Partners Who Punish You for Loving Them

We might think that what everyone longs for is love, and that the natural response to being loved would be gratitude. But the reality of relationships is a good deal more complex. For some of us, love is as terrifying in practice as it is desirable in the abstract – and our chief response to being loved may not be kindness and welcome but, strangely and yet with dark logic, cruelty.

Stated simply: certain people who were harshly treated in childhood (a not inconsiderable portion of the population) will – when deep love is offered to them – begin to treat their partner in many of the ways they were once treated by their early caregivers: with the same uncertainty and contempt, coldness and sadism. Their responses become a palimpsest, in which they can read an account of the most painful parts of their own childhood – except that now the partner is the victim, and they have become the perpetrators.

If we were in a relationship with such a person, they might show up early on in the relationship full of good qualities. They would be warm, notice tender things about us, disarm our defences and invite in our childhood needs. But then, just as we were falling in love, something within them that they have barely grasped would be activated. They would stop turning up on time. They would leave our messages unanswered. They would cease asking us about our lives. They would discover friends they needed to spend a lot of time with. Work would demand everything of them. At worst, they would begin to flirt with others. If we complained, they would become stern. They would accuse us of imagining problems and of being ‘needy’. They would say we were ‘too much’. Having created emotional havoc, they would step back and coldly wonder why we couldn’t be more stable.

What might be at play? Unbeknownst to us – and usually to them – our beloved is walking the world with a set of deep-seated and extremely difficult suspicions about relationships, shaped by what happened to them in their family of origin before the age of ten. The suspicion that vulnerability (theirs and their partner’s) is, in essence, disgusting. That to show need is repulsive. That people are unreliable and will invariably leave you for someone else (it may have been their sibling). That a hunger for love is shameful. That others don’t have their real interests at heart. That they are unworthy and intolerable in their full reality.

The partner sees in us what they once had to kill off in themselves to make it to adulthood: the same nakedness, hunger and defencelessness. We are now the weaklings they were once accused of being. And they inadvertently defend themselves against the echo of their fragility by showing us the same sternness, unreliability and coldness that their parental figures once deemed good for them. They take us through – in compressed form – everything they had to endure over their first ten years: feeling like they are too much, not as interesting as someone else, unwanted. Our need summons up their buried longings – to which they respond with brutality.

If we make a simple list of everything they now make us feel, and then do the same for what their parents once made them feel, we’re likely find an almost identical list of adjectives.

There is generally no way to signal to our formally kind and generous partner that they have become what we might call sadistic. If it were that easy for them to see, they wouldn’t need to act out the issue.

We may simply have to escape. Which may not be easy, because we have probably also been seduced into imagining (as they once had to imagine, as children) that we deserve the ill-treatment we are being accorded. As we fight for our lives, we need to keep powerfully reminding ourselves of what should always be plain common-sense: that true love never involves inflicting pain. That true love is always indulgent to weakness. That true love is infinitely kind.