“We do everything together! No one can stay away from anyone!” He said so, and she said so.
She, Yang Bingyang, better known as ayawawa, a model, emotion columnist and best-selling author with an IQ of 145, is best remembered for saying that those who are prettier than me are not as smart as me, and those who are smarter than me are not as pretty as me.
He, Wang Peng, has an IQ of over 180, a world record holder for extremely difficult IQ tests, a returnee from China, and is currently keeping a low profile as Yang Bingyang’s husband.
Despite the passion of their first love and the fact that their daughter is almost a year old, the two still stick together like a piece of butterscotch. The two are still sticky as a butterscotch. The love is swirling between each other.
■It seems like you’re very dependent on each other?
Him: Yeah. We spend 24 hours a day together. It’s our way of life. More often than not, I take on her dependency, the responsibility that comes with strength.
She: We miss each other when we don’t see each other for three or four hours ……
■ What if we are temporarily separated for business trips, etc.?
Him: I would feel like the heroine of the movie was missing and I would fast forward, like sleep for a few more hours until she showed up.
She: Once I went to Shanghai to shoot a commercial – that was the only time we were apart for more than 8 hours, and we kept calling and texting …… Now when I have any event, I ask the organizer to let me bring someone with me, and I only have peace of mind when he’s there. I have peace of mind.
■ Is there anything you feel uncomfortable about?
He: Yes. The amount of time we spend with each other is uncontrollable, and we both have a lot on our plates, and sometimes there are conflicts.
She: Given that one day is as good as the next, we might start a company or do something else together in the future, and in general we don’t want to be apart.
■ What does this deep dependency bring you?
He: We’re each living the life of two people, which in effect doubles our lives, and it’s a good deal. We’ve been growing together, and some people say you get smarter when you find a smart wife for a long time, and I look forward to that.
She: came together in a myriad of miracles and coincidences and had to believe that there was a divine plan in the underworld. The fact that we’re so in tune with each other after we get married makes us appreciate the hard-won destiny between us even more.
Detachment: a threat that can’t be ignored
Their love story is a little enviable and perhaps a little questionable, as men and women today are very wary of the dangers of over-dependence on gender relationships. But perhaps we have gone too far, and today we face another threat: we are not intimate – the ideal of people who will do whatever it takes to gain independence and achieve a personal blossoming centered on self-worth. Love someone? Yes, but not too much love. Get married? Okay, but be prepared to pull your leg and leave. The “integration” of two people has even been seen as an enemy of the self.
In contrast to the happy love episodes of ayawawa and Wang Peng, the love episodes of Ren Fei and Li Qiang are often about detachment: Ren Fei is alone in her bedroom, moping or in tears, while her husband is in the living room, watching soccer or a TV recruitment show. Ren Fei seems to live with a stranger – she comes home with workplace stress, and he doesn’t listen, usually blaming her roughly and saying “I have stress too, it’s unresolved”; when Ren Fei feels desperate, his shoulder is usually not given to her; sometimes When Renfee gets a little hysterical with her emotional outbursts, he acts as if he doesn’t hear what he sees, and can even fall asleep right away, “making rude, shameless snoring noises.”……
“Just like overly dependent love, detached of love can also undermine intimacy, passion, and loyalty, but in a different way – by keeping those closest to us away.” According to Robert F. Bernstein, author of The Optimal Distance for Love and an American expert on gender relationships, “It’s a combination of an avoidant attachment pattern and a relationship script that can only rely on itself. This combination produces a love pattern of keeping distance – a relationship that is distant, unhappy, romantically repressed, and emotionally wasteful.”
The trap of superficial intimacy detachment
Bernstein summarizes the characteristics of the detached love model: true intimacy is replaced by superficial closeness, open communication is replaced by defensiveness, and passion is replaced by mechanical sexuality.
Superficial intimacy-the detached person’s distrust of others-means that he/she always chooses self-identity over intimacy-independence, reliance on oneself, rather than mutual trust and sharing in each other’s vulnerability. There is no doubt that the detached person does not know what intimacy means at all. There is no emotional give-and-take, no sharing, and no sense of lifelong companionship.
Defensiveness – Detached people fear closeness and tend to be superficial – even defensive – in their communication. An estranged person may periodically discuss “relationship issues,” but even then they are not focused on feelings, but rather on comments rather than emotions. This defensiveness prevents real intimacy from being built.
Mechanical sex – sex with an estranged person is sometimes only physically pleasurable, not emotionally satisfying …… Without commitment, the estranged person is relaxed and sexually indulgent, but when there is intimacy and commitment constraint, the estranged person’s need for distance becomes apparent, and the passion dissipates.
