I had a friendly run-in with my ex-girlfriend Stephanie at her restaurant in Echo Park last week. It was one of those former lover run-ins where I walked away thinking: Wow, what a wonderful person. I can see why I fell for her. And simultaneously: Wow, I can totally see why we didn’t work out.
Being the romantic I am, though, I couldn’t help letting the nostalgia swirl as I walked to my truck after our conversation. I remembered the first time I saw Stephanie back in 2018. I was having lunch with my buddy Scott, and she walked out of the kitchen of her restaurant, strode across the room confidently, looked at me with her blue eyes, and winked. “Who the hell was that!?” I said to Scott. I knew from that moment that, no matter what happened, Stephanie and I would be together.
This feeling of “love” at first glance is a feeling I’ve had many times. Maybe you have, too. See a beautiful woman across the street, on Instagram, or on a dating app, and something in our chest explodes. “That’s her.” Now, of course, we don’t always act on this feeling. I remember in my days living in New York, I’d fall in love or lust many times a day on the subway, the bar, or just strolling past an outdoor cafe. There was something very innocent and teenager-y about it all — fumbling and fantasizing over some stranger I knew I’d never see again. But these gorgeous women did seem to have a certain power over me I couldn’t quite explain.
As a part of my recent deep dive into my relationships with women, I’ve been fascinated by this power of projection and fantasy. (I wrote about them a couple weeks ago for Mr. Feelgood, here.) In his great book Iron John, Robert Bly writes about the power of a universal projection that all men carry of the “perfect woman.” He calls her “The Woman With Golden Hair.” Bly writes about this magical figure in an archetypal sense — He says that if men were more in touch with myths, as men were hundreds of years ago, they would understand that the projection they see when a stunningly beautiful woman walks into the room isn’t the flesh and blood woman before them, but The Woman With Golden Hair. Should the man get to know this real woman, should he have sex with her, or find out her secrets, he would of course find out she is not the woman of his imagination, and the projection dissipates. This is what can happen when we get deeper into relationship with someone, the ol’ 6 month or 1 year itch, when the honeymoon phase of a courtship ends and we’re confronted with the wholeness of our lover. Jackson Browne had a brilliant line about this moment in his beautiful song “Fountain of Sorrow”:
When you see through love's illusions, there lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
As Browne implies, this moment is often the beginning of the end of our relationships for so many men. If we don’t leave the relationship, we often turn to porn, work, fantasizing about other women, or some other form of checking out and away from our current partner. This happened to me in my relationship with Stephanie after we moved in together. Suddenly, the same “perfect” blonde beauty who had winked at me that day in the cafe was yelling at me for leaving my dishes in the sink, and not emptying the litter box. Months later, I fell for a “perfect stranger” in my grad school class, and left Stephanie, only to repeat the cycle again and again in the coming years.
Always running away from a real woman. Always running towards my projection.
What Bly and every other men’s work book I’ve read doesn’t cover, though, is why we have these projections in the first place, and why they are so strong. I’ve found in my own work, and my work with men in coaching, that there tends to be a correlation between parental neglect in childhood and the power of our fantasy projections. When a child experiences neglect — especially intense neglect or abuse — his fantasies save him from the devastation of feeling the full weight of his experience. To a child, the realization that his parents — especially his mother — cannot be there fully for him would be too intense to feel. Therefore, the projection of a fantasy caregiver — who can love him in all the ways his parents could not, appears. (This happens equally for women, of course, but I’m focusing on the male experience here.)
This powerful projection or fantasy of the “savior partner” will be beefed up by pop culture, the internet, movies, music, etc. That is inevitable. But the core of the projection is actually a genetic imprint. This means that the pretty face across the room will most certainly end up as a woman who carries similar traits to the very parents who hurt us.
Both my Mom and Dad were addicts in my early childhood, so even though they were physically present and I knew they both loved me a lot, I felt my deeper needs for support, safety, and presence were often neglected. And sure enough, whenever I’d end up in relationship with one of those “perfect strangers” across the room like Stephanie, I would feel that my deeper needs were neglected in that relationship, too. For years, I blamed this inability to meet my needs on all of my girlfriends. It was an obvious place to go, and there was some truth in it: After all, Stephanie’s 16 hour days at her restaurant were, in fact, leaving me feeling neglected. But her behavior was just a reflection of my own unhealed trauma.
That was a hard pill to swallow. But what I’ve learned as I’ve felt my way through to the core of my unhealed trauma — especially this last year with a help of an amazing intimacy coach — is that, as I feel and let go, these fantasy projections that once ruled me dissolve, as well. Do I still notice the beautiful stranger across the room? Sure. I hope I always do! But she doesn’t hold the power over me she once did. I no longer have the expectation that she can save me from myself, and nurture me in all the ways I wasn’t nurtured. I no longer expect her to be my mother (or my father). I no longer expect her to save me. Which gracefully lets any real woman I’m standing with off the hook. She can relax, feeling in her body that I need nothing from her. Which, hilariously, often makes her want to give me what I wanted anyway—on Friday, after many years of not seeing or talking to Stephanie, I was able to fully relax with her, and she was open, loving, sweet, attentive, and all the things I always wanted her to be when we were together. It made me think that, all these years after the messiness, Stephanie and I could even be friends. Which is probably what we should have been to begin with.
Something clicked for me on my drive home that day. And I had to laugh at how much time and pain I could have saved myself and all the women I’ve loved if I had done this work years ago. But that’s the journey, right? It’s only with new awareness that we can look back on our former selves and say: Man, I would have done things differently if I could have. I’ve found that’s the mark of growth.
-Sean
HI Sean, tried to relate to my life and my current situation. It was a great post.
thank you
I could really relate and I truly enjoyed reading the article. Thanks. Well done!