“Romantic Love is supposed to end.  Its purpose is to bond two incompatible people.  Incompatibility is the natural state of committed couples…The very experience of being ‘driven crazy’ forces change because loving someone who infuriates and confounds us is intolerable.  This is a relatively new idea, that continuing to love and grow with the one who pushes our crazy buttons is a right and good thing…More often than not, it is the unconscious relationship agenda that has disrupted the connection between you and your partner…Just know that disruption will occur from time to time and when it does, it’s time to go to work…Part of the waking up process is realizing that your habitual responses to frustration with your partner ARE the problem.”  (“Know When to Hold ‘Em:  When falling out of love can be good for your relationship” by Bob and Wendy Patterson)

The Role of the Imago in Mate Selection

“An Orientation to Imago Relationship Therapy” by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and Robert Elliot, Ph.D., begins with the question, “Why Don’t Relationships Work?”  Here it is stated, “From earliest times to the present, the testimony is consistent:  men and women have trouble with their most important relationships.  The divorce rate nears 50 percent, and for second marriages it is even higher.  Of people in intact marriages, 80 percent report varying degrees of dissatisfaction.  In earlier days, the divorce rate was lower, but there is no reason to believe that marriages then were more successful, if we measure that in terms of satisfaction and happiness.  Of all human enterprises, marriage shows the starkest contrast between beginnings and outcomes, between the enthusiasm of the launching, and the pain and distress of the storm-tosses passage.” (p. 2)

In the section on “Romantic Love,” the authors write, “Romantic love is powerful and important, and can be glorious, but we believe that it contains within it the seeds of its own decay.  Our thesis is that a Primary Love Relationship emotionally recapitulates important aspects of the early life situation of each of the lovers.  Experiences in infancy and childhood with significant caretakers leave all of us with important residues of ‘unfinished business”, frustrations, hurts, and unmet longings, residues that we unconsciously carry into our life with our present partner.  That pattern of unfinished relational business is attached to what we call the Imago.” (p. 3)

“…we propose that the Imago unconsciously guides our selection of a romantic partner.  The Imago is the key to that mysterious spark that draws two lovers together ‘across a crowded room”, out of a myriad of other choices.  What we bring to that romantic encounter is not only our present needs for companionship and love, but also our unconscious hope that the partner will meet, touch, and heal the hurts and unmet longings we bring from the past.  Ironically, the old hurts are likely to be reactivated and exacerbated with this partner…As that happens, the disappointments, frustration, hurt, and rage can be profound.” (p. 3)

The Power Impasse

In the section “The Power Impasse,” the authors state, “The romantic or honeymoon stage of marriage, as long as it lasts, is sustained by idealization of the partner, and the hope that at last one has found the partner who will meet one’s deepest needs.  It seems inevitable for that stage to decay (‘the honeymoon is over when…’).  The breakdown may occur quickly or over a long period of time, but few couples escape it.  In ways that partners often have trouble understanding, frustrations and disappointments appear: “This is not turning out the way it was supposed to.’  Each has a deep image of the way the other is ‘supposed’ to be, and the natural process seems to be that partners begin trying to maneuver each other into fulfilling that image.” (p. 4)

“Forms of maneuvering may be open or hidden, loud or quiet, active or passive…one partner may yell, and the other retreat in silence.  Each is trying to get his or her needs met, but the coercive process is counterproductive.  It can reach a tug-of-war or impasse state in which each is feeling enormous frustration and hurt.  The more intractable and repetitive the arguments (‘We go round and round on this issue, over and over again.’), the more likely it is that they are rooted in unfinished business and unhealed hurts in each partner from past relationships in childhood.” (p. 4)

As children, we have thousands of interactions with parenting figures.  These interactions, over the first 18 years of our lives, form an unconscious image (Imago) or gestalt.  As we fall in love, we don’t realize, because it’s unconscious, that we have chosen someone with characterological features of our frustrating parent.  Thus, we have picked one of the hardest people to get our needs met with, because they have some of the same features that made it difficult for us to get the attention and love we needed from a similar parent.

