10 signs you’re meant for each other
To be loved, today, the other must burst the screen of the psyche, surprise, perhaps impose himself, tall, beautiful, strong, complete, solid, « perfect« in every way but above all eminently »conform« – key word of affective business – to the personal ideal. To exist and endure, he must embody our narcissistic extension if not its negative, a magical object, contraphobic some would say, capable of filling each of our lacks, of repairing our wounds the most secret, to transform the voids into full … of what?
In the hyper-consumer society, we all end up « consume on the other« , by demanding everything from him, in the immediacy; as with any product, we change, we exchange it if it does not suit, if it gives way and breaks under the deleterious assaults of our innumerable criteria selection, and how could it not break into it?
There will always be another; there will be lots of them, men and women ready to love, to try, to wear and to endure the time that the seduction passes, that the mystery is dispelled – would we have gone around so quickly? – that we get bored. The formula promoted by Meetic or Tinder stumbles but the impulsive and desperate quest does not stop, the ideal is tenacious, the fear of remaining alone even greater than that of finding oneself one day in front of oneself.
However, is it not possible that among all these tests, these stammerings, these discords and disillusions, stand before us much more than a consumable? What if it was the promise of a beautiful story that deserves to be fully lived?
Based on the main psychoanalytic works, I propose ten items indicating that you may have found a person with whom to build a relationship, if not ideal, at least lively and creative, or who deserves at the very least that you do not succumb too quickly. to the supreme injunction to seek better, bigger and more beautiful, elsewhere.
1) It is easy to converse
We do not communicate in the same way with each of the people who cross our existence. In childhood, language is accessed by overcoming loss through words (Kristeva). We learn to name first what we lack, everything that can leave us, go away (Dolto). Our adult interrelationships forever bear the imprint of this process of symbolization and the more we feel contained, carried by the psyche of the other, the more we can speak to them freely, associate affects and ideas, mobilize the most constitutive psychic contents of our story and our personality: to tell each other in order to really meet. Language is the essential leaven of any romantic relationship; without its support, it will be impossible to overcome the various indissoluble mournings of a human life.
2) Together, you become children again
Regression is a complex psychic mechanism, in certain pathological cases, but essential to the neurotic-normal subject. In a functional couple, partners can sometimes behave like children. Through regression, a fantasy of wholeness is expressed, the other we « fills« fully, we become one with him, we unite, we reunite at his side. The communication from unconscious to unconscious which takes place in regression represents an echo of »primary maternal concern« (Winnicott), and through this experience of a primitive form of mother-child communication (Mc Dougall), we take care of the other as we discover it. Regression allows a reorganization of identifications: we replay the past or his fantasy to demystify and reinvent it together, the other gradually loses his strangeness; we can link him to oneself in a common story.
3) He looks like you (but only for a while)
At the beginning of any relationship, the other remains a stranger. The human psyche preferring what is familiar to it than what it misunderstands, at first it differentiates by a cleavage mechanism (Klein) what resembles it, the traits where it manages to identify itself from those which will mark a difference. This process will be facilitated by the projection of our affective contents, helping to make the unknown even more familiar to us, strangely resembling; what happens in the « love at first sight« when this identificatory and projective dynamic operates fully and that one has the impression of meeting »feature by feature« a being designated for oneself. However, this dynamic must gradually give way to a union based not on the temptation of narcissistic fusion (Eiger) but on a fair appreciation of the other in its singularity, as of the common history erected on the different stages of the life of two, the happy memories, the trials passed together.The uniqueness of the idyll must succeed its vestige: the complicity.
4) you laugh often and share the same sense of humor
For Freud, laughter is one of the highest human achievements. At the same time symptom, defense and expression of joy, laughter offers to the repressed sexual and aggressive impulses a satisfaction (Diatkine). Sexual pleasure and the pleasure of laughter have many subconscious affiliations. Humor, for its part, preserves the subject from affects that are sometimes painful, difficult to express or to think otherwise than through this modality of language. The couple, through humor, can lift a large number of unconscious inhibitions, thwart the censorship of the Superego (Bergeret). Some psychoanalysts have also interpreted laughter as a reunion with the primary object (the mother) and a conspiracy of separation anxiety.
