Intimate Relationships: a note to every married couple—if you can make it work, do the work. In time you’ll see that, no matter whom you marry, the real journey is learning how to live with yourself.

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Intimate Relationships
by the Canadian author Christopher Meng
“Looking for a lasting, genuine bond is, at heart, a search for the self.”
—Christopher Meng

Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor had beauty and wealth few could rival.

Her entire life was a pursuit of love.

From eighteen to seventy-eight, she married seven men and walked down the aisle eight times—she was, in a sense, a lifelong bride.

And yet she never quite found the happiness she was chasing.

Plenty of people do something similar: pouring energy into a nonstop hunt for “the one,” gaining and losing, losing and gaining, looping through the same cycle again and again.

Reading Christopher Meng’s Intimate Relationships helped me see the deeper truth behind all of this:

No matter whom you marry, the work is really learning to be at home with yourself.

When your sense of fulfillment can stand on its own, another person’s arrival isn’t about filling a hole—it’s about planting a tree.

01

The rush of new love often comes from the light you’re projecting

In psychology, there’s a well-known phenomenon called the halo effect.

The American psychologist Edward Thorndike once ran an experiment: give people a few glowing traits—“smart, agile, diligent, determined, warm”—and ask others to imagine the person. Very quickly, people start tacking on more virtues—“kind, generous”—as if the positives must come in a bundle. Start with negative traits, and the opposite happens; the mind slides into a string of negatives.

In other words, we rarely fall for a fully seen human being. We fall for our own projection—love’s built-in filter.

Romance turns the volume way up on this. The moment we’re smitten, we unconsciously polish everything about the other person.

Think of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy is, in large part, a story he’s telling himself.

A poor young man falls for a rich girl and swears he’ll marry no one else.

He goes to war, comes back to find her married, and doubles down: he’ll become wealthy enough to win her back.

He even risks illegal schemes, all to speed her return.

By the time he’s amassed a fortune and meets Daisy again, he discovers that the woman he placed on a pedestal—once distant and dazzling—turns out to be rather ordinary, eyes full of vanity and appetite.

As Fitzgerald suggests, once we’re in love, our expectations rise too high—and crash hard into disillusionment.

Here’s the cruel edge of love: when at last you reach that mysterious green light, you realize it’s just a lamp on a dock.

We cling not to who the other person truly is, but to the shining image we cast onto them.

02

The root of our emotional blow-ups is the unmet need from childhood
As the initial rush fades, many of us wake up to a sobering sense that the “perfect love” we thought we had was more dream than daylight.

When our needs go unmet and our attempts to “fix” our partner keep failing, pain sets in—disappointment, frustration, even anger, the feeling we’ve been duped.

Oddly enough, that’s also the opening: the moment we can drop the illusion and look at what’s really happening between us.

The real source of the pain is that we’re reenacting an old script from childhood.

What look like “relationship quirks” are often echoes from much earlier years.

In Positive Discipline, Dr. Jane Nelsen notes that when a child’s needs for belonging and significance aren’t met, the child becomes discouraged. Depending on the degree of discouragement, four patterns tend to show up:

— Attention seeking (“Look at me! Look at me!”)
— Power struggles (“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.”)
— Revenge (“You hurt me; I’ll hurt you back.”)
— Withdrawal (“What’s the point? I don’t matter anyway.”)

Watch a couple in a fierce argument through this lens and you’ll see it: grown-ups behaving like hurt kids.

Worse, we often use adult logic to justify it—and then keep doing the same thing.

In the crash of disillusionment, it’s easy to get stuck in the drama triangle, rotating through three roles:

• Victim: “Poor me. This is all their fault.” (passive suffering, self-pity)
• Persecutor: “You’re the problem—change now.” (blame, attack, control)
• Rescuer: “Maybe I’m not doing enough. If I try harder, I can fix this…” (people-pleasing, over-functioning, taking over)
  
  

All the while, the trigger isn’t really your partner. The roots were planted long ago, buried in the unconscious.

A line from The Flow of Love puts it simply:
“It isn’t your partner who creates your fear and anxiety; your partner awakens the fear and anxiety already within you.”

Or, as Christopher Meng writes:
“No one can make us happy, and no one can make us miserable. Our inner experience arises from unresolved issues within, not from another person’s behavior.”

When love’s spell breaks, the task before us isn’t to change our partner. It’s to meet the truest version of ourselves.

03

Life rushes by; you blink and half of it is gone. Real strength is changing how you respond
Wisdom allows things to be as they are and remembers that every person has a path of their own.

Practice noticing your emotions. When the inner waters get rough, try this:

First, acceptance.
Accept that problems and friction are part of any relationship.
Accept your partner as they are, not as a project.
Accept your own feelings. Anger, disappointment, and sadness are signals—pointers to unmet needs.

Get curious about what sits beneath the feeling. What do you actually need that hasn’t been met?

Second, communicate well.
In conflict, skip the rush to blame. Speak calmly and specifically.
Listen to what your partner thinks and feels. Share your needs and hopes.
Look for a solution that both of you can genuinely live with.

Third, grow yourself.
When you can reflect on your part—your habits, your reflexes—you’ll start to see the hidden patterns.
Pain, uncomfortable as it is, can be an invitation: to know yourself better and to heal.
Study, journaling, therapy—there are many doors. Pick one and walk through it.

As you become steadier and more whole on the inside, you become capable of a relationship that’s healthy, stable, and genuinely happy.

A final word

Your partner is a mirror. What it reflects is less about them and more about the unfiltered you.

Those flashes of anger, disappointment, and hurt? They’re invitations—to discover yourself and grow into wholeness.

Don’t assume swapping partners equals instant happiness.
Elizabeth Taylor walked down the aisle again and again, but as long as the inner emptiness remained, every story ended the same way.

As the American writer and speaker Sam Keen said:
“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”

Lasting happiness isn’t something another person hands you. It’s something you build.

When you stop grasping outward and begin to root inward—
when you no longer wait to be lit up but choose to be the light—
you may finally discover this:

The purpose of marriage is that, through another human being, you are led back to the most honest version of yourself.