An Argument With Someone Who Isn’t There

A Brief Reflection

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil; Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes

I’m a fan of re-reading certain authors. I find that in the first encounter, I’m often so overwhelmed with the themes and novel ideas that I miss the smaller, more subtle nuggets of wisdom I pick up on return. Nietzsche is absolutely an author who merits a re-reading or two. And sure enough: “One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.” I took this seriously for a moment and found I had some thoughts.

To our detriment, we idealise the people we’re with. We even idealise how they mentally represent us (how we imagine they perceive us). Based on what we know, what we observe, and then, fatally, what we desire, we create imperfect fantastical psychic representations of who they are. And they do the same. Often, when we come into conflict with our ‘person’, we are not really even in direct conflict with their authentic being (with them); we are interpreting and responding to our representations of them, and they, in turn, are responding to their representations of us. We are rarely reacting from an objective perception of the objective reality in front of us. Even in more or less healthy relationships, we begin to confuse our fantasies and representations of the individual’s being with what their actual internal reality is.

When I buy a new outfit, I look forward to showing my husband, and I prematurely relish in his awe at my exquisite taste before I ever consider that he, in fact, has eyes and a mind of his own capable of evaluating aesthetic taste for himself. I don’t consider for a moment the possibility that he may not like my outfit because the fantastic version of him I have mentally developed loves it without question. Therefore, when I wear the outfit and detect a flicker of disapproval in the arching of an eyebrow, I am devastated and betrayed. ‘He is not who I thought he was’ (literally). In reality, he did not betray me; he simply did not precisely conform to my mental representation of him. Disappointment is the cost of faulty expectations.

We cannot encounter another person directly in their interiority. That is the fundamental problem. We encounter them through inference, memory, projection, and hope. What feels even more dangerous is that the representation of the other can become entwined with the representation of the self (this is common in individuals with an anxious attachment style). How we imagine we are seen by them (desired, interesting, attractive, admired) can stabilise our identity and self-perception. The partner functions as a psychic mirror that we have partially designed ourselves. When that mirror reflects back something unflattering or unfamiliar, it is not only the image of them that falters, but something of the sense of self that relied on it does too. The partner’s independent perception is experienced as an act of aggression, even when no harm was intended. Their autonomy feels like abandonment.

There is something so unromantic about it, and yet it is the condition under which love becomes real. Not the elimination of fantasy, but maybe the mourning of it, and at the very least an awareness of it. Loving my husband means to consent, again and again and again, to the rude awakenings that come with his otherness. It’s jarring to allow him his private interior world, his tastes, his moods, his perceptions that do not reliably orbit my needs. But if I manage it, I make room for a stranger who is much more complex, less compliant, and infinitely more alive.

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