Idealization Is the Opposite of Love

There is a strange thing the culture has done with the word love. It has taught us, with great consistency across novels and films and songs and Instagram captions, that the deepest expression of love is to find another person magnificent — to see in them something close to perfection, to elevate them, to put them on a pedestal that says, in effect, you are unlike anyone else, you are everything I have been looking for, you are sublime.

This sounds like love. It is, on examination, something else. Alain de Botton, who has spent a long career thinking about how romantic culture misshapes the relationships of people who are trying to love each other, has argued for years that idealization is not the high form of love but its opposite. The pedestal is not a tribute. It is, gently, a failure to actually see the person standing on it.

This is a quieter argument than the dominant one, and it asks something more demanding of us than the romantic narrative does. The romantic narrative asks us to fall, to swoon, to elevate. De Botton’s argument asks us to look — to see the person as they actually are, in their full ordinary mortality, and to love that. Not the idea of them. Not the wished-for version. Them. This turns out to be much harder than the swooning version, and also, where it succeeds, much more like the thing the culture has been pointing at all along.

What idealization actually is

To idealize someone is to relate to a version of them that exists in your mind rather than to the person who exists in the world. The two versions overlap, usually significantly, especially early on. But the idealized version has been edited: the parts of the actual person that don’t fit the picture have been minimized or written out, and qualities the person doesn’t quite have have been imputed to them. The result is a composite — part real partner, part wished-for partner, presented to your own consciousness as if it were one coherent person.

This is not, mostly, a conscious choice. It happens automatically, especially under the influence of new attraction. The brain is doing a kind of inference: this person makes me feel a particular way, therefore they must be the kind of person who makes someone feel this way. The inference often outruns the available evidence. We assume their values match ours before we have actually tested them. We assume they understand us before they have shown that they do. We assume their flaws are minor or charming before we have lived with the flaws long enough to know.

The man in the grip of this is not lying about his partner. He is, in a way, lying about his own access to her. He is treating his early impressions as if they were the full picture, when in fact he has only seen the early chapters. The early chapters of any human being’s full presentation are, in almost every case, more flattering than the middle chapters. We have all developed, by adulthood, a social presentation that displays our best qualities first. The idealization is built on that presentation, not on the harder material that will, inevitably, surface later.

When the harder material surfaces — and it always surfaces, with anyone, if you stay long enough — the man who has been idealizing has two options. He can revise his picture of his partner downward, toward the actual person, which is uncomfortable but ultimately the path to real intimacy. Or he can experience the surfacing as a betrayal — she is not who I thought she was — and conclude that the relationship is failing, that he has chosen wrong, that the right person is presumably somewhere else, presumably matching the idealized picture still intact in his mind.

This is the trap. The picture in his mind is not, and never was, a real person. The disappointment he feels when his actual partner fails to match it is the disappointment of meeting an actual person where he had been expecting an imaginary one. The actual person was always going to disappoint the imaginary one. The imaginary one was constructed precisely to be unattainable.

How idealization makes love impossible

The reason de Botton calls idealization the opposite of love, rather than just a form of it that has gone slightly wrong, is structural. Real love requires the other person to actually be present as a real person — full, flawed, particular, irreducible to the simpler version you would prefer. To love someone is, in the older meanings of the word, to know them. The knowing is the love. The idealized version interferes with the knowing, because every time the actual person does something that doesn’t fit the picture, the man notices the mismatch and tries to manage it back toward the picture rather than letting his picture be updated by the person.

The partner senses this, almost always, even when she cannot name what is happening. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being with someone who is in love with an image of you rather than with you. The image-loved partner experiences a constant low-level pressure to be the image rather than the self — to perform the qualities the image has, to suppress the qualities the image does not have, to be the person her partner needs her to be in order to keep the idealization intact. Over years, this is exhausting and corrosive. The relationship is, in a literal sense, not happening between two actual people. It is happening between one actual person and one composite, with the actual person doing increasing labor to maintain the composite for her partner’s benefit.

It also produces a specific kind of disappointment when the idealization finally breaks. The man, having loved the image, now feels he has lost the woman. In fact, he never had her. He had the image. The actual woman was here the whole time, ready to be loved, partially obscured by the picture he was holding up in front of her. When the picture falls, what he discovers is not that she has become someone else but that he had never quite met her in the first place.

The cultural narrative that the right partner is the one who completes us is downstream of this same error. The right partner does not complete you, because no actual person can play the role the completion fantasy requires. The right partner is one you can come to know, over years, as a complete and ordinary human being, and whose ordinariness becomes, with time and care, more lovable than the idealized version ever was. This is not the romantic story. It is, on de Botton’s argument, the story love is actually trying to tell.

