The person to whom you entrusted your soul, to whom you threw it wide open, believing them to be the closest of all, turns out to be just as ordinary a mortal as the rest of us.

They are afraid of something, they need something, and in turn they project onto you the heavy burden of their own expectations.

Any close relationship is a hard burden to carry, because each of us tries to find in it that Significant Other which a parent once was.

Of course, it never even crosses our minds that our partner will be our parent. We spent so much energy on finally separating from our father and mother.

And yet the beloved becomes that very Significant Other onto whom we project the same needs and the same psychodynamics as we did onto our parents – precisely to the degree that we remain unconscious.

When the biblical sages insisted that in marrying one should leave one’s father and mother, they may not have imagined how hard that would be to do.

And so we can only partly part with the expectations of care, support and healing that a person projects onto the Significant Other.

The contradiction between the secret hope and everyday reality, as one crosses the Middle Passage, brings a person a feeling of intense pain.

“The Middle Passage”,

James Hollis