The overly dependent person designs a trap to get someone else to take on responsibilities and pressures that he or she is not willing to take on, and the detached person tries to design a trap to get the other person to give up the initiative and let him or her decide what kind of distance to keep in the relationship. Whenever the spouse tries to talk about personal issues, he/she deliberately keeps his/her distance and acts sullen, which is actually setting a trap for the detached relationship. The spouse who falls into this trap will slowly relinquish control and stop talking about things that make the detached person uncomfortable. In this way, some serious problems in the relationship are covered up.
Emotions draw from dependency
We need to call out dependency in love – because, at the beginning of life is integration. This interdependence is essential for us to generate the emotion of love, in which we feel fusion, passion, forgetfulness and our early relationship with our parents is the source of this fusion, especially our bonding experience with our mother is very important: the loving mother feeds her child, touches him/her, responds to his/her call and needs… …through this fused connection, the mother makes herself felt by the child. If this relationship at the beginning of life is reassuring to the child, the child will be brave enough to explore the world. This connection affects us for the rest of our lives, and we will always miss it and try to get it back, and if that connection was missing in the first place, we will try to fix it in our own love lives.
Love and connection are inseparable. Without one of them, the other will cease to exist. “Fusion has the role of determining the composition of personality: it requires all lovers to give a part of themselves to each other, while at the same time occupying and possessing a part of each other.” says French psychoanalyst Jean-Georges Lemaire. In the interweaving of connections, there are two opposing movements. On the one hand, there is a fear of losing the other; on the other hand, there is a fear of losing oneself. Both the fear of breaking up and the fear of being engulfed. This anxiety is best expressed in the mouth of Don Juan, who never gives his true feelings, as an echo of the fear of being devoured or emasculated early in life, a fear that has its roots in the Oedipus complex discovered by Freud: there is only one way to save oneself – to escape all attachments, to deny any dependence.
This is one of the more common fantasies of modern society. Rafael Milikovic argues, “It is modern society that has made emotional self-reliance possible, and has also shaped it into a value.” Serge Schormier sees this fantasy as “a kind of free speech in the economic sense, a deterioration of individualism, which is incompatible with the link to love.” He also stresses that “emotions draw their nourishment from dependence. But I am against any rhetoric that simplifies the issue. This desire to affirm the self by damaging the partnership may stem from the difficulty some people have in maintaining the partnership.”
There is a kind of codependency that is healthy
“There is indeed a healthy middle ground between rigid independence and harmful overdependence. Healthy codependency is the ability to blend intimacy and autonomy, to rely on others while still retaining a strong sense of self, and to be willing to ask for help when needed. When using a healthy codependency approach with those around you, each person will find that they have potential they never knew they had, and the love between partners will be even deeper.” Bernstein said.
Love is paradoxical and dual in nature. Behind the dependency lies another side of love: communication and giving. By accepting love’s connection and taking care of it carefully, one is able to step outside of oneself and open oneself to embrace others. To do this is to be humble and to get rid of the illusion of being omnipotent, that is, to admit: I can’t do everything, someone else is equally important and I need him/her. Once this dependence becomes interdependent, that is to say, becomes a relationship, freedom becomes possible. That connection from infancy reappears: backed by reassuring love, we can let go of our own individuality.
“Love makes us go forward, and we need to be supported by each other to achieve our own blossoming, and we look at each other with a generous eye, like a mother looks at her child.” Mary, a 28-year-old foreign company employee, said. Entrusting ourselves into the hands of our loved ones allows us to gain inner freedom. Inner freedom empowers each of us and opens us to our desire to live. In order to achieve this freedom, we must cross certain stages and know how to expand and nurture the connection known as “healthy dependency”. 36-year-old Jia Zhao, who has been married for 10 years, has learned: “I can actually live alone and live without her. But I have to depend on her to be happy in my life, and I don’t need to depend on her if I’m just going to live.”
Sociologist Serge Schormier treats love as a mental illness: “When we fall in love, we fall into a kind of compulsion for others. It’s morbid, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful disease!” Hey, if love is a disease, we’d all like to have it, wouldn’t we? Long live love! Long live the dependency of love!
When he/she is detached: To help your detached partner open up, you’ll want to work on closing the distance between you.
■Accept your partner’s fear of intimacy: The first step in helping each other overcome their fear of intimacy is to accept it unconditionally, accepting that it unloads on both people.
■Acknowledge your own need for intimacy: When you acknowledge and accept the other person’s ambivalence, you create an environment where you can communicate and discuss without defensiveness how your needs are being met in your relationship.
■ Seeking common ground: You then need to balance your needs with the other person’s fears and find ways to be close that you are both happy with.
When you are detached: You have to learn to make yourself more emotionally sensitive and to allow your partner to help and support you. Most of us associate growing up with self-reliance (the legacy of childhood). For the estranged, however, the opposite is true: growing up means relationship rebuilding, not isolation. If you can’t do it by asking your partner for help, you do it another way: by offering to help.