When Need Masquerades as Love

Some relationships make people stop sleeping. They reread messages at two in the morning, lose their appetite, check a phone that has not made a sound, and become capable of interpreting a four-minute delay in response as evidence of an entire emotional catastrophe. We have traditionally been rather generous in calling this love. Romance has benefited enormously from our willingness to confuse suffering with depth.

The confusion becomes harder to see when a relationship begins with an almost intoxicating sense of recognition. Someone understands you unusually quickly. They notice what other people missed. Around them, you feel more interesting, more desirable, perhaps closer to the person you have always believed yourself to be. For someone who has spent years feeling unseen, that experience can be difficult to resist.

Then the reflection changes. The person who seemed fascinated by your mind becomes irritated when your mind produces an opinion they do not share. Independence that once attracted them begins causing arguments. A boundary is received as rejection. You start explaining things you never imagined would require explanation, and eventually you become very good at anticipating which version of yourself will make the evening easier.

I became interested in what happens during that change because both people may continue calling the experience love. The possessive partner may genuinely feel unable to lose the relationship. The person becoming smaller may experience the same intensity and reach the same conclusion. The attachment can be enormous. The question is what each person has actually become attached to.

If you want to understand the difference between love and obsession, or between love and ego-driven possession, read Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir.

I recently returned to it for the third time. I had read it twice when I was younger, when I understood longing considerably better than I understood love. I remembered a man searching for Esther, the wife who had left him, and being moved by the fact that he could not eat, sleep, travel, speak, or write without eventually returning to her.

The word “zahir” refers to something so present, so impossible to overlook, that once it enters the mind, everything else begins to disappear behind it. It is not merely a thought. It becomes an obsession. Esther becomes his Zahir. Her absence fills every room, enters every conversation, and slowly takes possession of his life.

His conversations with Mikhail stayed with me this time. A younger man is trying to explain to a successful writer what love is and why Esther left him, but the writer can barely hear him. He is too consumed by the question of how to get her back. He has just published a bestselling book about love, yet he remains unable to distinguish love from everything wounded, possessive, and frightened within himself.

Mikhail also tells him something he is not ready to understand: Esther still loves him. She did not leave because love had disappeared. She left because loving someone does not make it possible to remain indefinitely in a life where you are not seen. There are forms of loneliness more painful than being alone, and perhaps the worst is loving someone deeply while becoming invisible beside them. Sometimes leaving is not the end of love. It is what a person does when remaining has begun to feel like disappearance.

Reading it now, I kept thinking about the woman who had been standing beside him before she disappeared. He could not live without Esther, yet he had lived with her without seeing how profoundly she wanted to leave. He could see her everywhere once she was gone, but he had been unable to see her when she was directly in front of him.

Her absence became more real to him than her unhappiness had ever been.

A person can become the only thing we see while we remain unable to see the person.

I have written before about the three years of abuse by my supervisor during my PhD in neuroscience. There is one moment in Frankfurt that returned to me while I was reading The Zahir.

We were at a conference. He had violated me again, and I was crying in the hotel room. He went into the bathroom, pleased with himself, then came back and found me still crying. He pulled me to my feet, placed my back against the wall, and held me.

“You are the only reason I wake up every day,” he said. “You are the only reason I come to this fucking job. You are the delight in my life that I thought had ended a long time ago. You brought me back to a life I thought was over. I am obsessed with you. What is it, if not love?”

I remember the cold wall against my back. His arms around me. My body still carrying what he had just done while he described me as the reason for his life.

Part of me wanted to believe him. I could not.

I remembered The Zahir.

He was looking directly at me and did not see a woman crying. He did not see that he was the reason she was crying. He saw the person who made him feel alive.

He called it love.

To me, it felt like obsession, possession, and an ego that had made another human being part of itself.

That was what made it so frightening.

Human beings have always been suspiciously willing to treat sleeplessness as evidence of destiny. Add jealousy, loss of appetite, and the inability to think about anything else, and calling the experience anything less than love can feel almost insulting.

A person can occupy enormous psychological space in our lives. We organize days around hearing from them, feel immediate relief when they return, and experience separation with a force that seems to answer the question of how much they mean to us.

They may mean a great deal. That still tells us surprisingly little about how well we know them.

Psychoanalysis has long been interested in the difference between another person and the place that person comes to occupy in our inner life. We become attached to what someone represents, to what we experience in their presence, and sometimes to who we become when they look at us. Genuine intimacy can acquire those meanings over time, but the meanings themselves can arrive remarkably early.

Someone’s attention may make us feel desirable again. Their admiration can quiet an old sense of inadequacy. Being chosen by them may alter our experience of ourselves. None of this requires manipulation or conscious calculation. Most of us would be rather offended to discover that our grand romance had been performing unpaid psychological labor.

The trouble begins when losing the person becomes inseparable from losing the version of ourselves that existed with them. We may know their habits, their body, the way they text, the expression they make when annoyed, and still know surprisingly little about the private person who exists beyond our relationship with them.

I am therefore less interested in whether someone feels unable to live without another person than in something less romantic and more revealing: amid all that need, have they remained curious about who the other person actually is?

“Narcissists have low self-esteem” is one of those explanations that sits close enough to the truth to survive while explaining very little.

Kohut gives us a more useful way to think about it. His concept of self-cohesion describes the ability to maintain a reasonably continuous sense of oneself across admiration and disappointment, success and humiliation, closeness and separation. We begin building that capacity through other people. A child discovers something about who they are through being delighted in, comforted, taken seriously, and recognized. Eventually, enough of that experience becomes internal.

