When Love Goes Bad, and Why That’s Good

Part 4 of a 5-Part A Christian Counselor on Becoming Series

Fifty years after penning his classic allegorical tale, The Great Divorce, with its stark images of love (see Part 2), C.S. Lewis encountered a little competition from Hollywood’s big screen.

Compared to Lewis’s depiction, the 1996 cinematic release Jerry Maguire defined love in a way that was different – though hardly differentiated.

In the film, Tom Cruise plays an egomaniacal sports agent named “Jerry” who has a sudden crisis of conscience about his role in a “show me the money” culture. In bucking the industry responsible for his success, Jerry begins to align with his deeper, emerging core Self. The ensuing financial and professional fallout is a blow to his polished public image or persona.

Love’s Tragicomedy

There are genuine moments where Jerry’s brokenness awakens him to his core Self. However, much of the movie explores the conflict Jerry experiences as his weaker ego-self tries to reassert a persona of status and control, in sadly comical ways. Jerry is growing, but he still struggles with the need to impress or influence others in order to massage his “reflected sense of self” (see Parts 1-3.)

In one romantic scene, Jerry is tearfully reconciling with his girlfriend and former office assistant, “Dorothy” (played by Renee Zellweger). Professing his love, Jerry says, “You complete me.” (Followed by Dorothy’s famous line, “You had me at hello.”)

At which point, the global community of therapists covered its collective ear in dismay. Or, so I imagine. In my view, many therapists work in ways that actually encourage emotional entanglement, reducing relationships to what I call “soul-mate love.”

‘You Can’t Complete Me’

Psychiatrist and professor Roberta Gilbert makes a poignant observation about “completion” in relationships. It’s as if the film industry has found in her words a money-making script for Hollywood screenwriters to follow religiously:

Human beings will attempt to complete the self in relationships to the degree that it is incomplete by itself. At the same time, the others in their systems will also be aiming for self-completion. The effort to make a complete self out of two undifferentiated selfs results in a fusion of selves. 

In the same vein, Dr. David Schnarch, a psychologist and certified sex therapist, has coined a term that seems to describe Jerry’s and Dorothy’s need for self-other completion: “other-validated intimacy.”

Comply or Defy

Schnarch’s decades of exhaustive couples’ research spells out a commonly embraced myth in relationships: that intimacy primarily means meeting the other’s emotional needs. When a partner shares sensitive thoughts and feelings, Schnarch found, the other is expected to provide affirmation, and/or disclose in kind.

However, needing a partner’s validation to prop up your “reflected self” – a process Schnarch calls “borrowed functioning” – ultimately diminishes both people. It leads to a grid-locking emotional “fusion.” This dependency creates subtly rigid expectations for each partner to regulate his or her anxiety through the other.

Over time, Schnarch says, other-validated intimacy breaks down into a controlling, competing pressure for partners to either “comply” with or “defy” one another’s (often unspoken) demands. Schnarch also said:

Reciprocity is a beautiful thing. But if your relationship hinges on it, you’re in trouble.

The Good News In Love Gone Bad

The problem with other-validated intimacy, Schnarch says, is that it’s “time-limited.” Relationally and neurologically, it’s meant to support the infatuating, ego-stroking side of romance – but not to sustain a deeply connected, long-term relationship. Partners often get attached to being merely accepted and accommodated, rather than risking the vulnerability of being truly seen and known.

When other-validated intimacy inevitably expires, a beautifully tragic and organic thing happens:

Desire sours.

That’s right – shallow love goes bad. (And that’s good.)

Holding Self Before Other

Deeper intimacy doesn’t always feel good – and so frightened, undifferentiated partners may prematurely judge the pain. However, Schnarch believes that the naked honesty of allowing your partner to watch you undress yourself emotionally can be a daring (even erotic), Self-defining act. When you humbly own your raw humanity with no-strings-attached Self-affirmation, you become a stronger, more attractive person (to yourself first, but also to others).

Conflict and desire problems are meant to spur core-Self awakening, for the good of the relationship. Tapping into your Self-affirming, Self-regulating emotional core – especially when tension arises, Schnarch says – demonstrates a willingness to “hold onto yourself.”

Self-Affirmation Breaks the Gridlock

Such differentiated love isn’t dictated by your partner’s reactions. Rather, it’s marked by the courage to confront yourself – to catch yourself in the act of blaming your partner, and to see how you’re permitting him or her to provoke or hook you into predictable patterns.

(From the perspective of Gilbert and family-system theorists, partners get stuck unconsciously reliving childhood roles in order to resolve anxiety and feel “complete” the same way they did in their family of origin.)

Conflict is a powerful force for change – for developing Self-validating intimacy, Schnarch says. A partner may not respond kindly to your growth, simply because it positively interrupts your highly synchronized dysfunction as a couple. As Schnarch puts it,

Self-validated intimacy breaks the tyranny of lock-step reciprocity and stops the volleys of negative emotional reactivity.

When Completing Actually Works

Real intimacy doesn’t demand that each partner always experience it equally in the moment, Schnarch says. Another important aspect: The more differentiated the partners, the more they can also welcome other-validated intimacy – simply because they are not attached to it or trying to wring every last drop from it to feel okay.

In a sense, differentiated partners might even “complete” one another in moments. But it’s a whole different dialogue when the weak “reflected self” is muted by a core Self that’s speaking to and inspiring the best in another core Self.

The film characters Jerry and Dorothy – like the earthly versions of Frank and Sarah (in The Great Divorce) – were more often clinging to other-validated intimacy than holding onto Self and truly seeing the other.

Christian Counseling: Becoming a Whole Person

These couples may find it hard to trust the words of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:10. In Christ “you have been made complete,” Paul writes, a union that is sometimes translated as “brought to fullness.”

In Part 5, the final article in this series, we’ll see how core theological concepts like Trinitarian perichoresis and kenosis point to the differentiating work of Christian formation – becoming a distinct, separate-and-together “person” through refining relationship.

Christian counseling itself is a differentiating process that illuminates where and how a person is trying to validate and complete themselves through others in unfulfilling ways. If you contact me here, I would be glad to help you reframe conflict and desire problems as a catalyst for Self-defining change and more genuine relationship.