We always marry for the wrong reasons
It could be said that the reason we feel so incomplete is that we were all born either male or female. We are always either one or the other, never complete, always only half of a whole. Viewed in this light, our search for the right relationship is necessary rather than romantic. We can see that we are always lacking something, always on the lookout for something to fill our gaps.
So we remain lonely until finally Mr Right turns up or until we find love and tenderness with a new wife. Whatever form it takes, a relationship brings something into our life. Without one, we are missing out. So we are all on an eternal quest for a relationship to make us feel happy and alive.
If we make these assumptions, however, we are already in trouble. Because we need a relationship like a crutch in order not to be lonely or unhappy. And however wonderful it might appear at the outset, sooner or later those expectations will wreck it.
A relationship like this is like a one-legged person looking for another one-legged person in order to walk. The two get together, have two legs – and walk! Problem solved. In their initial phase of bliss they may even forget that they were ever one-legged. Until one day one of them wants to change direction or speed … and suddenly the other one is cruelly reminded of their disability. They can’t walk on alone and begin to limp. They fall down. And because they had completely forgotten that they were born one-legged, they blame the other person for the limping and falling, and even for the disability itself. Most people experience this kind of scenario at some point. Suddenly there is something missing in their relationship – tenderness, support, safety, passion, attention – and it’s all the other person’s fault.
If you enter a relationship as only half a person and therefore think that you need someone to supply the missing bits, then paradoxically you lay the foundation for conflict and separation. Your partner cannot make you happy. They can count themselves lucky if they can do that for themselves. In the beginning you might be caught up in the illusion that this wonderful new person at your side is bringing wonderful new things into your life. But it is only a matter of time before you are cursing them for the very qualities you sought in the first place. Because they are withholding them from you and cannot or will not meet your expectations.
Once, in a relationship workshop, a husband and wife were standing in front of each other. There wasn’t more than a foot between them. Step by step, the husband, whose marriage was in great difficulties, had walked towards his wife. In this therapeutic process, with every one of those steps – some tearful, others heavy and reluctant – he had symbolically stepped through an issue which had separated him from his wife in the past. Now he was standing in front of her, vulnerable and open, watched by a fairly large audience. Finally he was forced to look her in the eyes and to be really close to her, to see her as she really was. Then, frightened and kind of panicky, he looked at the therapist. ‘I married her for the wrong reasons!’ he stammered, deeply shaken.
The therapist smiled sagely. ‘We all marry for the wrong reasons.’
Women marry men because they are successful, smart and strong, because they can kill bears, read balance sheets and are skilful in bed. Women marry men because they are exactly like their father, or completely different. Women marry men because they are the father of their child or because their friends fancy them. Women marry men because their parents have arranged it or because they will get money or a new passport for doing it.
Men marry women because all their friends find them irresistible, because they look gorgeous, have a brilliant bum or blonde hair. Men marry women because they are allowed to conquer them. Men marry women because they can manage men so well. Men marry women because they are good cooks, just like their mother – or better. Men marry women because they want a family or because they need someone who admires them. Men marry women because they want sex or are scared of being alone.
We always marry for a reason. Most of the time, though, those reasons turn out to be a curse. Successful men are never at home. Beautiful women get wrinkles and cellulite. All the reasons why we got married turn out to be delusions, change or simply disappear. Our hopes turn into greed – nothing is ever good enough. Beauty fades, success does not bring contentment. We need more success, more beauty, more attention, more care. More sex. But it’s not enough. At some point we feel drained inside or that we are dying a slow death. Often our frustrating search for what we need simply ends with a new partner who promises us more satisfaction and fulfilment.
Whatever our reasons for marrying, with regard to the durability of the marriage, they are all volatile and changeable. They are really only indicators of our own inadequacy. For that reason, one of the most important steps you can take towards renewing the life of your partnership is to acknowledge the reason why you married your partner in the first place. ‘Well, because I was in love!’ most of you will say now. But no other sentence in the world has as many different meanings as ‘I love you.’ Or contains so little of the truthfulness and wholeness of the person to whom it is spoken. Or expresses so much of the subjective needs of its speaker.
Be brave and face up to what it means when you say ‘I love you’. Whatever it is, the sentence starts with the word ‘I’. This ‘I’ filters all our experience of love so far, all our conditioning from childhood, all our unspoken expectations and unfulfilled desires. They are all hidden in this very personal ‘I love you’. Have you already guessed that this might have very little to do with your partner as a real person?
