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Do you occasionally feel like you become a different person around your partner? Does it seem like he or she has to change - or that you'll have to change partners - for you to be your true self? Do you take turns acting like stubborn toddlers and feeling as powerless as one? Well, you're not alone.
Just about all lovers go through a stage of high emotional reactivity that threatens to destroy their relationship. A request or "observation" tinged with any hint of negative emotion automatically triggers an unpleasant response in the other partner. It doesn't matter how the request and response are worded, the negative emotion underlying them makes both parties feel wronged and, eventually, like they can't be themselves around each other.
They may think they have irreconcilable differences or that they're simply with the wrong partner. In reality, they're just caught in a predictable stage of relationship development -- a stage that affects all committed couples to some degree, because it rises from what I call the Grand Contradiction in human nature.
Humans are unique among social animals in our competing drives to be autonomous (able to determine our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior), while relying for love and support on someone with the same contradictory drives. We can feel as if we're betraying our true selves if we're too accommodating, too sacrificing, too revealing of private thoughts and feelings, or too dependent on the emotional support, approval, and love of our partners. On the other hand, pursuit of autonomy can easily make us self-obsessed, irresponsible, regretful and isolated. We can neither sell out the self for the relationship nor the relationship for the self.
Emotional well being for most people depends on the ability to balance the competing drives for autonomy and connection. When the Grand Contradiction goes out of balance, uncomfortable feelings automatically occur -- as a signal, I believe, to get back into balance. For instance, if you focus too much on yourself, you feel guilty and irritable; overdo focus on your partner, and you feel anxious, resentful, or empty. These uncomfortable feelings do not dissipate (without drugs, exhaustion, or distraction), until the drives for autonomy and connection are once again in balance.
But couples in conflict rarely interpret negative feelings as signals to balance the drives for autonomy and connection. Instead, they experience them as signals of unmet "emotional needs" that their partners must gratify. The desire to love degenerates into "Getting my needs met," which often sends a message to the other, "You have to give up who you are to meet my needs." They handle the Grand Contradiction the same way they did when it first emerged back in toddlerhood, with power struggles, temper tantrums, or quiet sulking. The brightest and most sophisticated couples can act just like toddlers -- injured, infuriated, punishing, and oblivious to each other's perspectives. They protect themselves with the toddler defenses of blame, denial, and avoidance. All their arguments can be reduced to the toddler refrain of, "No!" and "Mine!"
Stuck in their "toddler brains," they cannot be the loving and compassionate partners they most want to be. And that is the core of the problem. They are alienated from each other because they've become alienated from the deepest sense of who they are and what they most value.
Of course, we can all think and act immaturely in our relationships sometimes. Love stimulates a vulnerability similar to that experienced in toddlerhood; most lovers in conflict have not felt so emotionally dependent and helpless since they were toddlers. It is incredibly easy for the intense feelings of intimate relationships to lock us into the emotional processing part of the brain that was completely dominant at age two.
Toddler Love
Here are the characteristics of love controlled by the toddler brain:
- Highly narcissistic (can't see anyone else's perspective)
- All-or-nothing (I love you one minute but, in a temper tantrum, I hate you.)
- Permanency of feelings (When they feel something, they can't imagine ever not having felt that way or that they will ever feel differently in the future.)
- All strong feelings represent emotional "needs."
When disappointed or hurt, toddlers are often aggressive, although they do no damage. (Say "no," or otherwise hurt the feelings of toddlers and they may hit you with a tissue.) The aggression is a futile effort to get others to sympathize with their hurt. Adults who love like toddlers inevitably hurt each other when they really want compassion, demand submission when they really want cooperation, and insist on "validation" when they really want connection.
The line between love and contempt grows ever thinner when compassion declines, as it must in toddler love. The parties try desperately to regulate how they feel by manipulating each other, which can only make them feel more powerless and inadequate. As lovable as real toddlers are, the last thing you want to do as an adult is love like one.
See the follow-up post, Adults in Love
