Love, romantic relationships, and models of happiness

Abstract

This paper deals with love and the variations in couple relationships and the accompanying models of happiness. At first, the model that corresponds to a patriarchal order is presented. For this purpose, the content of the film The Fountain of Women is analyzed. There, love in most of the couples is absent, except for Laila and her husband Samir. In this part we see how the presence of genuine love and the discovery of reading liberates from the dominant yoke. In the second act, the changes that are taking place in the couples' relationships are presented. In one sense and another radically different.  On the one hand, what reflects the tradewife trend, a kind of return to the traditional couple model where the woman is happy satisfying the desires and constraints of the man. And on the other hand, the appearance of a dystopian love, different from the types of love and other models of happiness known so far, which calls into question the traditional couple union that apparently begins to enter into crisis, and therefore another way of understanding love.  The third scene describes, briefly, how in the face of this crisis of models, the public institutions in charge of the family privilege the therapeutic culture, in order to try to maintain the traditional model of happiness in question, obviating its structural origin and the performance of the subjects.