‘I love you’ can mean all sorts of things: ‘I love you because I find you attractive.’ ‘I love you because you are successful and wealthy.’ ‘I love you because you fought for me.’ ‘I love you because you are so creative.’ ‘I love you because you have everything that I don’t have.’ ‘I love you because you are so much like me.’
On an unconscious level your ‘I love you’ has countless other meanings as well. ‘I love you because you are so different from the person who hurt me.’ ‘I love you because with you I feel as distant as I did with my father.’ ‘I love you because you appear as helpless as my mother.’ ‘I love you because I feel so worthless and you seem so rich.’ ‘I love you because I’m scared to be alone.’
If you really arrive at the reasons why you married your partner you will – if you are thoroughly open and honest – always come to a place where you seem to be lacking something. It is your desires and inadequacies that the other person is supposed to satisfy. So their strengths are things that you apparently lack. That is why your relationship problems are based on your deficits. They are really based on distorted and mostly repressed programs you had hardwired very early on, long before you met your partner.
Everybody lives with countless emotional disturbances, both large and small. Most of them are not conscious, but they nevertheless condition our behaviour. This is not easy to understand, so here’s a way of clarifying it. Put both your thumbs and forefingers together to form a little triangle. I call this the tip of the iceberg. It symbolizes the part of you that is visible to yourself and others – the part that you are conscious of. This is the part that falls in love. This is the part that believes you have met your dream man or woman, the part that one day says ‘I love you’ to another person. This is the part responsible for saying ‘I do’ at the wedding.
Now hold this finger triangle in front of your forehead and imagine that your lower arms are an extension of your fingers. Now you have the whole iceberg. The small triangle at the top between your fingers, the part that falls in love or finds its better half, only symbolizes the part that is visible above the waterline – the part that you call ‘me’.
In reality this is the smallest part of you. Your real self, your more complex personality, is the larger part from the wrist to the elbows. Down here are all the things that disappeared from your consciousness or never even reached it in the first place. That’s everything that was not allowed in your family. Everything you were taught was undesirable. Everything that once hurt so much that you’d rather repress or forget it than face it again. Everything that you never understood, accepted or healed. Everything that you never felt capable of. All your old patterns, early childhood experiences, pain, hurts and fears, as well as your unfulfilled potential, your unexpressed vitality and your undivided love. All the good things that were once a natural part of you but didn’t find space or acceptance. Down here these things have gone bad. Formerly unexpressed power and lust, forbidden wishes and drives have turned into aggression, shame, greed and hatred, which in the end we condemn ourselves for because we never remember the good intentions behind them.
Our repressed powers are like caged tigers. The tiger itself is an elegant, lithe and powerful animal that needs to roam freely. Out in the world it is guided by its instincts and in perfect harmony with its environment. If you take away its freedom and put it in a cage, however, it turns into an unpredictable, aggressive and dangerous creature. It’s the same with everything that is caged at the bottom of the iceberg – everything that we now consider dangerous, that we don’t want to know about consciously or don’t allow ourselves to do or feel, everything that doesn’t fit our value system, our upbringing and our society, everything that once made us a ‘bad’ child and that today we condemn.
Of course, the iceberg model is also true for your partner. While above water – ‘above the consciousness threshold’ – two little icebergs are drifting across the ocean, full of mutual respect and intense longing, whispering ‘I love you,’ below the waterline something else is going on. It may well be that ‘I love you’ is turning into ‘I love you if you do what I want’ or ‘I love you if you behave like my dad.’ The little triangles are just planning their first child, while underwater the corners of the larger triangles are colliding, reopening old wounds, and two rejected villains are beginning to fight.
In reality, those presumed ‘baddies’ are orphaned, helpless and attention-seeking creatures following their own logic. With few exceptions most originate in our childhood, and they function and act like children. While above water we want to love our partner deeply and maturely, the hurt child underneath curls up in a corner, frightened of being abandoned. While above water we want to love and give, underneath parts of ourselves are sabotaging our plans and actively choosing negativity, separation, selfishness, fear and mistrust.
How can it be that we act in such a divided and deranged way? From birth onwards we are searching for completeness and perfection, because we are ‘only’ a man, ‘only’ a woman. But for a small child the deep elemental desire for connection is completely different from that of an adult. As children we are never searching for the right relationship, the right parents, the right acceptance. We are totally passive and receptive. We do nothing but take on board whatever is happening around us. We soak up nurturing, warmth and attention just as we do disharmony, abuse and rejection. We simply take in everything that happens and think that’s what the world is like.
