The Reality of the Dream Relationship

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.


The world turns on relationships. The ideal way of living is within a relationship. The most successful people in the world have relationships which, in turn, are most successful. Without a relationship life is empty and we feel isolated and different from everyone else. If we don’t find someone to share our lives, then not only are we doomed to loneliness but a very clear message goes out to all around us that we are ‘different’ in a negative kind of way. A partner is our comfort, our companion, lover, friend and, ultimately, our assurance to the rest of society that we are ‘ok’ people.
You’ll probably have found a lot of common sense in the above passage. But, equally, when you reality test it, there are certain things that stand out as being not necessarily true. The world doesn’t turn on relationships. It carries on turning whether we have relationships or not. It might be an ideal way of living for most people but not necessarily for all people, particularly if the relationship is bad. The most successful people in the world can often have disastrous personal relationships. Without a relationship life can sometimes be lonely but we are not ‘doomed’; there is such a thing as independent living. People around us can start wondering why we don’t have a relationship but that is as much our own sensitivity as anything else. And we don’t, or rather shouldn’t, need a partner to show society that we are ‘ok’.
The first set of views I presented above stem from an idealised belief that relationships are always good and always beneficial. But relationships have two sides. They are not all trouble free, personally empowering, psychologically fulfilling, or a full time joy. They can have a problematic side to them too.
In the therapy room I work with people who have difficulty with relationships that have ended, usually badly and usually leaving them with more questions than answers.
It is not always women who are mourning the loss of a partner either. Men, too, have an equally hard time when relationships end that they had hoped would succeed.
Part of the problem lies in the expectations that have been disappointed. The ideal image of the ‘whole person’ in contemporary society is one who has a good relationship with a partner, from which both can draw love, happiness, support and fulfilment. It would be trivial to suggest that we sometimes see having a partner as a commodity but in analytic work it is not unusual to hear the concept of ‘partner’ talked about in the same checklist for lifestyle perfection as the career and the apartment.
And so the reality of the relationship becomes based on an imaginary ideal. We all need ideals, goals, objectives and dreams for the future. I’m not disputing that. But the reality of relationships can be very different from the ideal. They involve two people, either same sex or opposite sex, who come together often from widely differing life experiences and with equally differing inner lives and desires. Love, as we know it, is the ingredient that can blend these differences together and place them on a shared path. But love has its obstacles too.
For some people the act of loving involves too much giving to the other. They can be carrying wounds from previous relationships or life experiences; they can have unrealistically high demands on their partners; they can have issues with intimacy; or they can simply be unwilling to let themselves go emotionally because it means loss of control. Either way the devastation that failed relationships cause is all too real.
When we love, we invest part of ourselves in another person. This energy and emotion is now cut loose from the one we loved and sends us into a tail spin of emotions. Therapy is a way of gathering in that energy so that the sense of pain and loss can be healed and the person can eventually move forward again.
This can be either a lengthy or relatively short process depending on the circumstances of the break-up and the presence or otherwise of extra burdens that the break-up represents. Here I’m thinking about issues such as excessive dependency, self esteem, the factor of infidelity, or physical or emotional abuse.
A common way of dealing with the pain of break up is to find another relationship quickly. There is a prevalent view that relationships are things we can jump in and out of with ease, starting another when the previous one ends. But pain, like all energy, has to go somewhere. And if it is not dissipated properly it accumulates and moves with us into our future relationships.
When a relationship fails we need time to make sense of that failure and often that means taking time out to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened. In that way we can be made stronger by the experience rather than weakened by it.