Romance is Weird

When I think of romantic relationships, I think of three things:

1. Sexual attraction
2. Friendship/companionship
3. A romantic spark

Sexual attraction is easy to explain: we evolved to make more of ourselves. Friendship/companionship is also easy to explain: human beings can achieve more working together than we can on our own.

But what of romance? What makes a romantic relationship different from a friendship? Sexual attraction? But then what makes a casual sexual relationship different from a romantic relationship? No matter how we do the analysis, romance isolates itself as a 3rd element, separate from both friendship and sexual attraction.

In order to understand romance we have to go way back, all the way to the day you were born. This was the day you formed your first ever emotional attachment to another human being, who I will refer to abstractly in this post as “the parent.” Through this emotional attachment, you learned something beautiful: other people can meet your needs.

At first, the parent was a god figure for you. The fulfillment of your physical and emotional needs was entirely in their hands, giving them ultimate power over you. As you grew, however, you learned ways to fulfill your needs without them. Rather than being force-fed milk through a bottle, you could get yourself a glass of water all on your own. Rather than being snuggled and comforted emotionally, you could self-soothe by taking a warm bath or wolfing down a snickers. If you’re like most people, you went from “my mom is the best mom ever and my dad is a superhero!” to “my parents are cool people” to “my parents are… people.”

Losing the god-image you originally had of the parent was empowering and sorrowful, all at once. It allowed you to become a real person who could make a real impact on the world. It also drilled into your head a fundamental truth of the world: no one is coming to save you.

But what if someone is coming to save you?

Enter romance. When you grow up, you realize that no one can meet all of your needs for you, and that the god-image you had of the parent was a lie. The implicit promise of romance, however, is that this god-image is real, that someone really can meet all of your needs.

You see, I don’t think the god-image you have of the parent completely disappears when you grow into your own person. I think it remains dormant, waiting for something to latch onto. I think a part of us, however small and suppressed, maintains secret hope that there’s someone out there who will meet all of our needs. Former therapist Daniel Mackler calls this the “parental rescue fantasy.”¹

Romance is intoxicating because it taps into this small and suppressed part of us that hasn’t seen the light in years. Romance makes us believe our partner can be all the things our parents failed to be: endlessly loving, caring, nurturing, and identificatorily fused.

Hell, remove the “r” and “partner” becomes a perfect anagram of “parent.”²

These ideas may sound Freudian and far-fetched, but there’s evidence to back them up.³ People tend to be more romantically attracted to people who remind them of their parents,⁴ and to choose partners with similar attachment styles to their parents.⁵ This makes sense — our parents teach us how to love, and what it means to be loved, so its logical we’re drawn to people who fit with what we’ve learned. The brain circuitry that bonds romantic partners is also nearly identical to the brain circuitry that bonds child to parent.⁶

Also, incest porn is really popular. Just throwing that out there.

This doesn’t mean that the goofy stuff Freud said is completely right, or that romantic relationships are just people pretending to be each other’s parents. It just means that our early relationship with the parent forms a blueprint in our minds that we use to navigate the world, including the romantic world. Being aware of this helps us be better people. It helps us stop projecting an infantile god-image onto our partners — an image they will never live up to — and stop expecting them to meet all of our needs.

It is only when we clear our eyes of false visions and see our partners for who they really are that we can truly love them. No one can meet all of your needs, but deep human connection remains possible, and may be the most meaningful thing humans can do.

Endnotes:

1. See Mackler, D. (2023, August 20). Parental rescue fantasy: exploration of the psychological concept. Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.
2. The missing “r” is of course romance.
3. There are alternative explanations of this data, such as the simple fact that we tend to prefer the familiar over the unfamiliar. I’m happy to discuss these alternative explanations in the comments.
4. Perrett, D., Penton-Voak, I. S., Little, A. C., Tiddeman, B. P., Burt, D. M., Schmidt, N., Oxley, R., Kinloch, N., & Barrett, L. (2002). Facial attractiveness judgements reflect learning of parental age characteristics. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 269(1494), 873–880. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2002.1971
5. Ni, P. (2019, March 10). Do people choose romantic partners similar to their parent? Psychology Today.
6. See Panksepp, J. (2014). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.