I went to a conference where a gender violence prevention project aimed at secondary school students was presentedto. There was great attention to teaching what a toxic relationship is, how to recognize a manipulative or narcissistic partner, how to walk away at the first signs of risk. I came home full of anxiety. It seems to me that love has become dangerous territory. Kids are taught how to defend themselves from it and not how to meet it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why many teenagers today no longer chase love but run away from it. What can we adults do?
Serafina
– Dear Serafina, in fact today there is a lack of education in affectivity that is focused not only on to avoid toxic love, but also to joyfully build a healthy love story. Teenagers have always been in love with love, but now they risk experiencing it more as a risk than as an opportunity.
Emanuele Coccia, in his recent essay The unknown continent. Philosophy of modern love (Einaudi)states that we are constantly suspended in the desire to make love a pillar of our identity, but we are unable to do so because we have never really learned to love.
It explores the many contradictions that have characterized the search for love by human beings over the centuries.
Perhaps the thing to start from is to re-learn how to become longing for an encounter with others and seeking the wonder that this encounter brings to our lives, especially when it is “embodied” in the truth of our being, passing through the dimension of the body and the gaze.
An excellent reflection, in this sense, is offered by the psychologist Ameya Gabriella Canovi in her beautiful essay The stars are never alone (Vallardi ed.), whose title evokes the luminosity with the construction of “we”, an alternative to the obsessive culture of the ego that prevails today, which makes our existence richer and more surprising.
As you say, Serafina, our children have an extraordinary need to interact with credible adults who are good bearers of relationships, passionate witnesses of Love, the one with a capital L, that is, that which does not make you feel like you belong to a perfect relationship, but which allows you to feel “true” to yourself and above all “true” in front of the other who is capable of being a couple with you.
The starting point is always us adults: If the excess of storytelling about the toxicity of love has disturbed you, become a witness to the beauty of love in your children’s lives. Smile, hug, support: in short, make desirable what you want to see them desiring.
