“What is your way of loving?” The question seems intimate, almost private, as if it were born exclusively from personal experience. But we rarely love from scratch. Before having a partner, even before knowing how to name what we feel, we are already surrounded by stories that teach us what we are supposed to be moved by, what kind of bond we should desire, and what form love should take when it finally arrives. We learn to recognize it, to expect it, and, many times, to romanticize it before having lived it.
This learning does not come only from home or only from the first affective relationships. It also infiltrates stories, movies, songs, series, and all that flow of images and narratives that shapes an expectation. Our co-founder Ursula Pfeiffer says it clearly: those teachings are “impregnated in tales, stories, movies, series, in all the content” that reinforces an idea of what would be normal —and above all natural— for a woman when it comes to feeling, giving, waiting, and romanticizing love.
The problem is that not all of those stories teach good love. Some, in fact, do exactly the opposite. They present a dynamic of attrition as romantic. They embellish unilateral sacrifice. They make endless waiting desirable. They call possession passion. They confuse intensity with depth. And, most delicately, they turn into a feminine ideal the capacity to postpone oneself, to always understand, to always yield, to love even when the experience erodes, saddens, or blurs.
Ursula makes a very valuable distinction when she says that, with luck, some women will have learned “good love,” the kind that “elevates us, that allows us to give without losing ourselves, that does not demand sacrifice, but rather invites us to share and care for each other in a reciprocal way.” But she also recognizes that few stories reinforce this version of love. Many more insist on another pedagogy: that of drama, of rescue, of the wounded man who needs to be understood, saved, or endured, and of the woman who proves how much she loves precisely by how much she puts up with.
There appears one of the most uncomfortable questions in the text: why is it that so many times emotionally unstable, moody, distant, or aggressive men have been presented to us as more interesting? Why are kindness, emotional stability, empathy, and affective openness usually written as less attractive traits, flabbier, less exciting? Ursula formulates it frontally when she asks: “Where does this idea come from that aggressiveness and emotional detachment are desirable in a man?”
The question matters because it forces us to review an entire archive of tormented leading men, men of long silences, intense tantrums, unworked wounds, and behaviors that, in real life, would be red flags. However, in fiction they are usually presented as evidence of depth. As if true love consisted of deciphering the inaccessible man, waiting for him to mature, teaching him to love, or saving him from himself. And as if a woman became more admirable to the extent that she is willing to endure more to be chosen.
Ursula finds a key to understanding this attraction in a book that continues to resonate decades later: Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood. The central idea she recovers is powerful: many women end up feeling attracted to conflicted, distant, or emotionally inaccessible partners because they have learned to confuse conflict with desire and intensity with love. Not only that. Sometimes, those relationships activate unconscious attempts to repair much older wounds, wounds that did not start in the current relationship, but in childhood.
That nuance is fundamental. Because it shifts the conversation from guilt to understanding. It is not about saying that a woman “chooses poorly” due to a lack of intelligence or judgment. It is about recognizing that the most harmful bonds sometimes touch something familiar. Something that doesn’t feel good, but does feel known. And the known, even when it hurts, can be confused with love if for a long time it was the only affective language available. That is why Ursula insists that a bad love can happen to anyone, but when it becomes a pattern, it is no longer appropriate to romanticize it: it is appropriate to look at it as a warning sign.
The same occurs with jealousy and control. For generations, many stories have taught us to read them as proof of love. As a sign of intensity. As a form of desire. But Ursula dismantles that fantasy with necessary precision: “behind the need to possess or control the other, love is rarely there. What is hidden is rather fear, insecurity.” That reading changes everything. Because it returns the focus to what usually lies beneath certain romantically embellished behaviors: lack, fear of abandonment, inability to trust, unresolved affective hunger.
That is why it is worth reviewing what stories we were taught to consider tender, epic, or deeply romantic. Ursula mentions revealing examples: Penelope waiting eternally at a station; Like Water for Chocolate, where the protagonist loves a man to death who promised her love while building his life with another; Cinderella betting her destiny on a prince she practically does not know; The Little Mermaid sacrificing her voice just to get close to a man seen from afar. What unites these stories is not just their narrative beauty, but the insistence on certain mandates: waiting, understanding, sacrificing, adapting, disappearing a little to love more.
And there appears a painfully current question: at what point do we learn as women that loving means molding ourselves? When did the idea of accommodating, yielding, postponing, sustaining the other even when that leaves us out in the open become so normal? Ursula responds from a broader cultural observation: women continue to be rewarded for how much they endure, how much they give, how self-sacrificing they are, and how willing they are to put their desires at the end of the line. The ambitious woman still runs the risk of being punished with rejection, mockery, or isolation. The woman who prioritizes herself can still be read as selfish.
That is why good love, in this reading, cannot be confused with disappearance. Ursula says it with a rare beauty: “good love is acceptance, celebration, exaltation, not of one over the other, but of both together.” That definition dismantles much of what has been presented for years as the feminine ideal. Because loving well should not involve blurring oneself to sustain another, nor sacrificing one’s own voice for the relationship to survive.
The reflection becomes even more interesting when Ursula connects these ideas with childhood and games. Games, she recalls, are not just games: they are learning tools. In them, skills, roles, and ways of moving through the world are rehearsed. And there, gender is also learned. Playing with dolls is practicing care. Playing house is practicing domestic attention. Meanwhile, even today, many boys continue to grow up without being offered the same natural training to care for, feed, and sustain a home.
This gap helps explain why so many women continue to reach adulthood with an emotional and practical preparation for care that is not always distributed equally in their partners. And why even in modern relationships, where both work and provide income, many domestic tasks still feel like male help instead of shared co-responsibility. Ursula captures it with brilliant honesty when she corrects her own phrase: she should not say that men “help” at home, but that they contribute to the home, because it also belongs to them.
Deep down, this piece does not only ask how we love, but from what stories we do it. What we understood as romantic. What we tolerated because it seemed natural to us. What we continue to call love when perhaps it is fear, habit, or a poorly learned narrative. Reviewing those stories does not imply stopping enjoying fiction or becoming immune to its charm. It implies, rather, acquiring a second look. A look capable of distinguishing between what is moving and what is worth imitating. Between the intensity of the story and the health of the bond. Between the spell and reality. This search for a more conscious, more reciprocal, and less sacrificial love naturally talks with Yuriyana Club’s mission of accompanying women towards a fuller life at an emotional, physical, and sexual level through knowledge and connections that enrich.
You can find the complementary video to this article here: https://youtu.be/yqIbxawQSGY
