Vittorino Andreoli: «You can make love with the same person for your whole life, here’s why»

Professor Andreoli, in your latest book «Letter on love», published by Solferino, you write that «we are also breaking love». Why?
«Because we are increasingly in a hurry, we are unable to imagine feelings as a construction and, above all, something to live, something to experience. Everything is automatic, just think of how we experience work: in most cases we interact with machines and not with human beings. I believe that even in love we are making the same transition, that is, we think it is something programmable.”

Do you see potential patients in them?
«That’s right!».

Today we tend to be sold a bit of everything, including the dream of a happy family, think of many influencers.
«Unfortunately we need models and we cannot fully understand the magic of this experience. Which by its nature rejects categories and only asks us to be open towards the other, the passage from I to we. But what I see around us is an increasingly marked reduction of love to physical sexuality and this is harmful. Having reduced sexuality to the physical meaning, it has highlighted difficulties or at least performance anxiety, which ends up making the game between bodies a difficult test and often a failure, which is not only reduced to the failure to satisfy pleasure, but affects heavily on desire. The most evident sign of this condition is in the widespread use of stimulants and facilitators of erectile action in male adolescents, while requests for antifrigidity therapies have increased in females.”

Are you saying that teenagers also use pills to improve performance?
“Very, very much. Because they experience sex not as a magnificent exchange of pleasure and life, but as one of the many performances that the world imposes on us today. Not only. Too fast a rush of discovery of erotic liturgies has also prevented us from knowing and experiencing the wealth of preparatory practices, wonderful because they are characterized by sweetness, gradualness and the learning of one’s own pleasure and that of others”.

She says one should be careful when saying that love can end. Yet, considering the quantity of separations and divorces, one would think the opposite.
«Every time I find myself faced with a couple who declare their love is over, I think either that it never began or that they are faced with one of the many obstacles that can be encountered along the way. Because we make the mistake of not thinking that love also has an intensity and quality different from attraction. Love means, for example, recognizing one’s own fragility and that of the other person and taking care of it. The most frequent aspect, when looking today for the reasons for an end of love, are new affairs: it is then claimed that it is impossible to continue with that person when one is taken by the new one. How fate came into play and it wasn’t a question of responsibility. And the dominant signs lead back to Eros, not to conditions that lead to the need for the other.”

Sometimes, however, there are situations that are difficult to overcome, such as an unexpected betrayal.
«I’ll be frank: I don’t think that this awareness, although very unpleasant, has the strength to destroy a love story. I believe that betrayal should not be accepted, but that it can be one of those crises that a bond of love can face, process and resolve together, one of those conflicts that we mentioned at the beginning of this interview. I believe, however, that what ends a love affair can be a change in the personality of one of the two.”

Do you want to explain yourself better?
The change in personality causes one of the two members of the couple to change to the point of becoming unrecognizable to the other, almost a stranger, and, in a certain sense, dying, leaving a void. I think of an arrest, a rise in notoriety that can irremediably transform someone, or a sudden illness. Love ends when one of the two protagonists of the story ends, never in other cases, in my opinion.”

In your writings you also talk about violence and observe: The phrase “if you don’t stay tied to me, I will kill myself”, contains violence, albeit verbal, which is very serious.
«It is the violence of blackmail, of the impossibility of fully experiencing love because this does not cancel individual personalities but, on the contrary, enriches them and makes them grow in a journey for two. And, unfortunately, it often ends differently because the news shows how violence leads to killing the other, while the one who expressed an intolerable lack continues to live.”

Professor, can you make love with the same person for your whole life?
“Certain”.

As?
«Love is an exclusive bond and what characterizes it is not a philosophical or religious principle, but biology itself, the constitution of the human that wants to project its own fragility onto the person, in a combination that is not separable. In a love relationship it becomes difficult to recognize one another without the other and from that moment, one’s story is also that of the other. The great pronoun that characterizes love, “we”, returns.