You’re Not Who I Thought You Were!
Henry here. Which of us hasn’t hurled that accusation from a friend, a boss, a child or, most often, our partner?
You let me down! You are not the person I thought you were! Why did you change so much? This is a serious problem and they are strange questions. The most reasonable answer to “Your not the person I thought you were!” is, of course, “It’s not my fault that you thought I was somebody I’m not!” I see you. I interact with you. I think I know who you are, but I’m wrong. How can I be wrong? I was so sure, so certain and I was so in love with the person you seemed to be. My heart told me you were the one, and now it is in shreds.
This is a painful purgatory, but strangely, it is of our own making. We thought we saw something, but it was not really there. Those qualities were there in our imagination, but not in the other person. The confusing thing is that they did the same thing. They saw qualities in us that were not there, or at least not there in the quantity they needed.
Such arguments arise out of our projecting the solution to our own neediness out on someone else. In other words, we see what we’re looking for, even if it isn’t there. Living with someone we may have the same problem. We live with them a long time think we know them, but things blow up and we realize we do not know them very well at all. We have these ideal qualities we want, that we carry around in our minds and we think we see them outside of us, in other people, but it’s often in our minds.
It is like we are at a masked Halloween ball and all the people are parts of ourselves who are strangers to us. All we can do is guess and pretend we know what is going on.
We need to slow down our relationships, be brutally honest with our loved one about who we are and what we need from life. If we don’t know them, we may need to think about whether we are ready for a heavy-duty relationship.