Sofía Calvo: Why We Struggle to Build Deep Bonds in the Age of Anxiety

Sofía Calvo sits down to talk about why we've become so afraid of each other. The psychologist, who has built a following by writing and speaking about relationships and mental health through a psychoanalytic lens, has noticed something troubling: we say we want connection, but we've constructed a world that makes genuine bonds nearly impossible.

The paradox starts with self-love. A decade ago, the discourse around loving yourself was liberating—it gave people permission to leave bad relationships, to set boundaries, to stop sacrificing everything for a partner. But somewhere along the way, the message inverted. Now, Calvo observes, people treat relationships as a threat to self-focus. They've swung from one extreme to another: from believing love means erasing yourself to believing that opening yourself to another person means losing yourself entirely. The real problem, she argues, is that we've inherited a broken model of what relationships are supposed to be. We imagine them as total surrender, as giving up your time, your friends, your autonomy. So of course we run. But a good relationship, she insists, is the opposite. It's something that makes you feel better, that helps you know yourself more deeply, that expands who you can become.

Then there's the machinery of modern connection itself. Social media and dating apps have flattened intimacy into a game of signals and interpretation. A like doesn't mean someone wants to date you, but we've trained ourselves to read it that way. The virtual world offers an endless catalog of potential partners, which sounds like abundance but functions as paralysis. At the first sign of friction—someone doesn't like the same music, takes time to respond—people vanish. There's always someone better in the next swipe. This is the opposite of how relationships actually work. Real bonds require slowness, tolerance, the willingness to stay when you see things you don't like in another person, unless those things are truly unforgivable, like violence or aggression. The tools we use to connect—instant, frictionless, optimized for speed—are fundamentally at odds with what relationships demand.

But the deeper issue, Calvo suggests, is anxiety. Argentina ranks high in global anxiety statistics, and anxiety is fundamentally about intolerance of uncertainty. An anxious person can't simply wake up and see what the day brings. They need to diagram it, control it, know what's coming. This need bleeds into relationships. People write multiple messages to someone who hasn't responded, not out of intensity but out of a desperate need to confirm the other person is still there, still wants them. They confuse anxiety with passion. And because the virtual world promises instant answers—you can Google almost anything—we've become even less able to sit with not knowing. You can't ask ChatGPT if your partner loves you. You have to believe them, or live in constant doubt. The uncertainty is the punishment.

Calvo draws a crucial distinction between availability and desire. When someone says they're not available, believe them. But when they say they are available, you might not be able to trust it—because desire operates below consciousness. People often choose partners who aren't available, then wonder why they're unhappy. They're not choosing badly; they're choosing according to something deeper, something they can't see. This is where psychoanalysis becomes useful. It teaches you to look at the patterns, to notice what you're actually doing versus what you think you're doing. It teaches you that you contain contradictions—that you can be rational and passionate, that you can know something intellectually and still act against it. Accepting this, rather than fighting it, is liberating.

On the question of pain versus suffering, Calvo offers a metaphor that has stayed with her. Pain is a bridge you have to cross. Life puts it in front of you—loss, rejection, failure, grief. If you cross it, you get to the other side and keep walking. But if you stay on the bridge too long, analyzing it, asking why, trying to extract meaning from it, you enter suffering. Suffering is pain that has stopped moving. The tools that help are simple: friends, therapy, people who can sit with you while you cross. The culture we live in, though, wants to make even pain productive. We're supposed to learn something from it, grow from it, optimize it. But some pain doesn't have a lesson. Some pain is just pain, and the only thing to do is move through it.

Two phrases anchor her thinking. The first is almost a cliché: everything passes. But when you really sit with it, it opens up. Good moments pass, so enjoy them fully without clinging. Bad moments pass, so you can endure them knowing they won't last forever. The second is memento mori—remember that you will die. She has it tattooed on her body. It's not morbid; it's clarifying. If you're going to die, what life are you actually living? Are you being honest with the people around you? Are you doing work that matters? Are you with people who matter? It's a way of cutting through the noise and asking whether you're living coherently, whether you're being the person you want to be. These aren't tools that make pain disappear. They're tools that help you move through it without getting stuck.