of successfully fixing her. This careful arrangement satisfied their need to ignore how emotionally distanced they had become from one another.
At first, all Claire had to do was passively act as if her partner’s routines were helping her. Although their song-and-dance routines were strikingly dissimilar, they shared a major trait: both were highly invested in fixing, saving, or rescuing someone important to them.
Sam first learned his routine as a child when he devised a series of performances for his depressed mother to make her feel better. Conversely, Claire’s routine was to act as if her detached mother and father gave good performances as parents. Both performances were designed to relieve household anxiety. Unfortunately, neither of their caregiving compulsions ended when they left home. Instead, they took their unconscious need to be helpers with them, chronically repeating the pattern, unaware of being driven by a need to keep the world from falling apart.
Once Sam and Claire shared their storylines with one another, they felt as if they had shared intimacy for the first time in years. They began to see how they administered the same treatment to one another that they had used on their parents.
Although the story of Sam and Claire may seem extreme, partnerships like this are common. With some couples, when conflict develops, one partner becomes increasingly convinced he or she is the injured party while the other feigns passive innocence. Angry but unopposed, the active partner begins to make a noose for the passive partner but at the last minute hangs him- or herself after being rejected by the other as a failed caregiver. The Audience’s investment is so deep that he or she practically kicks the chair from under the gallows and sits back to enjoy the spectacle.
Claire maintained her safety by letting Sam be her hero-rescuer who would take responsibility for everything in their relationship. That way, no matter how messy things got, fingers could be pointed only in his direction.
But Claire’s posture was no less isolating than Sam’s fix-it routine. When at length she became unwilling to pretend that Sam’s performing did her any good, the show devolved into dreary melodrama. Claire wasn’t aggressive: she merely refused to invest herself or to validate Sam. Consequently, the anxiety their song-and-dance routine was designed to circumvent surfaced with a vengeance. By the time they started therapy, Sam saw himself as an almost abusively unappreciated caregiver, while Claire had completely lost interest.
As their therapy went forward, Sam and Claire unfolded the backstory of their fear of intimacy. As they did so, they were surprised to find themselves recovering the excitement of their early relationship. Piece by piece, they disassembled the anxiety that caused them to invest in irrelationship and began building a life of genuine intimacy.
Where Have You Been All My Life?
Irrelationship brings people together in interlocking, scripted roles for all the wrong reasons. Primed by histories created by irrelationship, they learn to identify one another by unconscious pattern recognition and set themselves up to fall almost instantly into a song-and-dance routine. Instead of a measured but exciting courtship, the two partners meet, fall for one another, and “mate for life” in the space of a few days. Early sexual contact elevates bonding hormones for both parties—either driving them apart, resulting in a series of one-night stands, or abandoning or cementing the relationship prematurely. Before either can stop, consider, and perhaps, separate, they jump in with both feet almost instantly. This causes the couple to miss red flags seen by others—or perhaps by themselves. What they’re attracted to in each other—commitment to the song-and-dance routine—ultimately becomes their undoing. Burdened with unrecognized or unnamed dissatisfactions, resentment builds. Esteem is undermined by refusal to allow mutual contribution. Intimacy is thwarted, making the entire construct liable to collapse under the right stressors.
Irrelationship becomes effective between persons who, even before they meet, agree to be “exactly who you need me to be” provided “you will do the same for me.” But how do they find one another in the first place? Many people complain that they experience the same relationship disappointments repeatedly, finding a partner who will act out the sought-after role-play until it burns out. This addictive pattern continues to rule their choices until they become able to identify it and the part they play in it.
Across a Crowded Room
As you read this scenario, look for anything that might look or sound like your own experience.
I see you across the room. I sense, I feel, in my heart some special unfathomable, for-my-eyes-only, X-factor that distinguishes you from all others. Chemistry. I’m already forgetting myself. I’ve promised myself I would not meet someone this way again after what happened the last twelve times. But I want you. I don’t know why, but I am driven toward you. I need to know who you are and find out if you, at last, are who I’ve been looking for.
In irrelationship terms, this scenario means, “I am drawn to you because you have that secret neediness that I was born to fix, just as I have the type of neediness that draws you to me. Somehow, on an intuitive level, my brain knows. That small child’s habit learned long ago has hijacked my will, leading me eagerly to my doom like the Siren’s song, enticing sailors toward the rocks.”
And so, I feel this desire as I come toward you. I reach out and introduce myself. And, while I feel that I want you, that I must have you, I also sense an unbridgeable gap between us.
Research into gambling behavior has shown that near misses increase the drive behind a gambler’s compulsive, reward-seeking behavior.2 This happens via brain mechanisms that measure external situations and produce activation in the ventral tegmental areas of the brain and other areas related to pleasure and decision-making.3 For example, when playing slot machines, four out of five cherries makes a person more likely to continue playing than hitting only three out of five cherries, thinking, Damn it. I almost got it that time! Just one more round! Just one!
Psychologically, almost getting it makes people think—incorrectly—that they have a better chance of getting what they want if they keep trying because, after all, last time they “almost got it.” In the emotional and reward-based reactions, they lose touch with the ability to see that the chance of winning has nothing to do with the previous outcome. Similarly, connections driven by irrelationship delude us into believing that a near miss improves the likelihood that “next time will be different.”
I reach for you—and you slip through my fingers (even though you may be playing out a similar scenario in your head). My heart aches for you. I ask you for a date. Even if you say yes, our union is impossible—it has to be. I reach and I reach for you. My desire is unbearable—and the game itself, while killing me, is also thrilling me. But if I get what I think I want, if I succeed, my desire will drain away. I must have you. I must fix you or you must fix me—and, no matter how much you try to convince me that you are mine, I somehow don’t catch you. And anyway, what would be the fun in actually catching you? No, I want this cat-and-mouse game to go on indefinitely. 4
The entire dynamic for this scenario is fueled by the notion of drive rather than mere desire. Something drives the irrelationship process: the need for security, the need to believe that we live in a safe world, a world that is not falling apart. Deep within the anxiety driving irrelationship is the terror that we will not be able to maintain safety unless we keep the world stable. And this drive will continue indefinitely.
I’m drawn to you—driven to repeat the irrelationship pattern with you. Both of us are possessed by the same need that took shape when we were children. We’re conspirators dancing a routine that will protect us from the dangers of the world—especially the threat of intimacy and unbridled feelings that each represents to the other. So instead of risking reality, let’s dance—all night if we have to.
Rocking the Boat
Do you find contact with loved ones and others to be enriching, flowing, and vital? Or, are you troubled by a vague feeling that something isn’t right about your connection with others—perhaps even that true connection is completely missing?
Are you in a relationship