As Hendrix and Elliot state in the section “Formation of the Imago,” “In infancy and childhood, each of us tried the best way we knew to get our caretakers to meet our needs.  And our caretakers tried the best they knew to meet our needs.  However, no matter how adequate our caretakers were, they could not and did not meet all of our needs all of the time, and that left us frustrated some of the time.” (p. 6)

“…some of us had caretakers who had their own problems.  Sometimes they were depressed or preoccupied, busy or angry.  At other times we were left alone because of their sickness, work, divorce or death.  Others of us had parents who were cold and detached some or most of the time.  Whenever our caretakers’ needs made them physically and emotionally unable to meet our needs, we experienced pain and intense frustration.” (p. 7)

“Each transaction with our caretakers left an impression in our minds.  In some transactions our needs were satisfied and we experienced pleasure.  When we were frustrated, we experienced pain.  Each pain left an ‘imprint’; each imprint became part of a ‘picture’ in the deep part of our mind.  That picture we call the Imago, the deeply embedded image of the ‘other’…The Imago is a synthesis of the positive and negative traits of all our primary caretakers as they were related to the satisfaction or frustration of our needs.” (p. 7)

Terrence Real’s Perspective on Marital Dissatisfaction

Terrence Real, in his seminal book How Can I Get Through to You?, writes in a similar vein about the profound difficulty most people have in creating a fulfilling marriage.  He states, “One of the few stable statistics in our fast-changing world is the rate of divorce, which has hovered between 40 and 50 percent for the last thirty years.  Any two people who marry face a grim 50 to 60 percent chance of survival…Of those who remain together, how many do so happily, as opposed to those who stay for external reasons, like their children, finances, religion, or fatigue?  Conservatively, we can estimate that at least one out of three, perhaps one out of two, of those couples left standing do not relish their lives together.” (p. 33)

Real poses an interesting question: “Is there some natural law of marital entropy?  Some ubiquitous centripetal force pulling people away from one another?  Of the thousands of statistics about marriage churned out by social research each year, the one I find most depressing is that in all couples, rich and poor, happy and unhappy, one of the most reliable predictors of marital dissatisfaction is simple longevity.  The longer couples live together, the lower their reported contentment.” (p. 35). The wife Maggie is quoted as saying, “My feelings for Steve are like a balloon that’s been leaking air for years.  I don’t hate my husband anymore.  I did for a while.  But I don’t even have that much left in me.  I’m just out of air.” (p. 36)

In his third book, The New Rules of Marriage, Real explains how couple get stuck: “There’s a saying in family therapy that most couples have the same fight over the course of 40 or 50 years.  These seemingly endless, irresolvable repetitions are like children’s Chinese finger puzzles: The harder you pull, the tighter they get.  They are vicious cycles that dig us in deeper and deeper, eating up, over the years, more and more of the goodwill and connection we started off with…I call the vicious cycle that a couple faces over and over their Bad Deal.  It’s as if both partners have agreed to play out for all eternity reciprocal roles that gets neither of them anywhere.” (pp. 65-66)

The Marital Replay of Painful Childhood Experiences with Parents

Real then asks, “Where does your Bad Deal come from?”  He writes, “While it might not be readily apparent, the vicious cycle most couples find themselves stuck in replays some aspect of the relationships they grew up with.”  Describing several such couples, Real states, “The painful dramas they each grew up with spill into their marriages with the seeming inevitably of a classic tragedy.  Their relationships are crowded with ghosts.” (pp. 67-68)

Next Real asks, “Are We Doomed to Keep Repeating the Same Pattern?”  He asserts, “At a more spiritual, mystical level, we pick partners with whom we can re-create whatever it was that was relationally dysfunctional in our formative years out of a deep-seated impulse to heal it.  We are drawn to partners who meet two conditions: 1) The person’s character is similar enough to that of one or both of our parents that, with this person, we can re-create our most familiar and most unresolved childhood drama; and: 2) The person’s character is dissimilar enough from that of our parents that, with this person, the old drama carries within it the potential for a new and healthier outcome.” (pp. 72-73)

Continuing with this theme, Real asserts, “It is the urgency of your wish to ‘get from your partner what you should have had but did not get from your parents that drives your losing strategies and guarantees failure…We hit the piñata this way and that, trying to get candy we’ve always known lies inside.  But we are deluded.  Whatever it was that we wanted from them came and went a long time ago.  It’s far too late for anyone to give it to us now.  We are no longer children.  The only person who can learn to make up for what wasn’t there—the only person who can finally give you the missing skills and love you so yearn for—is yourself.” (pp. 74-75)

Understanding the Role of Projective Identification in Marital Disharmony

As Harville Hendrix has written, in his book Getting The Love You Want, we either 1) Pick a partner who has similarities in character to a difficult parental figure; or 2) Project onto the partner that s/he is acting in a similar way; or 3) (unconsciously) we Provoke our partners to act in a similar way.  This is where it gets really tricky!  It certainly requires some humility on my part to recognize that I may be unconsciously provoking my partner to act in exactly those ways that are most difficult for me to handle.  The psychological term for this provoking behavior is “projective identification.”

