Why We Turn Into Children in Relationships (And Expect a Fairy Tale)

Unfortunate, but in relationships we are expected to solve problems in adult ways. Partners clash over such mature issues as financial priorities, division of chores, parenting disagreements, mismatched expectations for the future, and more. Addressing these maturely would mean talking through them together. Yet, we all know that many couples’ conflicts go unresolved for months, even years, eventually growing into resentment. So why don’t we act like functional adults and address conflicts constructively, the way grown-ups are supposed to?

The answer: we regress in love relationships and tend to behave like children.

Non-Verbal Ways of Communication

Early in life, we communicate with caregivers - mostly parents - through nonverbal patterns. Toddlers and small children lack the words to express themselves, so they rely on emotions. Screaming becomes their go-to method to signal distress, whether they’re hungry, sleepy, or need a fresh diaper. Toddlers operate in a preverbal, impatient way, yet their messaging to parents or caretakers is crystal clear.

Sounds familiar? To me it certainly does. Many couples communicate the same way. When one partner wants something from the other, whether it’s a change in behavior or a specific action, they often want it immediately. And if that doesn’t happen? Righteous indignation flares up (or at least, it feels justified in the moment). This explains why partners so often yell, raise their voices, and accompany their dialogue with anger and rage, as if the words fail them. It’s a childish stencil of behavior, a regression to early relational patterns.

Fantasies

In adult relationships, we’re driven by the same core desire as in childhood: we want to be loved. And we carry fantasies about how that love should look - fantasies shaped by either imitation or rejection of our parents’ traits.

Take a husband who imagines an “ideal wife” as gentle, sweet, and endlessly patient. In reality, his wife is more direct and less tolerant of nonsense. If you ask him whether any woman in his life ever matched his fantasy, he’d draw a blank. Dig deeper, and he'll describe his mother or grandmother as stern, domineering women who ruled over a passive father. His fantasy isn’t based on reality but on counter-identification - a rejection of what he grew up with.

Now consider a wife who pictures her “ideal husband” as financially stable, reliable, who stoically keeps his emotional reactions under control at all times, because “real men don’t weep.” Yet her actual husband is sensitive and prone to anxiety. Ask her who this fantasy resembles, and she’ll say, “My father.” She idolizes him, he’s her best friend, her perfect man. They go to the cinema, restaurants and spend a lot of time together. He’s the most reliable man in her life. Here, the fantasy is a direct parent-image, an attempt to recreate a beloved dynamic.

In both cases, partners will grow disillusioned and angry with one another when their fantasies do not actualize in the partner.

Projection

To save themselves from disillusionment many couples employ the mechanism of projection. They subconsciously project their fantasies onto their partners, refusing to accept any other behavior. "If only my husband or wife see things my way, they’d be perfect for me!"

For instance, one partner thinks that once they separate from someone in a love relationship, further contact is taboo, while the other partner holds a different value, that of befriending and keeping exes in their life, and vehemently defends it. This can lead to a lasting confrontation because both partners project their values onto one another and expect the other to behave in a certain way and agree with them.

Take a partner whose parents never took proper responsibility and didn’t keep their promises to the child. Now, the person wants their spouse to always, in any circumstances, keep all promises and blames the partner, becoming angry with them if it doesn’t happen for some reason. Here is the projection of the perfect parent image.

Whatever we lacked from our parents, we try hard to get from our partners, even if it means fantasizing, projecting, and defying the reality of them being unable to give it to us. In some sense, we believe in magic and are angry when it doesn’t happen.

Fairy Tales

According to Bettelheim (1), fairy tales help the child "fit unconscious content into conscious fantasies", that is making the impossible feel real. They're also tools to cope with "unconscious pressures," as kids identify with the story-telling. In a fairy tale everything is possible and anything goes, often in contradiction to reality. Through a fairy tale the child seeks to master the world and almost every fairy tale has a strong motif of magic. Invisible hats, flying carpets, cure-all potions, swords of invulnerability change the world with a flick of the fingers. Just like our inner child seeks to master the relationship and be loved, understood and accepted unconditionally, and expects the other party to quickly and magically change themselves according to our preference.

By means of a fairy tale the child projects his or her hero-like qualities onto the protagonist who defeats the evil, the antagonist. Believe it or not, the love relationship is often subconsciously perceived by us in exactly the same way, especially when we disagree and argue with our partners. We are the "good side" - the fairy or a hero - and the partner is the "bad side" - the dragon, the evil queen, the cruel king. We are on the right side and need to be agreed with, and the partner's point of view should be defeated by unconditionally accepting our "correctness" and following through.

It is not accidental that most fairy tales end in marriage. And a relationship, either finding a mate or overcoming difficulties for the sake of one, is a central motif in them.

A relationship is a bit of a fairy tale, as we want our significant other to be our savior and to help us live out the fantasy of perfect love and happily ever-after. That's why we find it hard to be disappointed in our partners. It means the demise of the fairy tale which we've written.

Conclusion

In a relationship we regress, and employ childlike mechanisms of how we expect our partner to be, likening it to a fairy tale. This regress is inevitable, but once we understand that it happens and is accompanied by projections, fantasies and concomitant emotions such as anger, indignation and disappointment when magic doesn't occur, we can be more conscious about them and deal with them better. The end of the fairy tale does not mean the end of the relationship; on the opposite, it opens new realistic ways of being with one another - not with the fantasy about one another. Couples therapy helps identify and address regress, as well as setting the fantasy apart from reality and accepting and loving the partner for who they really are, not for who they could magically become.

Bibliography:

1. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
2. Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital tensions: Clinical studies towards a psychological theory of interaction. Karnac Books. (Original work published 1967, reprinted 1993).
3. Schwartz, E. K. (1956). A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fairy Tale. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 10(4), 740–762.

Published by author on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships-and-emotional-intelligence/202506/understanding-our-inner