I personally know many women who are in dire need of a relationship. “If I do not have a man, I do not exist.” These are the very words of one of my friends. My clients sometimes sincerely confess to me: “I want to improve not for myself, but for a man.” In their opinion, improvement is almost a guarantee of finding a good man and having a relationship with him. In psychotherapy, self-improvement, and training, women like these are not looking for harmony in themselves. They are motivated by the fear of never finding or losing a partner.
Let me start by saying that there are men among those who are relationship-dependent. However, women still outnumber men. Thus, I shall focus on the latter. I have observed that these people are ripe for pseudo-psychological advice and popular psychology. They are willing to change themselves, undergo training for years, listen to webinars from gurus, and change, change, change. And, of course, demand creates supply. After our eternal need for a partner and the fear of loneliness, pickup training has arrived. Manipulative ways of attracting and retaining men are in vogue. In my opinion, they only lead to neuroses, increasing fears, and shame. The question “How can I avoid being lonely?” has a paradoxical answer: “I have to learn to be alone.”
It is terrifying. Just think about a person with a fear of heights being told to walk along the edge of a skyscraper every day. It is terrifying, isn’t it? But in the case of loneliness, this is a prescription that has a deep meaning: to be in a committed relationship with someone, you have to create yourself. The stage of a possible “We” has to be preceded by the stage of a created “I.” That is, you have to learn to be alone not for the sake of loneliness itself! In this way, we make space and time for the process of self-discovery.
If these steps are turned backwards, then we keep repeating the same scenario for a relationship with the Other: “I need someone to take care of me. In the same way, I need someone to take care of me. After all, that’s how it was in my childhood, and I knew for sure that this is what love is.”
Of course, the need for a relationship is always greater, the more infantile we are inside. And sometimes, until our official old age, we linger in sweet dreams of Eden, the Garden of Eden, where unconditional relationship with a partner is possible.
Jungian analyst James Hollis explains this fantasy of dependency as follows: “At its heart is the conviction that there exists a person who is made just for us: he or she will make our lives meaningful and interesting and fix the flaws that exist in them. He or she will live only for us, read our thoughts and meet our needs. He or she will be a benevolent parent who will shield us from pain and, if we are lucky, spare us the very dangerous journey of individuation.” The trouble, Hollis goes on to say, is that our whole culture is infected with this symbiotic virus of search: “When you get in a car, turn on the radio and listen to the first ten songs in a row. Nine of them will be about the search for the Good Magician.”
Indeed, in the minds of many, there is a sweet illusion of a soulmate wandering somewhere in the world, especially for me alone. Only She or He is capable of loving me as no one else can. And then my life takes on meaning: to seek, to attract, to preserve, to change for Him, so that He will never abandon me. “How disappointing and how unromantic if the Other exists on this earth not for me, not to care for me, and not to protect me from my life!” writes James Hollis. How many such “betrayals” from our partners we have experienced in life, haven’t we? We placed so much hope in them! And yet they constantly try to shirk this responsibility…
Some scientists draw an analogy between the deep fear of loneliness and the heritage of our separation from the warm paradise of the mother’s womb. Or maybe primitive people literally lived in the gardens of Eden. It was safe there, and Adam and Eve were two halves of one whole. And now we merely try to reunite with the archetypal experience of our sinless ancestors. It is not known for sure why, but it is necessary to understand that we still require merging until we have walked our own path to separation from this paradise.
The problem is exactly in this contradiction! Our soul is caught between two extremes: the childish desire for merging with the Other and the adult desire for independence. Our essence is predestined for individuation, that is, for the maximum manifestation of our self in the world. We are born with a built-in program to fully develop our own inherent properties, abilities, and potential.
The job of growing up is to find one’s own integrity, which does not need reflection in another, supplementation at the expense of another, or the allocation of resources from another. And life, being faithful to our needs, offers us circumstances so that we can harden ourselves and be able to withstand the fears, pains, and disappointments that come with relationships in life.
But we are afraid of all these unpleasant companions of growing up and would rather offload the responsibility for maturing from ourselves to our partners. Have you noticed how many women complain about infantile men? Well, this cry from the female soul is not about the weakness of men! It is a collective female cry about the loss of illusions about finding in a man a caring, gentle, and unconditionally accepting parent. The female demand to “pull yourself together and finally become a mature and responsible man!” is about her own fear of growing up. She doesn’t want to go on her own journey to grow up. Otherwise, her relationship with her partner would be different.
