Reconfigurations in couple construction: analysis of the existential continuum in women

The dialogic exchange from digital media marks one of the main spaces for couple building. Thus, this article seeks to understand the experiences of women in the process of couple building from the existential continuum and discontinuum, given the absence of information on women's experiences in couple building today. The development of the same is framed in the qualitative-phenomenological methodology, describing the subjective and intersubjective accounts of women between 20 and 32 years old, responding to the question "How are couple relationships constructed


INTRODUCTION
Although in recent years there has been an increased interest in research topics related to couple problems (Vanegas and Camargo, 2020), the following research arises from the research problem of the absence of information on the experiences of women in the construction of couples today. This interest arises given the sensitivity generated by these human and social processes in youth and young adults. The construction of couples nowadays is mainly based on the dialogic exchange that is maintained through digital media and is strengthened by face-to-face encounters.
The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of women in the process of couple building from the existential continuum and discontinuity.
To this end, we seek to describe the subjective and intersubjective accounts by answering the question of how are couple relationships currently built from an existential perspective?
The reconfigurations of the processes of couple building today can be understood from the way power is expressed through the different worlds, this expression is based on the principles of violence and mutual deception.
The principle of violence is specified by Miller as the first deception carried out by the figures of care and power, sending a double information in which it is specified that one loves, cares, gives opportunities or recognizes merit, but this is done through acts of violence, repression and deception, facing the above, the person is educated to deceive himself and the other, looking for that confirmation to be able to revere himself in his existence.
Hence, the importance of understanding the existential assumptions that emerge in the reconfiguration of the processes of construction of couples in women aged 18 to 32 years under the perspective of the principles of violence and mutual deception, achieving not only to specify the relational dynamics but also the ways in which the person assumes these processes.
Couple relationships are configured as Sternberg (1988) specifies, from three elements: intimacy, passion and commitment. For Mayorga-González (2018) these three elements are represented in the forms of confirmation that people perceive in each other. According to, Almeida Eleno (2013): For Sternberg, love is one of the most intense and desirable human emotions.
Human desperation for love goes so far that people may lie, cheat, kill in its name or even wish for death when they lose it, yet it is also the driving force behind many of the highest moral acts (p. 58).
Love from an existential point of view, being an emotion implies a constant exchange with the other, oriented towards the confirmation of appreciation, affection and respect as recognition of the surrender of the subject to the relationship with another and that implies maintaining such emotion that we call love. Mayorga-González (2018) specifies that the existence of the subject must remain in a world surrendering to multiple constant exchanges with others, in that exchange the subject assumes roles and also through these he/she is relating with others from the formal, informal and hidden, until achieving the configurations of a new world that will be called couple; this link implies the construction of in common agreement and thinking about the welfare of the other (Alzugaray and García, 2015).
Going back to Sternberg's proposal (1988 and1999) and referenced by Almeida Eleno (2013) and Capafóns and Sosa (2015), love is configured from intimacy, passion and commitment. Intimacy is oriented to closeness, union and affection towards the other, from Honneth's (1997) point of view, the intimacy that subjects achieve with another is oriented to the search for appreciation, to feel cared for by another, avoiding the violation of this intimacy. For Almeida Eleno "the germ of intimacy is in the mutual selfexposure of the members of the couple" (p. 59), since the exposure of intimacy can trigger the violation of it, given that the other by mistreating or violating intimacy tries to take over the body and life of the other person beyond his or her own will (Arrese Igor, 2009). Nowadays, intimacy is assumed as the possibility of discovering what is hidden to the other, but to another who with effort and dedication earns it, even if the subject continues to feel insecure in offering it.
Passion as an important element in the couple relationship (Levinger, 1996) and as a second element in the proposal of Sternberg (1988) is oriented towards the intense desire for contact with the other, for Almeida Eleno (2013), this element "coincides with the so-called "love at first sight" and consists of a state of intense desire for union with the other produced by a mental and physical excitement" (p. 59), following with this same appreciation passion "is the desire to be with the person with whom we form the couple. It is, therefore, an ingredient that gives vivacity to the couple relationship and fosters a healthy attachment" (Capafóns and Sosa, 2015, p. 1).
But the germ of passion in the configuration of a couple's relationship is exclusivity, since this generates disenchantment, habituation and deterioration, that is, "the degree of passion generally decreases more easily when a reward is obtained on every occasion that one acts, and yet it increases when sometimes one succeeds, but other times one fails" (p. 59).
The couple ceases to become a hidden world, as it is presented in the intimacy, but the couple becomes an informal world where the subject is oriented to seek recognition of opportunity and avoid exclusion. For Honneth (1988) and later referenced by Arrese Igor (2009) passion in its form of recognition is oriented towards equal opportunities, because "it depends on the horizon of collective ideals and goals, in the light of which the contribution of the qualities of the subjects can be valued" (p. 4). If the passion for the other manages to maintain the satiety of personal needs and to perceive a merit before the other, the exclusivity of passion makes the subject feel excluded with the loss of passionate intensity.
