Taught from a very young age,

Through the indoctrination of Disney princesses,

That the path to love is to follow one’s heart.

Stop thinking and analyzing so much.

Follow your gut.

The way that we know how to love, however, depends on our early childhood.

The experiences we have growing up will not only be ones of tenderness and caring but will also be fraught with being let down, embarrassed, shamed, made to feel small, and, of course…abused.

Our ideas about love are bound together with suffering.

Have you ever gone on a date with a nice person?

A really nice, respectful person that your friends think will be good for you?

But something’s just not right for us.

We reject them for they will not be able to make us suffer in the ways that we need to suffer in order for us to feel that love is real.

We’re not on a quest to be happy;

We are on a quest to suffer in ways that feel familiar.

One might say “I married my mother.”

Perhaps their spouse is critical like their mother.

One subconsciously chooses a partner who wounds them in the same way their mother did.

But why?

Through repeating the past and trying to change their wife, they are trying to change the relationship that at one time existed between their child-self and their mother.

The concept that individuals might unconsciously seek partners who resemble their opposite-sex parents is often referred to as "marrying your parents".

It comes from Freudian psychoanalytic theory, specifically in the Oedipus and Electra complexes.

Freud proposed that young boys go through an Oedipus complex during their psychosexual development.

In this stage, a boy experiences feelings of desire for his mother and jealousy toward his father.

For girls, Freud introduced the Electra complex, where girls experience feelings of desire for their father and jealousy toward their mother.

How unclassy it would be to vilify any one contributor to psychology, even one who draws universal conclusions for humanity based on their own penis tingling.

We move on.

So I’m going to marry my father.

That’s quite bad news for me because my dad has a clinical disorder called garbage human syndrome.

He was once a normal human, or so I am told, but something happened to him in his life to make him regress to a state of pure garbage.

Psychodynamic theory’s guess that I will marry my father has always miffed me because I can’t feel any part of me trying to seek out any part of him.

We jump now to early 2023.

I’ve just begun graduate school for counseling.

In my theories class, we begin to learn about object relations theory.

Within this theory, Melanie Klein rescues us from Freud’s penis.

She, for the most part, removes the factor of gender from Freud’s earlier theories.

This theory asserts that “objects” merely refers to people with whom we share an emotional investment.

We develop internal representations of these people to serve as a template for what we need from relationships in the future.

And then, it hit me.

I am not seeking out my father in my partners; I am seeking out my mother.

When I think of my mother, despite her many flaws, one of which is loyalty to a garbage human…

When I think of my relationship with my mom growing up, I feel like I’m in a tight hug that I don’t want to end.

I feel safe.

I feel accepted.

I feel best friend energy.

I should clarify that my mom is not dead, but we don’t have the special closeness that I felt in childhood, mostly because I avoid the garbage human that she lives with.

That’s the flip side of the object relations coin when dating my mother, fearing disloyalty and betrayal.

It’s complicated and imperfect, and isn’t it always?

We go out into the world and seek partners that will make us happy.

You may marry your father, or you may marry your mother.

The coziness of familiarity bound up with the corresponding nostalgia of torture.

Clementine was into all that stuff. The crystals and the oils. The tarot readings and the energy healing. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d also find myself deferring to nonsense for the answers to my pain, I’d have told you to check your tea leaves again. It’s astounding what we’ll convince ourselves of just to feel better. 

Although Clem’s passing wasn’t unexpected, I still felt shock when she died. I didn’t say so, but I was sure a miracle was coming. For all the talking to angels that she had done, I was sure that one of them would pull some strings. It’s astounding what we’ll convince ourselves of just to feel better.