Peter Kramer, the psychiatrist who became famous for his book Listening to Prozac, later wrote another book, Should You Leave?, which helps us to understand the operation of projective identification in our relationships.  Kramer writes, “It was Melanie Klein who yoked two Freudian concepts to coin “projective identification.”  It is Klein’s account of a common way that people keep the images of emotionally charged relationships alive.  “When men don’t marry their mother, they make whomever they marry into her.” (p. 211)

Kramer elaborates on how this occurs as follows: “Less flexible couples respond to disappointed expectations by engaging in destructive forms of mutual projective identification in their relationship.  Each member of the couple will behave in just such a way as to induce in the partner exaggerated features of a frustrating parent.  By goading the husband, the wife helps create a violent man, a parody of her forceful father.  The husband, in frustrating the wife, replicates his hypercritical mother…through mutual projective identification, partners are made into hurtful parodies of parents; this transformation establishes a destructive relationship that has great stability, in part because each spouse embodies unacceptable traits that, so long as the marriage persists, need not be experienced or dealt with as parts of the self.  Many aspects of self and other remain hidden.  The troubled marriage is the domain of altered creatures created by mutual projection.” (p. 215)

Kramer adds, “Some of what you complain about in your partner is of your own making.” (p. 220).  Recognizing that projective identification operates in most all relationships helps us to develop more humility and compassion toward our partners.  It is not simply that my partner has a personality that is difficult for me to handle, although that may also be true.  In fact, I share responsibility for my partner’s traits and behaviors.  I am unconsciously provoking my partner to act in ways that may drive me crazy!  Knowing this is the case helps me to continue to work on my tendency toward blaming or defensiveness, as well as on my self-differentiation, which has been defined as “resistance to the interpersonal contagion of anxiety (or anger).”  Kramer writes, “Differentiation of self is very largely the capacity to resist, and to resist employing, projective identification.” (p. 216)

Recognizing That the Majority of Marital Conflicts are Perpetual and not Resolvable

In his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John Gottman writes that 69% of marital conflicts are perpetual and not resolvable.  He states, “Despite their differences, (happy) couples remain very satisfied with their marriages because they have hit upon a way to deal with their unbudgeable problem so it doesn’t overwhelm them.  They’ve learned to keep it in its place and to have a sense of humor about it.”

“In other words, they are constantly working it out, for the most part good-naturedly.  At times it gets better, other times it gets worse.  But because they keep acknowledging the problem and talking about it, their love for each other isn’t overwhelmed by their difference.  These couples intuitively understand that problems are inevitably part of the relationship, much the way chronic physical ailments are inevitable as you get older.”

“Psychologist Dan Wile said it best in his book After the Honeymoon: “When choosing a long-Term partner…you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”  Gottman adds, “Marriages are successful to the degree that the problems you choose are ones you can cope with…”

Gottman concludes: “In unstable marriages, perpetual problems…eventually kill the relationship.  Instead of coping with the problem effectively, the couple gets gridlocked over it. They have the same conversation about it over and over again.  They just spin their wheels, resolving nothing.  Because they make no headway, they feel increasingly hurt, frustrated, and rejected by each other…They are on course toward parallel lives and inevitable loneliness—The death knell of any marriage.” (pp. 130-132)

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

Alain de Botton wrote a provocative article in The New York Times (5/29/2016) entitled, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”  He writes: “We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at times comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us—and we will (without any malice) do the same to them…But none of this is unusual or ground for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.”

De Botton continues, “This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage.  It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage.  The failure of one particular person to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sigh that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.  The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently—the person who is good at disagreement.  Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ‘not overly wrong’ person.  Compatibility is an achievement in love; it must not be its precondition.”

De Botton concludes his article saying, “Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy.  It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling.  We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not ‘normal.’  We should learn to accommodate ourselves to ‘wrongness,’ striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous, and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.”