Not everything is about you...and that is wonderful

What happens when the other person steps outside the script we imagined and shows us something we did not expect to see?

In this article

·    Why falling in love resembles a trailer

·    What happens when reality appears

·    How narcissism prevents us from encountering the other

·    Why loving someone requires us to sustain difference

In every person, there is something that can never be fully known. Something that escapes the codes, expectations and images we construct. It is the foreign within us, that which we sometimes fail to recognise, recognise again, lose sight of and encounter once more. My research explores this foreignness. The foreigner as someone who migrates and inhabits a border, but also that which, within each subject, never feels entirely familiar. Not as a difference that must be eliminated, but as one that can expand the boundaries of who we are and of a culture. This question does not arise only when we change countries or languages. It is present whenever we encounter someone who does not correspond entirely to what we had imagined. Perhaps this is precisely why falling in love can be such an intense experience.

Falling in love and the trailer we imagine

Part of falling in love is the certainty that we see and are being seen. Two people look at each other, enchanted by what they find and intoxicated by everything they would also like to find. Falling in love resembles a spectacular trailer, assembled from the best scenes of a story that promises to become the great love story. The problem is that the film has not yet been made. It will be built. Moving beyond the ideals of romantic passion, in a society that struggles to sustain difference and continually inflates our narcissism, makes this construction increasingly difficult.

What happens when the other person leaves the script

At some point, something of the other person's reality appears. The cut can be brutal. The director shouts, the scene stops, one of the actors has done something outside the script. Nothing necessarily extraordinary has happened. Perhaps they have simply brought something more human into the scene, improvised or allowed more of themselves to appear. It is at this moment that the relationship asks whether we can sustain reality. Can the reality that pierces the trailer and dissolves part of the illusion still be good? Is it worth continuing? Can we truly look at one another, or was it more pleasurable to remain within our projections? Eventually, it becomes unavoidable: reality pierces the image. This is when many people choose to produce new trailers rather than face the work of building a film. Today, we readily believe that everything is about us. If the other person reveals something we do not like, it is quickly called a trigger, a red flag or something we should not have to tolerate. There is a horror of what is ugly, of what interrupts the image, of what cannot pass through the filter. We want the other person to continue reflecting exactly what we hoped to see. This does not mean emptying traumatic experiences, triggers or genuine signs of violence of their meaning. We need to learn how to distinguish what represents a real risk from what merely disrupts an idealisation. To do that, we need a less deluded view of ourselves.

Looking at what is difficult within us

It is essential that we learn to look upon our difficult parts, our capacity for violence, our shadows and our scars with some tenderness. They are part of our histories and also part of what we can still transform, without punishment and without hiding. In a world of filters and carefully constructed images, the marks that make us subjects are increasingly concealed. But what is real, what gives us substance and what can build a bond must be allowed to survive the image. When someone cannot accept themselves as a whole, their only possibility is to relate through fragments of themselves. Perhaps this is also why so many relationships never make it beyond the first five minutes of the film. This is where ghosting and other forms of emotional violence emerge, ways of ending a bond without fully considering the existence of the other person. It becomes easier to leave the scene carrying wounds and leaving wounds behind than to appear as someone whole and real. The fear of exposure is so great that a blasé attitude can turn any attempt to speak about oneself into excess. Responding with anger becomes a loss of control. Writing at length becomes dramatic. Showing emotion becomes a lack of restraint. It may be all of those things, but it may also be something else.

Not everything is about you and that is wonderful

When we manage to soften the sharp edges of our narcissism, we discover that not everything is about us. And that is wonderful. There is freedom in no longer needing to hide so much of ourselves in order to preserve an image. Beauty and ugliness are far greater than what any one person is able to see. When we understand that we cannot control what another person perceives, we can receive what they touch within us with greater openness, speak more clearly about what we do or do not recognise in ourselves and look at ourselves with greater modesty. Discovering that we are not the centre of the world allows us to grow. This passage may have been less difficult in other times, when culture did not so insistently reinforce the idea that everything should confirm our preferences, our certainties and our own image.

To love is to sustain reality

This is why growing up has become so essential today. The possibility of maturing, of limiting our own narcissism and finding freedom in doing so is what allows us, as a society, to love. Without this passage, we remain like infatuated children, oscillating between passion and anger. Love is the feeling that sustains reality. It allows us to live with contradiction and to sustain difference. It is possible to hate while loving, to feel frustrated while loving and to be disappointed while loving. What we cannot do is accept only love within love and only hatred within hatred. When everything must be pure, coherent and immediately recognisable, no real subject can exist. Perhaps looking more tenderly at what is real within ourselves is what allows us to be fairer to the reality that appears around us. The other begins precisely where what we imagined about them comes to an end.