Please Help: How Much of Our Attraction to Another is Based on Projection

[Silverbirch]

This is something I really need to think about myself. Over the last couple of years, I have had 2 relationships end, and things have happened where after the break-up, I wondered if I ever really knew the person. How objective was my view of them?

 

About 5 years ago, I had been in a long-term relationship with a man who was extreme high maintenance. I'd tell myself "But I love him!" I started to find out things before the break-up, and eventually found out that this man was leading a double life.

 

After I broke up with him, so many people told me what a total b****** they had always thought him, and when I got over the break, I really wondered what was wrong with me that I had thought he was such a nice guy. I was with him for a long time, and it was only after I lived with him that things began to unravel . . . the first week I was with him, the police came looking for him. We only ended up living together for 4 months and I found out so many awful things. Other women and gambling also came into the picture in that 4 month period.

 

Further down the track, I met somebody else who was quite different to the previous man, but I think I blinded myself again. I didn't give myself time to think out the likely conseuqences of the incredible baggage in his life that really made him poor relationship material. Once again, it was "But I love him and he is the one I want to be with." With both men, I put them on pedestals, and as they say, statues have clay feet.

 

As a consequence, I just wasted a couple more years of my life. I'm still in deep grief, but trying to ask myself that even if he wanted me back, what would I be going back to. I would be bringing a lot of bad energy back into my life resultant from his previous relationships - the ex-wife from hell who will haunt him to the grave - doing everything she can to make his life miserable to punish him for his failings - and very emotionally damaged grown children who suck the life-blood out of people.

 

The happy times I had with him were before the ex-wife and children came into the relationship and made life difficult. I saw a very different side to him, and spent a long time hoping the man I first "knew" would reappear. It's never happened.

 

After each of these relationships ended, I found myself asking "What was real? Who was he really?"

 

I friend of mine who has known me for a long time says she thinks I'm in love with being in love, and that it hasn't been the "real" people I have been in love with - just that I have projected qualities onto them they don't really have.

 

Can anyone else identify with this?

[BMP2CPM]

While I think projection certainly plays a part. I also think that your childhood also plays a big part on a subconscious level.

 

We learn at an early age how to interact with members of the opposite sex. Essentially, there are certain types of people that are our type, ie members of the opposite sex that we know how to play with based on what we learned as children.

 

Once the connection happens and the relationship starts, we do start to project, often based on the type of relationships we always wanted as children, but could never have.

 

Unfortunately, our long-term relationships can be situations where we:

 

1) Know how to play with each other based on childhood experiences

2) The circumstances occur where we can think that maybe, if we do A, B, and C we'll finally have the X, Y, and Z that we've always wanted since childhood.

3) The quest to get X, Y, and Z can be such a powerful belief that it blinds us from the actual, real conditions of the relationship, along with the all the bad traits and warning signs of the other person.

4) The belief that we can get X, Y, and Z in life causes feeling of excitement and fear - the perfect ingredients to completely fall in love with someone who may or may not be right for us

 

Good luck!

[Silverbirch]

Hmmm, yes I remember when I was a bout 8, I had a mad crush which lasted a couple of years on a boy next door. He had health problems and had this amazing scrap book of science-fiction and alien articles from magazines! LOL He was REALLY smart at school, and my ex is similar in personality I suppose. LOL I do think that all I've really wanted in relationships has been to be much loved and happy.

 

Sounds interesting. Any more on it you are able to share BMP? I started reading Co-Dependent No More, but I couldn't seem to identify with most of it, but maybe I was interpreting it right.

[Silverbirch]

Sorry, meant to say maybe I wasn't interpreting it correctly.

[BMP2CPM]

Silverbirch: Co-dependents no more is a good book. My favorite books to help understand some of this stuff is: Women who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood, Is it Love or Is it an Addiction by Brenda Schaeffer, and Love by Stendhal