It is in this absolutely receptive, non-judgemental state that growth takes place. Whenever we received enough nurturing, attention and love, we grew. Whenever it was lacking, there was no growth. So, with time, a totally individual profile of replete and deficient personality parts developed, their respective world views dependent on the development phase in which they were interrupted, hurt, abused or simply not attended to. If as young babies we had to do without something fundamental, then today there is a part of us that responds and functions as a hungry, frightened, fearful or lonely baby. If we were hurt, abused or traumatized in puberty, there is a part of us that views the world as a hurt teenager. The longer-lasting and more traumatic the negative events, the more intensive the impact of those parts on our life today.
If you find it difficult to understand how this works, imagine yourself as an extended family. Remember that every time your natural growth is interrupted by hurt, lack of nourishment or trauma, part of you gets stuck and is split off. So later on, when you enter into a relationship, you always have a large family of infants, toddlers, children and adolescents along with you.
For the adult, real fulfilment is blocked when a child that got stuck during puberty is still looking for its own particular kind of fulfilment. It yearns for nurturing parents, not for a powerful, free and grown-up relationship with another person. It looks for passive closeness and a melting into another person, but lacks a clear self that can have a unique encounter with another self.
As adults, we want to act consciously and make our own decisions, but the child in us tends to react automatically. Viewing the world from the former, frozen situation, it transfers all the old feelings and blocks to the new situation and the other person. This means the inner child simply repeats the childhood patterns time and again without question, without consciousness, without intellectual distancing. This, for example, is the reason why people who have been beaten as children look for partners who will beat them – without being conscious of it at all. Similarly, children of alcoholics often marry alcoholics.
The iceberg of old stories is not only at work when these difficulties emerge in a marriage. Our inner children turn up unexpectedly in all sorts of situations. Sometimes our partner perceives them more clearly than we do. I have noticed that when some women get close to men, they can’t take male authority seriously any more. A man might have an important position, expert knowledge or specialist competence, but, for instance, as one woman said, ‘He might be the Emperor of China, but when he sits next to me, he is like a little boy.’ Women sense intuitively that away from the official persona, parts of a man’s personality can be very childlike. They might not be noticeable at first glance because they are hidden behind powerful gestures and impressive lectures, but with closeness they become more and more visible.
Even when we fall in love, our extended family of childlike personality parts has a finger in the pie. And the mechanism works with the same precision. No matter how intense our desire for a harmonious relationship with an ideal partner, we always bring our old emotional baggage with us, and without conscious awareness find ideal partners indeed: people whose pain matches ours. People with iceberg stumps like ours. People whose hidden inadequacies collide so precisely and painfully with ours that at the tip of the iceberg we are suddenly ripped from our romantic dream and react with fear, doubts, insecurity and distance.
The confusion resulting from this split between top and bottom is the ultimate reason behind a separation. I’ve never had a single person come to me and say clearly and categorically: ‘I want to split up with my partner because I’m not interested in them any more and because they mean nothing to me.’ It’s always a resigned ‘I have tried everything and we can’t go on like this.’ I constantly see people feeling ambivalent, split, involuntarily cut off or distanced. Or they rant and rave about their partner’s bad behaviour and feel helpless at the same time because nothing they do is ‘good enough’ to get through to them. Without exception they are all searching for love, regardless of how complicated or dramatic their relationship is at that point. When couples come to see me together, the anger and bitterness, pain and suffering are linked especially closely to tears, despair and the yearning for intimacy and healing. If the couple are consciously aware of this link they often feel confused about their ambiguous feelings and ambivalent behaviour.
When Catherine came to me, she felt completely devoid of femininity, passion and sensuality, and could not bear her husband to be near her any more. She didn’t want him to touch her, she said, couldn’t sleep with him any more and thought he was an utter failure. But Catherine was also anxious whenever her husband was late home at night. She was afraid to go on holiday or even away for a weekend on her own. She asked her husband all the time to be near her and stay with her – but when he was around she could hardly tolerate him. He got on her nerves, so she started arguments with him and nagged him mercilessly.
When Catherine told me all this she was confused and appalled at her own behaviour. After all, she had come to me because she wanted to save her marriage. She claimed to love her husband. But she also found him unbearable. And she was ashamed of her angry and vindictive attitude towards him. This inner turmoil made her feel helpless. She wondered whether she was going mad.
Catherine’s story is only one of many in my practice that show a deep inner rift. Her adult relationship with her husband is troubled. That is because countless childlike desires and childlike responses are involved.