What love looks like instead

If idealization is not love, what is? De Botton’s answer is unsentimental and, in its way, deeply romantic. Love is a learned, sustained, deliberate practice of seeing another person as the full creature they are, with their actual histories and habits and limitations and graces, and choosing — repeatedly, over the long term — to remain in genuine relationship with that full creature. This is harder than the idealization version. It is also, where it succeeds, the thing the culture has been confusedly pointing at when it talks about real love.

What this looks like in practice has a few specific features.

It includes the difficult parts. The partner’s irritability when she is tired. The disagreements you can’t quite resolve. The histories she carries that are uncomfortable for you. The aspects of her personality that you would, if you could, prefer were slightly different. The love does not require these to disappear. It requires you to be in actual relationship with the person they are part of. The disappearance fantasy — that the right relationship would not contain these difficult parts — is the idealization in another form.

It is willing to be disappointed without making the disappointment fatal. Disappointment is inevitable in any sustained relationship with another full human being. The question is whether disappointment registers as data about a particular situation (this didn’t go well, we’ll talk about it, we’ll try again) or as evidence that the relationship itself is wrong (she’s not who I thought, this isn’t the right one). The idealizing posture turns every disappointment into the second. The realistic posture lets disappointment be what it is — a normal feature of love between two ordinary humans, neither catastrophic nor inadmissible.

It updates its picture continually. The partner you knew at twenty-five is not the partner you have at forty. She has lived a decade and a half. She has changed. The man who has kept loving his partner well across those years has been quietly updating his picture of her the whole time, letting the picture stay current with the actual person. The man who is still loving the twenty-five-year-old version is not actually loving the person who is in his life now. The work of marriage is partly this — the deliberate, ongoing practice of meeting the person who is actually in front of you, not the one you fell for fifteen years ago.

It includes the recognition that the same is true of you. The partner is also seeing you imperfectly. She is also forming pictures that don’t quite match. The mutuality of imperfect seeing is part of what makes love work — it is, among other things, the agreement that we will both keep trying to see each other more accurately, and that we will forgive each other for the inevitable failures of perception that the trying involves.

It survives the actual person. This is the test. The man who loves only the version of his partner that matches the picture loses her every time she shows him something the picture didn’t include. The man who loves her remains in love when she becomes more particular over time. The first kind of love evaporates. The second kind deepens.

Why this is harder to do than it looks

It is worth being honest about why so much of what we call love is, in fact, idealization. The honest reason is that idealization is easier. It does not require us to do the hard work of actually getting to know another person, including the parts that are difficult to know. It does not require us to update our picture of them. It does not ask us to tolerate the disappointment that comes from learning that the person we love is not, in fact, the one we imagined.

There is also a deeper reason. The idealized partner serves a function in the inner life of the man who is doing the idealizing. The image, being constructed in part by his own needs, often holds qualities he himself has not yet developed. He is, in effect, externalizing parts of his own unfinished work onto her: she is the one who will bring him calm, or order, or wildness, or whatever is missing from his own development. As long as she is being asked to be these things for him, he doesn’t have to develop them in himself.

This is one of the harder pieces of the work. To love a real person — not an image — requires giving up the unconscious arrangement in which she was going to complete you. It requires recognizing that the things you have been waiting for her to provide are, mostly, your own work to do. Outcome independence is part of this. So is the slow process of becoming whole in yourself rather than expecting another person to fill the parts of you that are missing. The relationship gets the air it needs once it is no longer being asked to do work it cannot do.

Coming back from idealization

For the man who recognizes himself in this — and most men, examined honestly, will recognize at least some of themselves — the move is not to feel ashamed about the idealizing. The idealizing is normal. It is what the culture trained us to do. The move is to begin, slowly, to update.

This looks like asking yourself, with some honesty, what your actual partner is actually like. Not the picture you have been holding. Her. What does she actually believe? What does she actually want? What does she actually struggle with? What does she actually love? You may be surprised how much of this you do not exactly know, even after years of being with her. The idealized picture has been standing between you and the answer.

It also looks like beginning to receive what she shows you, including the parts that don’t fit your picture. Her tiredness, her bad moods, her contradictions, the ways she fails you, the ways she is unlike the partner of the romantic narrative. These are not interruptions to the love. They are the love’s actual material. The relationship with her real self is, when you can manage it, the relationship that lasts.

And it looks like recognizing that the experience of being with her, in her ordinariness, is not a downgrade from the early days of mutual idealization. It is the harder, slower, deeper version of what the early days were trying to be. The idealized phase was a kind of beginning. The seeing-her-fully phase is the actual relationship. Many men miss this entirely. They keep chasing the idealization, in this partner or in successive ones, and never arrive at the place where love is actually waiting for them: the long, patient, careful knowing of one particular ordinary person over time.

She is right there. She has always been right there. The work is not to find someone more impressive. The work is to see, with finally accurate eyes, the impressive ordinary creature who has been in your life, often for years, waiting to be actually met. That meeting — not the swooning, not the pedestal — is what love has been pointing at all along.