People have an innate need to seek fulfillment in life together through intimacy: love, romance, and sex. Giving and receiving support and encouragement reinforces the sense of belonging, so in order to care for and be cared for, we seek a reciprocal relationship that nurtures and nurtures us in innumerable ways.
Our drive toward interdependence involves influencing each other, sharing thoughts and feelings, and participating in activities together. The couple relationship implies continuous commitment, constant interactions, emotional connection and mutual fulfillment of needs and desires, cooperation and consideration.
Given this complexity, is it any wonder that couples flounder when faced with daunting relationship challenges? According to a recent survey, almost half of marriages end in divorce, and according to another, a third of intimate relationships break up before the age of 25.
In my work with couples in relationships, I was interested in the nature of couple relationships and, in particular, the question: How come relationships don’t succeed?
While relationships can be heartwarming, precious, and full of mutual feelings, empathy, and closeness, they can also be loveless and toxic fields of hate.
I have engaged in private research to increase our understanding of how relationships fail. I would like to summarize it very briefly here. I want to distinguish exactly how a relationship can be sabotaged by the two partners involved.
An intimate relationship can be sabotaged in six main ways. Is it so:
1) merge
2) inclined
3) Domain
4) Twin Frustration
5) Freeze
6) The bridge or the Swiss weather house
Let’s look at each of these in a little detail.
1) merge
When people have no sense of an individual self, they have no sense of the other. This results in a fusion of identity and individuality in relationship. It reflects a return to the mother-baby relationship and the underlying reason is the issue of feeding and the inability to receive. The irony of the merged relationship is that neither gets what they want from the other, since neither is an identifiable giver or receiver; rather they are a fused (and often extremely frustrated) unit.
2) inclined
This type of relationship is based on dependency and the source of this type of dynamic relationship is infantile. It reflects the oral stage of early development when we look to the outside world and the people in it to meet our needs. The fear is that if the other leaves us we will not survive and this idea usually alternates with the opposite idea that can be summed up as: “I don’t need you because I can fend for myself.” Either way, the relationship is centered on need, with the tragic payoff that neither can give the other what he wants, since each partner needs it so much.
3) Domain
In this type of relationship, often narcissistic, power replaces love. Partners may idolize, idealize, adore or denigrate, abuse, or even intensely hate each other. But real feelings do not enter the relationship. Consequently, there can be no real meeting and each partner occupies a lonely and isolated existence of cruelty and emotional emptiness. This relationship can only express itself through control, retention, withdrawal and all forms of power and domination.
4) Twin Frustration
This is the kind of relationship that is based on the idea that neither of the two people involved can be free. They deny their inner demons in projecting and transferring from one to another. The relationship becomes an arena for discussion, conflict, and antagonism. Stubbornness and negative passion preside over what is essentially a form of masochistic attachment. The two partners carry the relationship like a burden and endure their interactions through unconscious negative reactivity, rather than any expression of tenderness, empathy, or true togetherness.
5) Freeze
When a relationship is characterized by activity in the form of achievement and competition, feelings and emotions take a backseat. The result is coldness, disconnection and distance. Each partner engages in disparaging the other through criticism, judgment, and humiliation. The keynote is rejection and permission to want or feel is not given either. The emotional attitude is rigid and emotionless, as each member of the couple tries to dislike and even hate the other in denial and release of their own self-hatred.
6) The bridge or the Swiss weather house
This relationship can be summed up like this: “The closer I get to you, the further you get away from me.”
Picture this: the two partners are apart, separately on either side of a bridge. The bridge is between them and symbolizes the meeting point, or relationship. One moves toward the center of the bridge exhibiting a desire to relate (share, meet, or become intimate). But as the other partner moves on to meet them, the first partner retreats to the bench where he was originally located. Prompting the other companion who is now on the bridge to ask, “Where are you?” As he backs away, the first partner crosses back to the center of the bridge, only to reply (when the other is a safe distance away), “I’m here, where are you?” your“And so it goes on in a farce of meeting and willing, unwilling and rejecting, inviting and abandoning, all of which undermine the need for intimacy. Each blames the other for not meeting and relating, unaware of the withdrawal and the unconscious rejection that they themselves are practicing.
The Swiss Weather House, like the bridge, is an analogy based on the idea that only one side of the relationship can be out at any one time. When one side goes in, the other goes out.
A healthy relationship model
Relationships are enabled through separation and boundaries. There are three elements to a truly intimate relationship: self, other, and relationship. Each of these elements must be distinguished, respected and honored. When they are, both individuals can fend for themselves. Individuality can be sacrificed to the relationship in consideration, commitment or disinterest. But each chooses to come together, to be together and to relate, instead of being compelled or unconsciously driven by need or fear.