Whenever our development from infant to child, child to adolescent and adolescent to adult in our family of origin doesn’t run smoothly, both mental and emotional gaps remain in our personality, like scars. Parts of us that were hurt, unfulfilled or not sufficiently protected and nurtured by our mother and father get stuck in their emotional development. Later, when we meet our partner, those childlike parts unconsciously look for healing. While the adult in us responds to our partner as an adult, the hurt and immature child in us may be needy, anxious and rejecting. Then we get confused and have doubts about our relationship.
Consciously, Catherine longs for a sexual relationship, while at the same time the anxious child in her wants to cling to Daddy. She remembers her childhood as deeply divided. There was a time ‘before’ and a time ‘after’. With ‘before’ she means her years as a small child. Then her dad had played around with her and they had had fun. When Catherine talked about this physical playfulness with her father, she smiled brightly. Then, when she was about ten or eleven, this close contact had suddenly stopped. Her father had withdrawn without a word. ‘I have no memory whatsoever of sitting on his lap after that time or having a cuddle,’ she said.
Catherine is not the only one with such an experience. When their daughters started growing up, many fathers of our parents’ generation began to feel very insecure in their physical expression towards them. Suddenly they felt inhibited and ashamed. ‘How close can I get to her? What if I feel something?’ It happened unconsciously, but was sharply felt by those concerned. As a result, many fathers and daughters found themselves facing a separation much too early, and it was painful for them. For many girls the development towards womanhood was sharply interrupted at this point. Unconsciously, their minds were programmed with messages such as: ‘I am not attractive.’ ‘Men don’t want me.’ ‘I have to be ashamed to feel physical lust.’ ‘I get men into difficulties with my blossoming body.’ While externally the girls continued to mature, an important part of their personality got stuck.
In order to understand these dynamics properly we could say that in the case of Catherine there is not just one woman meeting her man, but many different personae. Imagine Catherine and her husband at the tip of the triangle and beneath the surface many little Catherines whispering, doubting or interrupting. At the tip of the iceberg the wife says, ‘I love my husband.’ Down at the bottom, meanwhile, chaos breaks out. A lively young woman yearns for passion but is disgusted by her father/husband. An adolescent girl wants attention but is not allowed to be touched any more by her father/husband. A growing child wants a cuddle, but senses physical or even sexual attraction and perceives an unspoken rule against such needs in the father/husband. There is also a toddler there, filled with the need for protection and afraid that this father/husband won’t come home at night and will leave her alone at the weekend or on holiday. And a good daughter, who is ashamed because she is not as loving towards her husband as women are supposed to be. And a mother who thinks that the man is a failure because he can’t meet all those childlike needs. And the grown-up Catherine thinks she must be mad.
If it’s confusing just reading about all this, imagine what it’s like to live with it in a day-to-day relationship! Every time two people approach each other, they set off whole armies of people inside themselves, without having the slightest clue that they are doing it. So it is totally understandable when people begin to withdraw after a few skirmishes – just to stay with the military metaphor. And if we don’t split up straightaway, we often only communicate superficially, remain noncommittal and refuse to get involved. That prevents a whole bunch of veterans from being mobilized and possibly fighting a losing battle.
But even when we try to ignore parts of ourselves – our heart or body, for instance – and limit our communication to empty niceties, a similar process will take place. When two people want to get involved with each other they only respond to each other’s words on a superficial level. What they really respond to is the invisible current between them.
These dynamics, too, are due to our upbringing. Every family has a specific emotional atmosphere. This climate – all those emotional currents between father and mother and within the family – conditions us much more intensely than the verbalized rules we receive from our parents. Virtues may be praised and goals for life and learning defined, but the day-today reality may be totally different, full of ambivalence, uncertainty, even hypocrisy, distrust and arguments. As children we perceive all these disturbances, and frequently feel confused by the gap between what is happening and what our parents are actually saying.
Later on it becomes completely normal for most of us not to tell other people how we are really feeling, and we often reduce communication to a harmless minimum, an exchange of niceties. Mostly this doesn’t work. Relationships between people are first and foremost a dynamic process. We hear messages, but we respond mainly to the underlying sub-text and to how something is expressed. For example, when we tell our partner ‘I have done this or that today,’ the underlying message is ‘Please be proud of me … you can’t do it anyway … it was your task really…’ Often there are a dozen or so automatically activated sub-messages underneath the main one. Sometimes we are conscious of the sub-messages we are giving out, but we don’t notice the majority of them.
