Relationships · Love and disappointment
Love and disappointment
Why do some relationships begin the same way every time and end the same way too? What are we really looking for in the other person?
Some people have lived the same relationship three times, with three different people. The beginning is the same: intensity, the feeling that this time it's different, that this person understands. The ending is the same: disappointment, the sense that you were fooled or that you fooled yourself, the resolve to be more careful next time. And next time the same story repeats itself.
Repetition is not bad luck, and it is not a problem of choice. It is a sign that we are looking for something specific in the other person, something that has nothing to do with the person in front of you, but with an older lack, one you felt long before your first relationship. We fall in love not with who the other person is, but with who we need them to be. As long as they let us, everything works. Disappointment comes at the moment the real person surfaces, and the real person does not resemble the one we needed.
That is why disappointment is, paradoxically, the first moment at which the relationship becomes possible: only now is there someone in front of you, not an image. Many relationships end exactly here, because an image is easier to love than a person. Others only begin here.
Then there are breakups that never end. A year, two years, in which you are no longer part of the relationship, but the relationship still takes up space in your life: you check, you compare, you build arguments for a conversation that will never take place. What still lasts now is no longer the relationship, but something in you that has clung to it.
At other times it is about trust. After a great disappointment, people promise themselves that they will not open up again and that nothing like it will ever happen to them again. The result is not safety but loneliness, or a cold relationship in which no one can disappoint, but no one can come close either.
In counselling we are not looking for someone to blame, either in you or in others. We are looking for the pattern: what repeats, what is sought, what is avoided. Not so that you stop loving, but so that you can love a real person instead of the ideal you feel you need and have dreamed of.
When does a psychologist help? When the story has repeated itself for the third time. When you can neither leave nor stay. When a breakup that has already happened still takes up space in your life, day after day. Or when you have come to the conclusion that you are “not cut out for relationships”, a conclusion that deserves at least a second opinion.
If you recognise yourself in this text, you will find more on the page Relationships.
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