Love versus Compatibility
Whether a couple who feel they're in love will prove to be compatible in the long run always depends on how they work out their struggle for autonomy and intimacy. How to be true to one's self and yet remain close to the other in a passionate, caring relationship is often not easy or clear. When couples get frustrated, angry and confused and begin to doubt if they can ever live together, the conflict almost always results from the feeling that one's own interests and goals are totally contrary to the other's and that sharing is impossible. But underlying the surface conflict there's always a deeper, hidden story for each lover that's extremely hard and often impossible to face. If the powerful emotions around these unconscious stories are not fully worked through in the present, (often with the assistance of relationship counseling), a couple's odds of achieving intimacy and compatibility are greatly reduced. The lovers get hopelessly mired in the struggle to move from the "me" to the "we" in the present.
Here's a painful example of a couple with marital problems who turned out to be incompatible.
Tom and Donna
When they first started paying attention to one another, Tom and Donna felt this strange attraction, even though they had totally different interests and values. Tom is a lawyer, keenly interested in politics who reads a great deal, likes to see plays and has a strong taste for dramatic satire. Donna is a high school teacher who doesn't particularly enjoy reading, spends long summer vacations traveling to countries she's never been to before, adores going to discos and loves to give parties. At first it was easy for Tom and Donna to ignore these differences. But a few months after they started living together they came to the surface. Tom grew increasingly impatient with Donna, was critical and dismissive of her opinions and generally made her feel, if not downright stupid, barely intelligent or knowledgeable enough to share any of his interests. On her end, Donna had a peculiar knack for making Tom feel like an odd ball whenever they were with her friends at parties or on other occasions. Tom who had no friends of his own always felt out of place among Donna's friends. He knew they didn't like him and suspected they frequently criticized Donna for getting involved with a weirdo like him to begin with. As the months passed, Tom and Donna started having long, bitter fights in which Tom would criticize Donna unrelentingly until she'd walk away from him in disgust. Sometimes it got violent. Late one night Donna came home drunk, yanked Tom out of a sound sleep and started punching him. He grabbed her by the arms, pushed her down on the bed and rushed out to the living room to get away from her. It finally ended when Tom came home from work one day to find an empty apartment, except for a few pieces of furniture he'd brought with him when they first moved in together.
After they separated, Tom and Donna tried couples therapy but it lasted for only three sessions. In the last session Donna simply announced she wasn't coming back because she didn't feel motivated to try to save the relationship. After that Tom continued by himself for a few more sessions before he gave up. In his last session he recalled how strange it felt when he first got emotionally involved with Donna. "It was right after I'd finished law school. We'd always been strangers all through college, passing one another in the distance. I mean we knew each other casually but never became friends or dated. Whenever we crossed paths at parties, I remember Donna playing the wild party girl, coming on to guys, while I usually drank some wine, talked to some people and danced a little. More often than not I'd wind up leaving early. One night as I was leaving, I saw Donna coming onto this guy, kissing him as she unzipped his pants and pulled him into a bedroom. I remember feeling humiliated as I pretended not to see them, thinking I'd be way out of my league with a girl like Donna. That's why I was amazed a short time later when she came onto me at another party, right out of nowhere. I was flirting with this girl who was about to leave for Europe when Donna suddenly comes over and asks me to dance. Afterward we talked for what seemed like hours, drank a lot of wine and she invited me back to her apartment. I remember it all happened so casually but at the same time I knew I was getting caught up in something strange, and irresistible. After we had sex, Donna laughed and told me I had the cutest ass. I knew I hadn't been very good. We were both pretty smashed. But there was something in her voice that encouraged me, something I'd never felt with any of the other women I'd been with. A few weeks later we found an apartment. A month after that we got married. It didn't take long for things to go down hill. I remember growing more detached, more emotionally distant from her the longer we lived together, as if I was hiding, not only from her, but everybody. Now that she's gone I can't shake this feeling that she tried very hard with me but couldn't get through. Sometimes I play an old Joni Mitchell song, Blue Boy over and over again. The lyrics always make me cry."
Lady called the blue boy, love
She took him home
Made himself an idol, yes
So he turned to stone
Like a pilgrim she travelled
To place her flowers
Before his granite grace
And she prayed aloud for love
To waken in his face
In his face, oh ~~~~~
Sometimes in the evening
He would read to her
Roll her in his arms
And give his seed to her
She would wake in the morning
Without him
And go the window
And look out through the pain
But the statue in her garden
He always looked the same
He looked the same, oh ~~~~~
Bring her boots of leather
She will dance for him
Shyly from a feather fan
She'll glance for him
Here he comes after midnight
To find her again
He will come a few times more
Till he finds a lady statue
Standing in a door
In her door, oh ~~~~~
In the short time Tom and Donna spent in relationship therapy, I learned that underneath there surface differences, they were both deeply wounded people. Tom was raised by an abusive, single mother who'd been jilted by his father, a married man whom Tom had met only once before he died and who never openly acknowledged Tom as his son. Tom's mother was an emotionally fragile woman who vented her rage on him, criticizing and humiliating him every chance she got from the time he was child until his late teens when he joined the army and volunteered for the paratroopers, a decision I described to him as literally, jumping to safety. After he was discharged from the army, Tom enrolled in college, got student loans and tried to forget his tortured childhood. But he was never able to shake a deeply ingrained feeling that he was unlovable, accompanied by a fear bordering on terror whenever any woman ever tried to get close to him.
Donna was also raised by a harsh, overly critical mother who made her feel she was neither as pretty as her sister nor as smart as brother. Like Tom, she was an illegitimate child who never knew her real father, the unintended consequence of an affair her mother had years earlier when she'd almost left Donna's stepfather. No matter how hard he went through the motions, Donna's stepfather never made her feel he loved her as much as her sister or brother. Between her mother's harshness and underlying shame about her unwanted birth and her stepfather's indifference, Donna also grew up never feeling wanted. And like Tom she was never able to shake the feeling of being unlovable as an adult.
With these devastating childhood experiences still seething deep inside them, what Tom and Donna did in their present relationship was to repeat the earlier experiences unconsciously in a particularly harmful way which psychoanalysts call projective identification.
On Tom's side, the projective identification got played out like this: By criticizing Donna unrelentingly, implying she was stupid and unsophisticated, he made her feel worthless, just as his mother had once made him feel. And Tom's unconscious acting out slowly, gradually became a way for him to set Donna up to finally abandon him, as his father had done to him.
On Donna's side, the projective identification got played out in the following way: By surrounding Tom with her own friends who had nothing in common with him and whom she knew didn't like him, she unconsciously encouraged Tom to feel like a hopeless misfit who never fit in, exactly the way she'd been made to feel by her mother and father.
If we look at Tom and Donna in terms of their capacities for autonomy and intimacy, we see that their childhood wounds caused them both to place an extremely high value on independence and autonomy as their chief means of survival. It was incredibly difficult for either of them to imagine, let alone feel, the pleasure to be had from emotional intimacy with another person. Sadly for both Tom and Donna, they couldn't have chosen worse partners to try to be close to.
Finally, if we compare Tom and Donna with Rick and Sara, Bill and Carrie and John and Laura on the Genograms page, it becomes a lot clearer why each of these latter couples, with some relationship help, has a relatively greater chance of successfully moving from the lonely, isolated "me" to an intimate, more fulfilling "we" in their present relationships.