The last element is commitment, understood as "the degree to which a person is willing to attach to someone and take charge of that relationship until the end. It is the component that gives stability to the relationship" (Capafóns and Sosa, 2015 p. 1). For Sternberg (1988), commitment implies loyalty, fidelity and responsibility, all of the above, generates stability and formality between the parties, but the main difficulty lies in the fact that this commitment has different measures and meanings for each of the members of the couple.
Commitment demands the subject to perceive recognition of merit (Mayorga-González, 2018a), that is, "a recognition of the contribution that the subject can make to social life based on his personal qualities" (Arrese Igor, 2009), this implies, that he seeks to avoid the belittlement of humiliation.
Humiliation or dishonor is an experience of devaluation that fragments the subject emotionally; the humiliated subject cannot understand his own actions in the partner's world nor perceive love or opportunities from the other.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
In order to meet the objectives set out, a preference is made for a qualitative methodology, since this allows access to the arguments given by the same people involved in the problem raised (Herrera, Guevara, & Munster de la Rosa, 2015).
Accordingly, qualitative research is specifically oriented to delve into subjectivity, perceiving the phenomena, probing them from the point of view of the subjects in a natural environment and related to the context. Delving into their appreciations and meanings as expressed by Hernández et al. (2010). For Bautista (2011), qualitative research has an important element which takes into account the interaction of the subject and object which brings them closer and thus seeks a way to see internally the phenomenon in question.
In contrast, this approach is designed in a Praxeological way, since it uses the inductive method, which pretends to adapt the pre-established theories to the diverse unipersonal realities that emerge from the study and analysis of the existing problems, which allows adjustments during the development of the present investigation. This research does not intend to prove theories or hypotheses, thus pretending to give relevance to cultural symbols, which have a unique meaning that gives an unequivocal character to each culture. In addition to this, taking into account the nature of the data, which are relative to the experience, verbal and therefore mutable depending on the perspective of the social group and focused on phenomenology.
Therefore, for Vargas (2011Vargas ( ). (2011. the results of this research paradigm are of an intensive nature, they go from the particular to the general, they have an in-depth historical profile, thus achieving a naturalistic view of the phenomenon. In this order of ideas, Bautista (2011) expresses that the advantage of this research method over the quantitative, lies in the possibility

Article
Reconfigurations in couple construction: analysis of the existential continuum in women 78 of communication with the subjects of study, giving greater importance to individuals, which puts the researcher and the individual subject of study on a horizontal plane, so that social factors are seen more clearly in a more natural context.
In accordance with the above, phenomenology was used as a method that allows us to examine the contents of the subject's consciousness in order to describe them as they present themselves (Fuster, 2019;Reeder, 2011).
It is a qualitative study of phenomenological cut, the data collection mainly occurs from the in-depth interview (Bautista, 2011;Amezcua, 2015), so for this research a script was designed with three macro categories (see Table 1) from which a series of guiding questions were derived for the development of the interviews.
The unit of analysis is 11 women between 20 and 32 years of age from the city of Bogota who are in the process of building a couple and live in the city of Bogota, Colombia.
For the development of the research, a theoretical review was carried out, which resulted in the script for the in-depth interview; subsequently, the interviews were conducted and the corresponding coding was generated in order to be able to, finally, analyze the results.

Category Subcategory
The world The world and its functions in the construction of a couple The other Others and confirmation The self Self-referencing Internal polarities Triads to exist

RESULTS
The first assumption to analyze in the construction of a couple is the world and its functions, although every person is thrown into different worlds (family, couple, gender, religion, among others), it is she who has to inhabit it and assume different norms and functions that it demands of her; in the case of the construction of couples, women consider that from their experience there are two types of functions in the world of courtship.
On the one hand, the cautious woman who specifies "I let everyone talk to me, but I am clear that now I do not want to go out with anyone, I only talk to distract myself" (23-year-old woman) and the other, which we can call an alert woman "whenever a man talks to me I am attentive because it can be presented as a possibility for something serious in the future" (27-year-old woman), in both cases the world is presented with an initial norm and it is that of conversing and the function of conversationalist emerges, giving way to the assumption of the others.
Women perceive two types of others, those they consider possible-possibility and none-possibility, this is presented in the first instance because they are perceived from the supports (sedimentation) of the ideal of the other, that is, the woman arrives with an argument in which she evaluates the man to determine if he can be considered a possibility or not in the future.
"Although I talk to several guys, I really feel that they do not fulfill me, but I still offer them my friendship" (22-year-old woman). On the contrary, another discourse states "I am really looking for someone who is attentive to me, who does not make me feel alone, that we always have plans and who shows me that I am the one he loves" (19-year-old woman).
