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🇦🇷 Argentina /Health & Science

Gabriel Rolón: “To Love Someone Is to Give Them Power over You, and Healthy Love Never Uses That Power to Hurt You”

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Psychoanalyst and writer Gabriel Rolón said intimate relationships involve sharing pain, fears and experiences that people usually reserve for those closest to them.
  • He argued that healthy love means refusing to use a partner’s vulnerabilities to cause harm or win an argument.
  • Rolón described happiness as imperfect and rooted in the present rather than as a permanent state free of pain.

“To love someone is to give them power over you,” Gabriel Rolón said in an interview with LN+, framing intimacy as an exchange of experiences normally kept within a person’s closest circle.

To love someone is to give them power over you.

· Gabriel RolónRolón described the vulnerability created by sharing intimate experiences in a relationship.

The writer and psychoanalyst said relationships draw strength from confessions about pain, fear and shame. “I tell you things I have told no one, you know my pain, you know some of the things I am ashamed of,” he said, describing what partners share when they make themselves vulnerable.

For Rolón, healthy love depends on what a person does with that knowledge. “When you love someone, you give them a lot of things that give them great power over you. And what I believe is that the person who loves you in a healthy way is the one who refuses to use that power. They never use the power they have over you to hurt you or to win an argument because they are angry.”

I tell you things I have told no one, you know my pain, you know some of the things I am ashamed of.

· Gabriel RolónHe explained how partners build intimacy through private confessions.

He called the use of a partner’s private pain as a weapon an absolute boundary. “Using the pain someone entrusted to you to hurt them is an unforgivable attitude,” Rolón said. “If at some point I decided to use this, it means something has broken.”

When you love someone, you give them a lot of things that give them great power over you. And what I believe is that the person who loves you in a healthy way is the one who refuses to use that power. They never use the power they have over you to hurt you or to win an argument because they are angry.

· Gabriel RolónHe defined healthy love as refusing to exploit a partner’s vulnerability.

In his book Happiness, Rolón uses the term “faltacidad” to describe well-being that does not deny pain. He rejects the idea of complete fulfillment, instead presenting happiness as imperfect and shaped by what people lack. Emotional stability, he said, comes from inhabiting the present: “Happiness is here and now.”

Using the pain someone entrusted to you to hurt them is an unforgivable attitude.

· Gabriel RolónHe condemned using private disclosures as a weapon in a relationship.
About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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