The above-mentioned James Hollis has this to say about this issue: “Our psyche understands what is good for us and what is required for our development. If we rely on the Other to avoid a problem, we will deceive ourselves for a while, but our psyche will not let itself be fooled. It protests… The soul wants to express itself fully; it is there, as Rumi so aptly said, “to rejoice in itself.” Incidentally, in our 30s and 40s, our soul screams about this quite loudly! This is exactly why crises appear in our lives. In them, our psyche attempts to get a new development program. Of course, we do not always hear and understand this.
Giving general psychological advice is almost always a thankless job. However, I will still attempt to make some generalizations. Thus, if we identified ourselves in the above examples, then we can follow this algorithm:”
1. First of all, my favorite therapeutic phrase: “We’re fine!” We’re not ill, not medicated, not infected with a virus. In other words, we’re not hopeless. And that is the most important thing! The level of change we are at is a natural stage of development. It holds both the resources for further growth and the things we have to outgrow.
2. Change your focus! The constant search for and retention of a partner, relationship change, and cultivation of the perfect partner must become a thing of the past.
This is all the same myth of parent-child relationships, in which all of us are unconditionally bound by birthright. To have a relationship with an adult partner means to have to mature as a person. Thus, our task from now on is to tentatively but irrevocably set out on the road of individuation—that is, personal accountability for the course of our lives. We recall that we owe our souls the complete development of our talents and abilities for the benefit of this world. For this end, they, like a guide, lead us through dangerous paths that give us the opportunity to develop strength and character.
3. Take care of yourself! The process of individuation is very demanding in terms of courage and strength. The child in us is afraid of many things: the unknown, possible pain, unpredictability, and everything in between. Very often, there is some kind of background anxiety accompanying our growing up. It is as if there is some voice inside us whispering all the time about possible danger and the need to be ready for it. This is very hard to handle.
I used to be an “evil” coach. And my coaching philosophy at that time could be summed up in this harsh quote from Professor Preobrazhensky: “Cut it to hell!” I did not care about the internal reasons and undertows. Come to a coach: make some commitments, act like an adult, accomplish, and move towards your dream. If a client came to me with a similar internal desire for dependency and an external wish to get married, I would have followed the coaching approach: motives, goals, steps.
But now I realize that we all have our own boundaries of fear and anxiety. And most importantly, we all have our own stock of basic resources for further movement, no matter where we are going. If you brutally force yourself to grow up, you will never get anywhere. Just because we want to grow up and become stronger and more resilient doesn’t mean we have to leave ourselves behind on the way! Listen to yourself, observe your fears and anxieties, and feel what the changes mean to you. Realize that it may not be the time to move at top speed. Taking a seat, thinking, and taking stock also means moving towards yourself. Sometimes even more successfully. Don’t expect “evolutionary leaps” from yourself. What took years can’t be replaced in two months. Being more in tune with yourself, listening to what you want, and taking care of yourself on the way to individuation is perhaps the most crucial thing about maturity.
4. Never compare yourself with anyone! Other people’s recipes will not necessarily help you. Other people’s minds are governed by other laws. Another person’s mind is different. That is why, while protecting our mental ecology from feelings of guilt or shame, we have to register only our own changes, successes, and failures. Even a half-degree shift in our fate is already an unbelievable success in one human life! At every definite moment, we did the best we could. If you accept this law as an axiom, you will feel much calmer inside.
5. And finally, some tips on how to break free from relationship addiction, which I can share without any fear of being judged: we need to bring mindfulness into our lives. It is essential to learn how to watch ourselves in every moment of our lives: what position am I in right now? What do I actually want from my partner? Why do I need them? What do I want to satisfy at their expense? Why can’t I do this for myself? What manipulations and ways of influencing others do I use in order to have immature relationships? And so on. Just the experience of self-observation will not transform your life overnight, but it will bring hidden conflicts to the level of consciousness. Then, you will be able to deal with them in an adult way.
Wholeness and fulfillment mean self-acknowledgment and self-knowledge. The different parts of the mosaic come together to create a personal pattern, which is unique in the universe. When you have worked on this, it is impossible not to appreciate the value of what you have created. A person full of value is one who doesn’t need relationships. They enter them for Love, not fear!