In both cases the other becomes an instrument where the ideal partner can be deposited, or, on the contrary, discarded from that world, but in addition to the first contact with the other, it happens that as the conversation begins to take shape women assume a hyperperception of the man's acts or dialogues, focusing on the man's confirmations. Couple relationships represent a great source of support for young men and women, but in the development of these relationships, dynamics of control and jealousy can be presented and executed (Cevallos, 2017), which are subsequently interpreted negatively and, therefore, the formation of a couple relationship can be avoided.
"I like that he always laughs at what I say" (24 year old woman), in this story we can interpret the possible recognition that she needs from the man she talks to, this type of recognition is of merit, because she considers that he is giving a valuable place to what she is doing. But in part of the interview she specifies "another guy she talked to does not laugh at everything, but I like that he takes care of me, greets me every day and always dedicates songs or poems to me, he is very nice to me" (24 year old woman), this type of recognition is that of appreciation, that is, she specifies in her speech that this man appreciates her presence in his life, making her feel loved and cared for, finally, she talks about another man she talks to and points out "well Jaime (name changed by the author) is super handsome, in the photos he looks great and his voice is very interesting, but I dislike that he only tries to talk, that everything he says is debated and that he insinuates that if he were my partner he would ask me to stop talking to my male friends" (24 year old woman), in this story we can see the opposite of recognition and it is the contempt mainly in that the girl perceives the man as prohibiting things instead of giving her more opportunities for her social development.
With all of the above, we can specify that every ideal of a partner in women cannot be deposited only in a man and that is why 9 of the 11 women interviewed stated that they maintain conversations with 1 or even 4 men that they consider as a possible-possibility because they are seeking to be appreciated, recognized and with equal opportunities, without leaving aside their own cultural support of the prototype of a partner. It is important to emphasize that this support is based mainly on the development of each individual, especially the process of adolescence and how the way of relating to others was established; this given that, in adolescence, identity is consolidated in multiple aspects (Gaete, 2015).
For them, for a man to become a possible-possibility depends a lot on the space-time in which he arrives and how he manages to positively engage in the perception of their confirmation. But all of the above, begins to generate in them a confusion in their feelings "at times, I think I am confused by their way of being, because I feel that if I say something I might confuse them, or on the contrary, I might confuse myself" (30-year-old woman), it seems that this confusion occurs because the emotions begin to leave in the background the ideal of a partner "he told me he had a son, I told him at first that I didn't want to commit myself to anyone who had children, I didn't want to be the mother, but after we had a conversation and he was so attentive, the fact that he was a father took a back seat" (23-year-old woman).
As mentioned in the assumption of the world and its functions, cautious women think that their actions before their possible-possibilities are evident and instead of nurturing the conversation to achieve a more valuable couple building, they prefer to keep their intentions distant from the conversation because "I prefer not to be so obvious, because surely he will notice that I like him right away, so why say it, although there are times when I feel that he stops being connected talking to me, but I still prefer not to write him because then he feels that I am a bold" (21 year old woman).
On the contrary, alert women think that "the question is ultimately theirs, I think the problem lies in the man's instability, but no matter what, I am always willing to be there, lest he be the right person" (23-year-old woman), both the feeling and the thinking of women becomes a constant turn precisely because of how they perceive the dialogical changes that their possible-possibilities have with them, but it is here where beliefs become the bastion to discard or continue in the world of couple construction with those possible-possibilities.
This leads to consider that the construction of a couple is vulnerable mainly because "now I want to be alone, I have been with my ex-partner for a year, surely he left me because I could not always be with him, now I do not want to think about a partner and I prefer to meet or go out with guys without commitment, because I am someone who knows how to love, respect and give myself but I have been hurt a lot" (23 year old woman). In the above account, the instability of the supports can be evidenced, mainly because, although she has a belief of herself as a woman, she wants to project another one because she has lost confidence in her.
But the sedimented and unmodifiable supports are also present in other stories where they say "I don't want them to come and talk to me about formality, that is no longer my thing , I have been doing what I want with my life for a long time, for them to come and lock me up saying that they love me" (30- year-old woman) or "I am not looking for a game, I want someone who loves me and that we build a project together, If I have to start by talking, sex and things like that, I do it, but only if he knows that what I am looking for is a partner and that is why I give myself to him" (29 year old woman), likewise, "I am clear that I want a partner, but he cannot be short, nor older than 35, nor shy, but I have to be precise to get what I want and he is a dog that makes me suffer" (26 year old woman). In the three previous stories, we find the toxic sedimentation, which closes any possibility of encounter with others and a greater vulnerability to believe that any movement of the other is a direct attack on their beliefs.
