Romantic Relationships: When the One You Love Disappoints You

Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

When someone comes into our awareness in a dream, they usually aren’t quite the same as the person we actually know in everyday life (presuming they are someone we know at all).

In our dream we are creating the characters as a reflection of an aspect of ourselves. All the characters represent aspects of our own being.

The person themselves has nothing to do with our dream because the dream is entirely of our making. It doesn’t actually involve the other people. They are simply being used to mirror what we can’t yet consciously detect in ourselves.

But is this essentially different from everyday life? Are the characters who people our waking hours actually known by us for who they really are?

The Little Prince has met a flower who becomes the love of his life. The flower represents meeting “the woman of your dreams” or “the man of your dreams.”

The little fellow is head-over-heels in love. Yet, as we shall see as the story progresses, he isn’t really seeing his flower.

He’s looking at her as we all look at the people in our life. He’s projecting his dream onto her.

The way we see people in everyday life is akin to the way we conjure up characters in our dreams.

In the case of the Little Prince falling in love with his flower, he sees her beauty. He also notices she’s quite vain. But he has no real idea who she is yet.

He’s projecting onto her all of his fantasies of what the “ideal” romantic partner should be like.

The same can be said of how we project our expectations onto our friends, parents, people at work, and other significant relationships.

People do it with their doctors, ministers, and therapists too. All kinds of expectations are hung on these roles, each of them projections of our idealizations—and our neediness.

A friend of mine observes that it’s much more difficult than we imagine to wake up and notice another person for who they truly are.

So much of our relating to people has this dream-like quality to it, to where we create them in our mind as an idealization—and when they don’t live up to our dream of them, we demonize them. We now see them as “the cause of all our problems.”

Idealizing someone, followed by scapegoating them when the fail to match our dreams, is unconscious behavior.

The process of becoming conscious is one of beginning to see clearly who the other person is, which happens only to the degree we see clearly who we are.

The unconscious mind has a dream-like filter on it. The way to remove this filter is to self-confront.

Instead of asking why the person isn’t matching up to our expectations, we should ask why we have expectations in the first place. What are these expectations really about? What, in ourselves, are we seeking to supply through our dream of the other?

If the one we see as our dream-lover, dream-child, dream-superior, dream-minister, dream-doctor becomes tarnished in our eyes, the trick to becoming conscious is to ask what in us this means.

Why are we looking to someone else to complete us, fulfill our dream, make us happy?

The Little Prince has come to Earth because his dream-lover disappointed him. It’s through this disappointment that he’s beginning to wake up to what love is really all about.

To disillusion us that we can find fulfillment in another person is one of the most important roles a significant relationship plays in our life. The person, whatever role they play in our life, is doing us a huge favor.