Miserable soulmates

A miserable couple can be soulmates, and may be best off staying together ’til death parts them.

This is a simple, rough-hewn explanation without much of the tedious depth psychology. A lifelong depressed man will have low (or no) self-esteem, will be poorly- or unmotivated, will probably “not know who I am.” As depression typically is planted in early childhood (the child’s organic feeling self begins to be submerged beneath anxiety and parents’ imperatives), he will probably still be childlike in his adulthood, at a deep quiet level.

He would feel pressured to be more than, other than he is by the presence of an emotionally healthy, psycho-developed woman, especially one with some passions. She would cause him to feel inferior, or like someone who never even reached the starting gate of life.

And he would feel bad, strangely enough, to be selflessly loved by a healthy woman who was indeed focused on him, not on her own life. From childhood on, he had to grow a wall separating him from his feeling of being unloved and invisible, and he has lived outside that wall. A partner who caringly wanted to know him, his real self, would feel excruciating. “I can’t go there! It is an emptiness on fire.”

An adult, he would need what he will call love, but it cannot press beneath his dissociation (which is one of the rudiments of depression). It cannot demand that he feel powerfully, especially feel deep love back: He is too needy to give, and he will not have the supplies. So his partner must herself be depressed at some level, self-enclosed, disengaged, not demonstrably needy. He needs to be able to wish, get something but not too much from her, give a little something, but mostly be allowed to live in the numb comfort of his cocoon.

Finally, he would need to know all this, otherwise he will fool himself into thinking he’d be happier with a “better” (sexier, younger, smarter, richer, prettier) woman. He will be wrong, though people are so good at micro-mixing their chemistry that he may think bad feels good. He will need lower and smarter expectations.

He may even know enough to say: “It’s not that I don’t know myself. It’s that there isn’t a self to know.”

Soulmates!