Chances are you never thought you needed to be rescued from
romance. In fact, you probably feel you need more romance in
your life, not less. The truth is that most hearts are broken
in the painful difference between the possibility of real
romance and the insistence on the fantasy of romance — with the
real thing taking the loss.
Romantic Fantasy versus Real Romance
Do you remember as a child closing your eyes and making a
wish when you blew out your birthday candles? Remember
how you hoped with all your heart your wish would come true.
In all likelihood, those that did come true were made to happen
by your parents or another relative, someone who had the power
to bring your wish to reality. Didn’t it seem like a miracle
when you got what you dreamed of? All you had to do was
wish and there it was!
If you can see a rabbit in a cloud or a face in the bark of a
tree;
if your heart can be opened by the giant chords of a powerful
symphony or you can discover something where nobody ever
looked before, you might be praised for the wonder of your
imaginings. You might even be called a genius.
Do you have to give up imagining? Not at all. The price of
giving up imagining is the death of the soul.
But we need to make a critical distinction at this point, a
distinction that’s so important it carries the weight of whether
you will have a successful relationship or not. You cannot
prefer
your imaginings over reality and you cannot allow reality to
squash your dreams. You have to weave them together to make
a whole and fulfilling life. Unfortunately, for too many, this
distinction is not made, and they consciously or unconsciously
choose what they imagine over what actually exists in and around
them and are reduced to living in heartbreaking fantasy.
To experience real love and true intimacy, we have to
understand that, because we are all confronted with
differences, we cannot have everything we want just
the way we want it. Have you ever been in a relationship
with someone who turned out to be different than what
you imagined? Perhaps the reality of this person was even
pretty terrific, but he or she was different from your
expectations and you had to adjust. Even when that
works out well, there’s still a feeling of loss when you
have to let your fantasy expectations go.
For far too many, however, the loss is intolerable. Rather
than having to “settle” for a person they can’t help but
see as ordinary and unexceptional when compared to their
fantasy, they choose their own world of romantic make-believe.
They prefer the stories they’ve made-up rather than having to
live in the truth of who they really are and what it’s like to
be
with a real person who is different. And nothing is more
effective at destroying real intimacy than opting for the
images and emotions of romantic make-believe.
Romantic fantasies take many forms. They can be very
subtle and hardly noticeable, or they can be outrageous
and unbelievable. The key to spotting such fantasies is
that they always compensate for a sense of loss,
hopelessness or any feeling of inadequacy.
For example:
Niki can’t stop her date’s unwanted sexual advances because
“I’m afraid if I say ‘No,’ he’ll lose interest in me.” So she
ignores her own response and creates a fantasy about him —
that he’s so much more open and honest about his sexual
needs than she is — and she lives inside that story rather
than the truth that she doesn’t want to go to bed with
him and doesn’t have enough self-esteem to make her
feelings known.
Kareem looked forward to surprising Keesha by taking
her to a new restaurant. After they arrived, she said
she’d been there the week before with her networking group. He
was
crushed because he wanted to be the first one to take her there.
Rather than adjust to the truth of reality and enjoy the time
with
Keesha, he spent the evening sulking, caught up in feeling
betrayed
mixed with not feeling special.
Anthony wanted his marriage annulled when his wife told
him of her previous sexual encounters. He wanted to believe
she’d been a virgin even though he hadn’t been. Rather than
working out a reality-based relationship with his wife who
he claimed to love, he preferred the fantasy that a wife
should always be a virgin for her man. Anything else
would be degrading for him. “It breaks my heart to
have to leave her,” he sighed, ” but I have no choice.”
Not one of these people has their feet on the ground. Each
displays a dangerous preference for their idealized notion
of “how it’s supposed to be.” They reject the differences
between reality and their own fantasy and then have no
way to intimately connect with the people they’re with
because they are unconsciously loyal to the stories they
have contrived. For Niki, Kareem and Anthony to ever
feel really loved, they will have to rescue themselves
from their allegiance to fantasy.
Yvonne and Sam
We read about a young couple, Yvonne and Sam, in the
Los Angeles Times. They married after the birth of their
first child. She was 16. He was 21. They both were gang
members and said they fully expected that marriage “would
mean instant happiness.”
“Why not,” Yvonne insisted, “that’s what our culture teaches
us.”
Instead of effortless happiness, their marriage quickly
plummeted into despair. Sam couldn’t pull away from
his homeboys, and he lost his job. Yvonne had another
child, cried all the time and was beaten for her tears.
This is a vivid illustration of the dangerous differences
between the fantasy of instant happiness and the
demands of intimate relationship in the real world.