5) you have a great sexuality
In consultation, I am always amazed to note how much the patients put up with an unsatisfying sexuality, sometimes even totally absent. Even when initially they consult precisely for difficulties of this order, they quickly deny it. « It’s okay, it’s not the most important« , proves to be a frequent denial. The body-to-body, the skin-to-skin relationship with the other metaphor above all a relationship of psyche to psyche which employs in its economy a very large number of fundamental psychic processes. undermining must be questioned. Making love amounts to accepting castration, to supporting the partner in his otherness, in his difference. Erotic regression and the realization of fertile and creative sexual phantasmagoria presupposes being able to invest it psychically, to « surrender » in complete confidence.
6) You support his family, he supports yours
We can never write it enough, a couple represents first of all the meeting between two family histories of which the partners are unwillingly the custodians. The lovers build a life for two as a common creation, certainly original, but with an emotional and phantasmal material inherited from their family environment, even transgenerational. Everyone must be able to extract themselves from the relationship of belonging to the family of the spouse to define with the loved one those who will be specific to them, so that their couple one day becomes a full family freed from the weight of history. subsidiary, not repeating the vissicitudes. Despite this autonomy, relative because of the unconscious pact woven between the two families, when it is not a toxic or dysfunctional family, accepting the family of his spouse also shows that we accept an important part of him. I use the term « support« because we can experience an ambivalence, a nuanced combination of hatred and love towards this group which excludes neither tenderness, or the pleasure of being together, nor the possibility of feeling grievances or resentments with regard to it, but only experience one or the other must warn about drive repression and the risk of symptomatic repetition of certain filial problematics.We do not reproduce what is thought, understood, spoken.
7) You like the flaws that annoyed you at the start
I was talking about the early days of the relationship and narcissistic wholeness. When one begins to appreciate the other’s little quirks, his symptoms, it is a sign that the fusion of the beginnings gives way to the acceptance of the uniqueness of the spouse, without false-self or rejection. The other should not represent a fetish capable of filling all our gaps, of healing our wounds in a so-called relationship « anaclitic« (Eiger) but a personality »good enough« (Winnicott), neither ideal nor in conformity with your psychic representation, simply a human alongside whom you imagine yourself walking, even more building you two, growing together.
8 miss you when he goes away, but not too much
It may seem paradoxical, but missing your spouse too fervently when he disappears from your picture is not a sign of a solid relationship. When one feels sufficiently loved and carried by the other, when he is sufficiently linked to oneself, that one has introjected his qualities, his presence, one can bear for him to move away for a while, resist the inevitable experience of separation, without letting go (Rimbault). Better still, cultivating lack is synonymous with cultivating desire (Lacan). We must not confuse passion, amorous fixation and obsession.
9) you can argue
« A couple who don’t quarrel is a couple where one of the two has given up » according to an old saying. Spending your life alongside a chosen being represents a real challenge to the narcissism of each person. It will be necessary to agree on all the present and future decisions, to share the same space without suffocating oneself, to overcome the bereavements and the painful trials which will not fail, without insurmountable clashes or rupture. Just as the relationship must be able to survive separation, it is imperative that everyone feels loved, surrounded and confident enough to find their companion or companion under the terms of the discords that will inevitably arise in the years spent together. Be careful, however, it is one thing to oppose a choice, an important decision to be made, to quarrel, to speak vigorously, moved by the affects of anguish that arise when one feels one’s psychic territory threatened by ‘other: it is quite another to agree to systematically carry the aggressiveness of your partner, his violence only signifying then his narcissistic hemorrhage: physical and verbal violence are never tolerable.
Certain criteria are very often put forward by patients to justify the health of their couple without being really relevant: the purchase of a house (build and invest the equipment in the absence of being able to build oneself psychologically and invest the other ), to have children (the child is unfortunately seen as a scarring agent in many couples, the famous » phallus child »Coming to fill the gap and not complete a family harmony), the exercise of the same profession, even of the capacity to work together (the work being able to be used precisely to dissimulate the impossibility of establishing a true emotional bond, governed by rules other than those, operational, of productivity) …
A few words to conclude
The ideal does not exist; it is at most only a point of horizon towards which one can try to tend, a blaze to animate, during a time, the psyche (Pontalis). The condition for any romantic relationship is first of all to feel good with yourself, to be able to cohabit with your unconscious and to overcome the wounds of your personal history before considering making a success of the bet of living with another and of living with someone else. write a life together.
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