There’s a theory going round that we somehow gravitate toward romantic partners who enable us to resolve our unique childhood issues, whatever particular problems we couldn’t solve with our parents.
It’s a useful theory for motivating effort to work it out with our particular partners. After all, if we chose them for their unique capacity to help us, they must be right for us, even if they’re frustrating. Our partner choice is just the universe trying to teach us the unique lessons we need.
I’ve long doubted the theory’s accuracy because I don’t think our problems are so unique. If there were 500 unique problems, then finding the partner helped you with the one you had in childhood would be uncanny, but if there are only a handful of problems, it’s not uncanny at all.
These days I don’t think there’s 500 or even a handful. There’s only one problem. We all deal with it over and over, not just in childhood and love but everywhere.
We all want to feel sustainably safe and free, and gravitate toward commitments that promise security without compromising our freedom. Still, one person’s bid for greater safety and freedom can be a threat to another person’s safety and freedom. When you say, “I want to be loved (safe) for who I am (free),” it can sound to your partner like a take-it-or-leave-it threat, like what you’re really saying is “I demand that you compromise to accommodate me.” When we don’t feel safe or free we feel threatened and fearful.
Some say that love is letting go of fear. I don’t believe we can just drop our fears, nor should we. Letting go of fear with a greedy narcissist will ruin your life. The trick isn’t letting go of fear but fearing where fear is justified and not where it isn’t.
Trouble is, it’s hard to tell where to fear is justified, because fear and self-protection are often indistinguishable from greedy narcissism. Is our partners’ fierceness evidence of fear or is it a selfish grab for what isn’t theirs? Hard to tell.
Like I said, this is a problem not just in childhood and love but everywhere. An arms-buildup for self-defense is often indistinguishable from an act of aggression. Aggressors often claim they’re acting in self-defense. Even Hitler did. We end up in wars, big and small, catastrophic and petty in which each side is sure the other started it, that we’re merely defending ourselves against the other’s aggression.
I’ve dated broadly, hundreds of people, partnerships lasting 18 years and dates lasting six minutes. Each relationship was similar in this respect, compatibility punctuated by escalating conflict in which we each played out the drama of our childhood but more, the drama of the human predicament, competition for safe solid ground in the face of threat.
My love life history is the story of my trial and error experimentation with ways to glide through the conflict more efficiently. At first I thought I’d find partnership peace only when I found a partner who, like me could take responsibility for her fear-driven aggressiveness. In recent years I’ve recognized that I wasn’t as good at taking responsibility as I needed to be.
For a long time my quest was for a compatible partner. Eventually I realized I needed internal compatibility first. I needed to reconcile my demand for an equal partner with my gut’s desire for a partner who accommodated me by granting me an extra margin of freedom and safety.
There are right and wrong partnerships. I doubt I could ever make it with someone who never took responsibility for her fearful aggression. With her, I’d always be deemed the aggressor, which would make my fearful counter-aggression inescapable. I’m best with a partner who, like me recognizes the human predicament, and doesn’t see herself as exempt from it.
These are scary times, scary to us individually--jobs, status and partnerships uncertain, and to us all collectively, Putin, global warming, the middle east; terrorists, counter-terrorists, and governments paralized by the ambiguous conflict over who's the aggressor and who's just defending their rights appropriately.
In times like these we’d expect to see a rise in both fear and aggression, and that’s what we’ve got. It takes a whole lot of work to resist the lurch toward self-defense at each other’s expense, but what we get instead is lots of lurch, people poor at distinguishing between real and imagined threats, people proud to indiscriminately stand their ground against all threats, real or imagined.
Romantic intimacy is perhaps the hardest exercise in resisting the temptation to lurch. After all, it’s so intimate, so much skin in the game when we risk that much union with anyone.
Some of us just plain aren’t up to the romantic challenge. That’s OK. Whether in partnership or not, we all get practice working with thisone universal issue. It shows up everywhere--at work, with our children, in our friendships, on the global stage.
Still, I end up thinking that everything I know about safety and freedom management and negotiation I’ve learned in love. I’m finally getting the hang of how to hang at close range without flying off the handle into aggressive self-defense.