But their story has a happy ending. Together they
changed their lives.
In desperation, Yvonne found her way to a very supportive
continuation high school with an on-site day care and
parenting program for teen mothers. While she worked to
earn her diploma, the teachers helped her believe in herself
and increase her determination to take responsibility and
change her life. She gave Sam a choice: Leave Los Angeles
and the environment they were trapped in, or she would leave
him.
They moved to a new town, started couple’s counseling,
and the violence stopped. Rising up out of the quicksand
of unconscious fantasy and the pull of their allegiance to their
families’ and neighborhood’s way of life, they renounced
their self-sabotaging habits and made conscious choices to
change their lives even more. Yvonne now attends college
with plans to go on to law school. Sam works full time and is
pursuing his high school diploma.
They began as children mired in hopeless romantic fantasies
of effortless happiness, but they are doing the necessary
lovework, committed to developing themselves as proud,
positive, increasingly successful individuals. With continued
counseling they are discovering themselves.
They are learning to identify and value their differences,
becoming more intimate and loving with one another and
good role models for their children. They’re making their
way, hand in hand, through the challenging adventure of
leaving their past behind, interrupting the unconscious
duplication of what came before, in order to find their
own lives and be true to themselves and their children.
After such a difficult start, they’re learning to rely on
their love to achieve the excitement and power of real
romance and a new intimacy.
The Dangerous Price of Preferring Fantasy
Romantic fantasies, like drugs and alcohol, offer the hope
of getting what you believe you can’t get on your own.
Also like drugs they are temporary and never ultimately
satisfying. When the spell dissolves, you’re lost in the pit
of heartbreak, shortchanged by life yet again.
On the other hand, when fantasy is not a substitute for
reality, it can be a playful source of pleasure. You can
slip beyond the limits of daily life and play in a make-
believe world. You get to go anywhere, be anyone and
experience anything you like. However, enjoying romantic
fantasies is one thing. Preferring them over reality is quite
another. That’s a crucial distinction.
When you expect your fantasy to come true in reality,
bitterness and recrimination will routinely be part of
the package. Remember, reality can be overwhelmed
when it has to compete with the perfection of fantasy.
When reality fails, disappointed love often turns vicious.
Have you ever physically or emotionally hurt someone
just because she or he failed to match your dream of the
perfect lover? Have you ever suffered the failure of not
living up to someone else’s dream image of the perfect love?
We ask these questions during our trainings, and, without
exception, the majority of both men and women confess
they have experienced both sides of this problem.
Chances are, you have too. Then, when a real life
relationship makes its inevitable demands, you shrink
from a feeling of personal inadequacy, afraid you won’t
be enough, afraid you will come up short. The trance of
romance is deadly. When we’re caught, we reject what is,
preferring what “should be.”
Who You Are Has To Be Sacrificed
The major problem with a commitment to fantasy is that
whoever you are for real has to be sacrificed. If you’re
feeling scared, awkward, confused, angry or whatever,
you can’t show it. That would burst the fantasy. You
have to create a substitute self. You have to pretend to
be secure, comfortable, clear, composed, whatever it
takes. However, your false self contains a huge trap,
one that’s not immediately apparent. A false self can
never be enough, because its whole purpose is to
compensate for your initial decision that who you are,
as you really are, is unacceptable.
A false self never removes the feeling of being unacceptable,
that’s not it’s job. It merely hides it, so that you become
more and more afraid that if you relax you will be
revealed … and rejected.
When you condemn yourself as unacceptable you are
unavoidably lost. Without a credible sense of your own
self, you’re left to depend upon other people’s values,
ideas and beliefs as the basis for your identity — your
family, community, or church; fads or trends; media
deceptions; a life based on “how I’m supposed to act.”
You’re like a child living in somebody else’s world.
You can’t trust yourself. In fact, you can’t really trust
anyone else, because you don’t have a reliable sense of
self to make such decisions. Is it any wonder you might
fear being rejected by others? You can’t feel any safer
with them than you do with yourself.
Too many people spend their lives more faithful to an
imagined lover than to the people they could be with
(or actually are with). They prefer to be special in the eyes
of their ghostly lover rather than ordinary in the embrace
of a real person. Beware your wish for The Prince or
Lady Perfect. They always begin as images of hope and
promise. In the end, they turn out to be demanding
and unforgiving tyrants, permitting no real person to
ever be enough — especially you!
Judith Sherven, Ph.D. & Jim Sniechowski, Ph.D. authors of
Be Loved for
Who You Really Are, The New Intimacy, & Opening to Love 365 Days a Year
Visit our website at
www.themagicofdifferences.com