The tragic thing in all relationship communication is that it is the very messages that we don’t perceive that cause a reaction in the other person. Your partner hears that you did this or that today, but suddenly they feel irritated and become distant. Most of the time they are not conscious of why this is happening, as you have only mentioned trivialities. Mostly they don’t even realize that they have become distant. All they know is that they really wanted to see you or hear you, but somehow it hasn’t worked out.
For years there was a little routine between my husband and me which was symbolic of our relationship then. Whenever he came home, he embraced me. And before he came home I looked forward to it. When he actually did it, though, I felt uncomfortable. In the beginning all I felt was a little ‘Ugh…’ after an embrace. Later, however, I became really tense and eventually quite angry. One day I simply pushed him away and shouted, ‘Can’t you even give me a real hug?’ My husband was completely baffled. ‘But I am giving you a hug!’ Yes, he was. But at the same time something more was happening between us.
After that we had a huge argument and accused each other of all sorts of things. We discharged so much emotion that later, with more distance and calmness, we were able to gain new insights and a greater intimacy. We realized that I had wanted power and protection, to be held in the arms of a strong man. But with every embrace my husband had deflated like a pierced balloon. He is much taller than I am and when he embraced me he always automatically lowered his head and made himself appear smaller, so small in fact that in the end he was resting in my arms. In this embrace neither of us had anything to give. But both of us were looking to receive a caress. So every attempt had made the frustration worse and widened the inner gap. The connection between us had lessened, but our needs increased. And at this point in our marriage tenderness was not a gift, only a need.
Today we make jokes about my husband putting his head down between his shoulders while embracing me. After many hurtful encounters we can laugh about how he always wanted to be small and to cuddle up to me as if curling up in his mother’s lap, while I really wanted to fall into his arms as though I was resting on my father’s broad chest. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against really letting yourself go with another person and not against cuddles either. Tenderness is the lifeblood of every relationship – but it has to be something that flows from real closeness and emotional fulfilment between two grown-up people.
Time and again women tell me that after a number of years their marriage is like a physical and emotional desert. I know that feeling too. After the stormy passionate kisses of our first encounters, the hollow embraces later felt like empty packaging. The same applied to the passionless, routine ‘I love you’ after a while. When one day I became aware of how meaningless it sounded, it conjured up the good old times. I nostalgically thought of one rare scene during the first months of our relationship: we sat in the car, confessed our love to each other and cried because we had to separate for a whole week.
In the course of our marriage it has not been easy for us to recognize and accept that in every lovingly expressed ‘I love you’ there was one of our old stories demanding attention and healing. That in every ‘I love you’ there was the strong hope for love within our own selves. That every ‘I love you’ challenged us to go beyond our emotional inadequacies and become more loving.
Maybe you like watching sentimental Hollywood movies with a happy ending. Maybe when you opened this book you were hoping for directions to your one and only true love. Maybe you find it very sobering and unromantic when I dissect every ‘I love you’ as a pathologist dissects lifeless tissue. Maybe you feel deflated by the thought that underneath your little loving iceberg self there is all this struggle and fear. Maybe you’re thinking what a spoilsport I am, going on about pain and complicated reopening of old wounds. Maybe you’re wondering whether you will have to process your childhood experiences forever, or whether it’s your bad, bad parents who are responsible for everything. Maybe you are asking yourself whether it’s worth getting involved with someone at all if it’s always about needs, wants and repressed fears.
This book is not an attempt to reduce you to a hopeless bunch of walking wounded. It is not about the examination and processing of every minute of your childhood. Quite the opposite. I will prove later, that here, now, today, right under your nose, you have everything you need to heal yourself and your relationship.
It is crucially important both for us personally and for our relationships to know that we all have repressed pain and less attractive parts, and that they all have an impact on our life here and now. But I don’t want to suggest that you embark on lifelong self-analysis. All you need do is look at yourself and your relationships with other people in a completely different, maybe even revolutionary way. There are old undigested stories in all of us that wield their power to this day and shield our lively, fluid being like an invisible suit of armour. It is this armour, and not our partner, that prevents us from being happy. I repeat – because it needs repeating, given that this is such a complete and revolutionary change in our consciousness – that the people around us are only triggers, and the closer they are to us, the more precise triggers they are. But they are also our most devoted servants on the way to healing. They are at our command, so that time and again we can transfer our old patterns onto them, repeat them and thereby realize our deepest wish: to heal our pain.