If anything characterizes love, it is that it is irrational, confusing and turbulent. We know that it has a very powerful impact on our habits and our emotional state, but it is not always easy to describe these feelings and recognize what kind they are.

Unlike other intense emotions such as fear or disgust, in love the source of what we feel is almost never clear: is it the person with whom we have a relationship, or is it something they help us remember?

Rebound relationships, which occur after having gone through a love break from which we have not yet recovered, are precisely those in which what keeps the couple together is manipulation and fear of facing that feeling of emptiness and which, at the same time, are fed by our inability to recognize what we really feel.

Hiding affective deficiencies

Any relationship is double-edged. They are exciting and the source of many good moments, but if they end, they can sink us emotionally.

We cannot control the appearance of that feeling of emptiness, frustration and sadness that invades us when a relationship ends in which we would like to continue living, but we can learn to manage effectively how to adapt to this change. Many people manage to overcome this hard blow, but others refuse to accept their new situation and try to mask reality. Rebound relationships are one of the strategies used to achieve this.

Initiating one of those rebound relationships is a way of fooling ourselves into acting and feeling in a way similar to how we did with that person we miss . The bad thing is not only that we manipulate someone to get it; also, we are usually not fully aware that we are doing it.

Why do the rebound relationships appear?

In the same way that the best special effects can be used to create a very inverse film, the substitute lovers that are used in rebound relationships are a support for our imagination, with the aim of fantasizing what life would be like if that break-up had not taken place.

That means, among other things, that rebound relationships are highly unfair, since in them there is someone who is wasting his time, his effort and his illusions in a project that has no future because it is the patch to an affective lack. But it also means that in the person who has initiated one of these rebound relationships there is an unresolved psychological problem: emotional dependence .

The source of the pain is called emotional dependence

We call affective dependence a way of relating that is very interiorized in certain people and that puts us in a situation of vulnerability without us realizing it . It has two facets: one cognitive, one emotional and one behavioural.

Cognitively , it makes us transform our self-concept (that is, the idea we have of ourselves) into something composed of two people, so that we do not conceive of our life without the person we love.

Emotionally , it makes us remember throughout the day anything that is linked to the couple, which makes it very easy to think obsessively about it.

, makes us take the necessary actions to avoid the discomfort caused by the absence of that person. In these situations of longing the metaphor of love conceived as a drug becomes clearer.

Rebound relationships are a consequence of these three effects. On the one hand, everything that happens to us makes us focus on the discomfort of not being in the relationship we miss. On the other hand, we go to the extreme of giving false hope to another person in order to alleviate that discomfort, and on the other hand, in the moments in which we may think that we are manipulating someone , the self-concept leads us to think that even if it were true that we are dating two people at the same time (one real and one imagined) that is not bad in itself.

How to recognize the rebound effect in love

The bad thing about rebound relationships is that many times they can only be detected by the one who is trying to make up for the absence of her ex-partner by incorporating a new lover into her life .

This last person can detect some strange details, normally related to samples of unhappiness on the part of the person he is dating, but it is very complicated for him to know how to identify what makes him act this way.

To find out if you are nurturing the existence of one of these rebound relationships, ask yourself the following questions.

Are you trying to change that person to look like your ex?

This is a recurring action in rebound relationships. Asking the other person to change in the context of a romance is already inappropriate, but if on top of that the change is directed towards a situation where the person becomes more like the ex-partner physically or mentally , the alarm of probable rebound relationship should start to sound.

Do you repeatedly think about your ex in the context of the relationship?

If being with the other person often evokes memories of that old partner that you miss, it is possible that this is exactly what you are looking for in this new relationship : more situations in which it is possible to fantasize about that person who is no longer by your side.

Have you come out of a troubled relationship recently?

The more recent the breakup of a relationship that was very intense for us, the more likely it is to be a rebound. However, this fact alone is not an indication .

Conclusion: to love well and to love each other better
Loving relationships are something that always involves sacrifice, and therefore one must reflect before starting the habits of life as a couple with someone . Otherwise, we may reach a point where we realize that our own shortcomings have caused another person to embark on a path that is not based on anything but false expectations of loving and being loved.