The Superwoman Syndrome

They're beautiful and smart. They have social skills, leadership ability, and a middle or high school education. They perform jobs in which they express their skills and feel fulfilled. They have financial autonomy, a high degree of security and a remarkable personal maturity. This is the common denominator of the profile of the sample of 112 women who participated in the self-assessment of safety summarized in figure 7, whose data made me ask myself the following question

Why do women who have all the conditions to feel safe and fulfilled need to go to a therapist?

The overall conclusion I drew from their comments was that they did feel safe and fulfilled, but were not completely happy. And that lack that prevented them from reaching fulfillment was -precisely- related to their love life, because all of them had or had had couple problems when in the other aspects related to happiness both their self-evaluation and my perception were positive and coincidental. This contrast between the many values and capacities found in them and the difficulties or dissatisfactions of love that they all suffered, is what has led me to typify the syndrome that, so that it can be seen clearly what it consists of, I am going to enunciate it as opposed to what happens to the male collective that enjoys a similar profile:

While in the case of men there is a direct correlation between personal improvement and love success, in the case of women the opposite tends to happen. Therefore, the hypothesis that I propose is that the more successful a woman is in her personal realization project, the more difficult it is for them to establish satisfactory love relationships.

This is the key to the question and the origin of a problem that I already began to detect twenty-five years ago, when I carried out my first field studies on falling in love and love. What I perceived then was a growing dissatisfaction among women with the quality of their love relationships with men. And what is happening now is that this incipient problem is acquiring an enormous social dimension to the point of generating the phenomenon that has given rise to this essay, whose title serves exactly as an operative definition of the concept.

The Superwoman syndrome

A set of positive characteristics that are good for women's security and self-fulfillment and that make it difficult in practice to find a male partner.

In order for you to understand the reasons why this is a specifically female syndrome I will use the same operational definition applied to the male.

The Superman Syndrome

A set of positive characteristics that are good for the security and self-fulfillment of the man make it difficult, in practice, to find a female partner.

How many men do you think to suffer from this syndrome? I haven't met any who suffer from it since those who are handsome, intelligent and mature, with social skills, leadership ability, and medium or higher education usually don't have much difficulty finding a partner. Rather, the opposite is true, since their main problem is to clarify which of the different women who show a willingness to mate with them is best for them.

The natural result of this antinomy explains that the same personal characteristics that produce a syndrome in women generate a love benefit in men. This is a norm that benefits all men and is harmful to many women. And the difference between them is easily explained since the number of evolved women is much higher than that of men, which makes their chances of achieving love success manifestly lower. That is why men who improve fall in love, and women who have already improved face the challenge of facing the syndrome that generates their excellence

Lovable men

By what has been said so far, men become lovable when they accept their love disconcert in a superior way and understand that women do not want to establish dependent relationships, but rather walk with them in a project of coexistence that is enriching for both. This feminine expectation of finding a partner is perfectly understandable for men because he has enough logical intelligence to reason about it, although not everyone is mature enough to accept it.

As a consequence of this limitation and according to the nomenclature I have created for this essay, the profiles of men who are likely to awaken the feeling of love in women today are all those who are in the progression and a part of those who are in the reaction phase. And for that part to be as large as possible, the only thing these men have to do is to believe that they have room for improvement and apply themselves to the work with the conviction that change is possible.

Lovable women

I wish I could tell women something similar to what I've told men. The problem is that this is not possible because, as they are better off, they get less benefit from the improvement. Don't forget that, according to the argument, women who improve are not the ones who fall in love the most, but the ones who have more difficulty finding suitable partners.

In this sense, the only "advantage" of superwomen is that, precisely because they are superwomen, they have a degree of maturity that enables them to manage their love reality adaptively, whether they have a partner or live in the singular, because by being self-sufficient they do not need to get involved in relationships that do not contribute enough quality to their overall well-being. That is why, curiously, they are usually the ones who allow themselves to repeat, with all authority, that old saying that an old neighbour used to say when I was a child: "To get drunk, let it be good wine". And since men, like wine, also need time to improve, many women know how to feed on their sobriety while some also contemplate the possibility of maintaining stable' relationships, which will no longer be like in the times of their mothers or grandmothers because they are now women of today who are only willing to share their future with men who have known how to grow.

My theory of the couple

All I am going to say is a synthesis of the fundamental ideas developed in my books: The New Art of Falling in Love, Wise Sex and Love at the Second Try. In each of them I give importance to different things but all of them are necessary to consolidate the survival of love and preserve it from its deterioration; because love, like life, is born, develops, ages and dies. The scope for action that we have in this regard is therefore to ensure that it is born well, that it develops properly, and that it grows old and dies with dignity. When this margin is skilfully managed, it is even possible to ensure that a single love can last as many years as the lives of its protagonists, although this possibility is less and less likely. On the other hand, what is within our reach is to enjoy good relationships and learn from bad ones, so that all of them will be better.

Keywords

1. Harmonious love: That which is established between two mature people who decide to join their lives in a common project of living together to share their fullness. To be considered as such, it must meet four requirements: good sexual coupling, compatibility of characters, similar scale of values and convergent life project.
2. Vital learning: Positive assimilation of reality that contributes to the maturation process of the subject. It is produced when the person is capable of transforming the experiences in experiences.
3. Happiness facilitators: Way of qualifying the ways through which people experience the experience of happiness. According to the author the three main ones are: the internal congruence, the personal realization and the harmonic love.
4. Maturity: Degree of balance and serenity that is reached through the positive assimilation of the negative events of life. It is the result of overcoming the various critical phases of the subject's biography thanks to the application of the suffering of the person.
5. Complementary Couple: That which is formed by two people whose harmony and synergy of values, character and lifestyle enriches the relationship.
6. Superwoman Syndrome: A set of positive characteristics that are good for the security and self-fulfilment of the woman, making it difficult, in practice, to find a male partner.
7. Superwomen: Superlative created by the author to refer to women between 40 and 60 years of age who meet the following requirements: they are beautiful, intelligent and have an average or higher education. They have economic autonomy, a high degree of security and a remarkable personal maturity.
8. Self-sufficient superwoman: She who develops her autonomy to such an extent that her happiness depends more on her inner congruence and personal fulfillment than on love. Precisely because of this, she is the variant of the superwoman who builds more harmonious love relationships. 
9. Castrating superwoman: The one who, by chronifying the profile of the reactive superwoman, becomes neurotized in the love sphere. Her excessive competitiveness with the opposite sex makes her have an ambivalent attitude towards men that leads her to inferiorize them, despise them and use them. 
10. Conformed superwoman:She who adaptively accepts her love reality. Over time she tends to evolve into the self-sufficient or facilitative variants. 
11. Superwoman facilitator: She who wants to promote the success of her partners with her excellence. It is the variant that most benefits the men who relate to them, although it has the disadvantage that it does not always receive recognition or compensation for its contributions. 
12. Reactive superwoman: She who, possessing all the excellence of her condition as a superwoman, asserts herself competitively before men to the point of making harmonious love relationships difficult.
13. Theory of Happiness: Summary of the theses defended by the author to facilitate happiness through internal congruence, personal fulfillment and harmonious love.
14. Theory of personal security: Basic principles on which the author relies to defend a new concept of security, based on four main facilitators: self-esteem, self-image, self-concept and sexual competence