To close the referencing assumption, the women interviewed argue that their real desire is "to be loved, cared for and respected" (women aged 21, 23, 24 and 29). We could specify with the above a constant fluctuation of women in their feeling, thinking, believing and wanting that makes the other be perceived in different ways and ends up becoming an artifact to confirm.
Continuing with the existential exploration, women are constantly subjected to take an emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual position, but this position remains in conflict between different polarities. Within the results found we can speak that emotionally women in the process of building a couple are fragmented in their feelings, given that many of their supports in this dimension have been affected by the sum of couple and family histories in which they have found themselves, for them "the pain I feel, is not a pain of yesterday, my last partner cheated on me, He always told me that I was the best he had ever known and one day he suddenly left me" (Woman, 25 years old), in the same way, cognitively, women in the stage of couple building are oriented in an argument of individuation, where the search for autonomy persists as a way of protecting their intimacy because "many times everyone wanted to take me to bed, to test me as a woman and that made me feel used" (Woman, 27 years old).
In the social dimension of the personal narrative, we find that women maintain a narrative of instrumentalization of the other, in which they state "men only serve at this time to spend, to accompany us women" (22-year-old woman) and another interviewee indicates "it is not that women at this time are interested, let's say that giving us the opportunity to talk to several men opens the spectrum of possibilities and whoever is the best will always have a better chance of being something serious for us" (30-year-old woman), as can be perceived in the stories, the other only serves to maintain the person as existing in a reality that on a spiritual level becomes a continuous consumption of energy, purposes and frustrations, because, "at the end of the night, I feel that I do not think of anyone, although I wish I could love again, it is better to keep distance from that possibility, just like men think like that, just go out and that's it" (Woman of 24 years of age). (24-year-old woman).
As we have been able to explore the dimensional polarities of women we can specify that they remain in constrictive polarities leading them to actions of existential resistance as we will see in the triads of existing that they constructively assume.
In the discourses found in the interviews, it has been possible to analyze and interpret women who, in the process of building couples, find themselves constructively in referential references that distance them from the possibility of a true encounter and therefore see in the other an instrument to make them feel that they exist in the world of the couple, attracting their attention, seeking not to commit to a stable and lasting relationship. From the above, we find women who at a personal level are ambivalent, dissonant or incongruent when they say "I want to be loved and respected, but I do not know if it is the right time, that is why I talk to someone without looking for them to feel committed" (26 year old woman), these discourses reveal people who are confused about themselves, who have lost their security and selfconfidence, but at the relational level we find women oriented towards a competitive loyalty in which they struggle not to feel responsible for the acts that occur in the construction of a couple and at the same time manage to be the only possibility for the person with whom they are talking. Finally, at the existential level, we find women who, due to the sum of their histories, have assumed the evasion of their responsibility, generating the belief that their actions depend on the painful past and little interest in committing themselves to the future, "I think it is worth thinking about the present, enjoy it, try new things and always keep those possibilities alive, until one gets tired and that's it" (23 year-old woman). (23-year-old woman).

CONCLUSIONS
From the results described above, we can answer two questions. 1). What would be the present causes that maintain the way of existing of women in the process of couple building and 2). What would be, from the results found, the way of existing that allows to act in a reflexive and responsible way.
Answering the first question implies exploring the dilemmas that fluctuate the existential continuum of the couple building process in women between 19 and 32 years of age, since the confrontation with each dilemma, although it generates reflection, is overshadowed by the author-referential arguments of the women in their couple history. We can specify that the dilemmas as experiential assumptions of the existential continuum come as evidence, cases such as the traumatic rupture of the couple relationship, makes many of them perceive that their permanence as a couple is threatened and when they see that with time this happens, they assume a constructive protection towards their own capacity to commit themselves in a new relationship.
Another dilemma that arises in women is the encounter with situations that remind them of their painful histories, as well as other situations in which the other comes to surprise her with the possibility of being loved again, this generates a confrontation, because although the woman feels that she does not belong to the world of the couple, she desires it, and seeing that another is looking for her generates anguish not only for committing herself, but also because this other ends up instrumentalizing her, thus, the man's form of confirmation becomes a threat to her uncertainty.
The other dilemmas that present themselves are the encounter with possibilities that do not fulfill the ideal and the lack of skills to take responsibility to say, on the other hand, the continuous questioning of whether going ahead in conversations with the possibilities makes any sense, is held back mainly by the search not for a full well-being but for a momentary satisfaction of their emotions, using the other as a drug to get away from the poorly reflected wounds of their past. In conclusion, to the first question the causes that maintain the constrictive way of existing in the processes of couple building is the lack of skills to responsibly respond to the existential dilemmas that life presents in the couple's history.
The second question has its arguments in the question already answered, because if women are able to reflect and take responsibility for the sum of their stories, they will not only be able to change their story but also assume