Why are we afraid to love?
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Updated: Apr 20, 2026

Investigating Pain-Related Avoidance Behavior using a Robotic Arm-Reaching Paradigm
Published on: October 3, 2020
1UOC Quality Control ASL Napoli 1 Centre, Napoli, Italy, romina.tavormina@libero.it.
Abstract:
The crisis of the couple in today's society, increases the number of singles and causes difficulty in creating stable and lasting relationships over time. The last two censuses of the Italian population show an increase in the number of singles, especially among the young generation. From this figure we have tried to understand the causes of this phenomenon both from the point of view of sociology and psychology. The sociologist Baumann considers the crisis of the couple and the increase in singles as a result of the crisis of modern society. The author says that we live in a fluid world where everything changes quickly and there is nothing stable and this also affects the couple. From a psychological point of view, reference has been made to all that psychoanalytic writers from Freud, have said about the crisis of the couple. It is clear that some subjects have difficulty maintaining stable and long-lasting relationships because they are suffering from philophobia (fear of love). We have tried to understand what the causes of different types of philophobia for both men and women are. It was found that the origins are created in the early childhood relationships with their parents. It 'was found that people who have had problems in their childhood relationships with their parents, because of their lack of love, tend to reproduce in adulthood the same dysfunctional relational model, learned in childhood.
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