Then praise can feel wonderful without becoming oxygen. Rejection hurts without erasing identity. Failure can humiliate us without making the entire self collapse around it.

In narcissistic organization, some of that stability remains unusually dependent on other people. This does not necessarily produce someone who secretly thinks poorly of themselves. A person may feel quite certain of their superiority much of the time. The fragility becomes visible when admiration disappears, status changes, or someone important no longer reflects the expected image back.

Kohut’s idea of mirroring helps explain why another person’s attention can become so psychologically important. Admiration may quiet doubts that otherwise return, while being desired or associated with someone impressive can begin to shape how a person experiences their own worth. The partner is still loved as a person, but over time they may also come to serve a stabilizing function in the other’s sense of self.

That dependence can look exquisitely romantic. Someone cannot tolerate distance. Being chosen by one particular person acquires enormous importance. Their attention seems capable of changing the emotional climate of an entire day.

And sometimes the intolerable loss is not simply you. It is who I get to be when I am reflected in your eyes.

Some relationships begin with the uncanny experience of being recognized almost immediately. Someone notices precisely the qualities you have spent years wishing another person would notice. Their attention feels specific rather than generic, and you find yourself thinking, perhaps much earlier than usual, this person sees me.

Being seen and being known are easily confused in the beginning.

Projection helps explain why. We never encounter another person without bringing some of our own internal world into the encounter. We infer qualities before we have enough evidence for them and respond partly to what the person seems to promise. This belongs to ordinary falling in love. The problem is what happens when reality eventually contradicts the projection.

In narcissistic relationships, idealization may become particularly intense because the other person fits something psychologically important. Their beauty, intelligence, success, sensitivity, sexuality, status, or unusualness can become part of the meaning of possessing their love. Being idealized in return feels extraordinary. One person has found someone whose value enlarges their own experience of self; the other has finally encountered someone who appears to recognize their value without needing to be persuaded of it. There is no reason either experience has to be consciously false.

The difficulty appears as the real person becomes harder to fit inside the original image.

Winnicott’s work becomes useful here. A self develops partly through becoming able to exist without organizing itself continuously around what another person requires. Yet idealization can reward exactly that adaptation. Certain qualities receive fascination. Others produce disappointment or barely register. Eventually the relationship begins teaching a person which parts of themselves receive love most reliably.

That is why I am less interested in how accurately someone recognizes us during idealization than in what happens when we become inconvenient to the image they formed. Can I disagree with you and remain the person you love? Can I disappoint you without becoming a different person in your mind? Can I change in a direction you did not choose?

Recognition becomes love only if the person doing the recognizing can survive discovering that you are not entirely who they imagined.

Once another person has become involved in maintaining our psychological stability, separateness acquires consequences it did not have before.

Object relations theory gives us a way to understand why someone can remain psychologically present even when they are not physically there. Over time, we come to know what we expect from the people we love, how we imagine they will respond to us, and what their presence or absence does to us. Some version of the relationship continues in the mind when the person is elsewhere.

Loving someone deeply does not require their life to revolve around ours. We can depend on them, miss them, and be changed by them while still knowing that much of who they are exists beyond us. They have thoughts we will never hear, relationships we are not part of, and desires that did not begin with us.

In narcissistic attachment, separateness becomes harder to tolerate once another person’s attention has become important to how we feel about ourselves. Their distance may unsettle us even when nothing has happened between us, and their independence can begin to feel strangely personal. What belongs to their separate life is experienced as though it has taken something away from ours.

This is where possessiveness can emerge. Entitlement may certainly be part of it, but control can also be an attempt to make an important person psychologically predictable. The questions about where you were, whom you spoke to, why you need privacy, or why something matters to you that does not include me may look like questions about the relationship. Underneath them may be an effort to regulate what your separateness produces in me.

Over time, the partner may begin to notice that ordinary independence comes with a price. Friendships provoke insecurity, privacy becomes suspicious, and ambitions that require time or attention elsewhere can be experienced as withdrawal. Eventually, it may seem easier to give up small pieces of a separate life than to keep dealing with the conflict each one creates.

The problem is no longer how deeply one person loves another. It is whether someone can remain deeply important while still being allowed to belong to themselves.

Idealization has a limited tolerance for reality. Sooner or later, the person who seemed to fit so beautifully into the relationship does something inconveniently human. They disagree about something important, want time alone, become absorbed in work, lose interest in pleasing, or simply have a bad month and become considerably less enjoyable company.

For someone with a more integrated capacity for relationships, disappointment changes how we feel about a person without requiring us to change who we believe that person is. Melanie Klein’s work on splitting helps explain what happens when this integration is more fragile. Contradictory experiences of the same person become difficult to hold together. The partner who gratifies and the partner who frustrates begin to feel almost like different people.

Narcissistic injury can make the change surprisingly sudden. A boundary that seemed ordinary to the person setting it may feel humiliating to the person receiving it, and a disagreement can quickly become about far more than what was actually said. Even a partner doing well can create tension if their success changes how important, needed, or admired each person feels in the relationship. What looks like an outsized reaction often makes more sense once we understand what the moment came to mean.

This is often where devaluation enters. It is much easier to tolerate disappointment in someone once we have decided they are selfish, foolish, ungrateful, or simply not the person we thought they were. Then there is no need to sit with the much more uncomfortable reality that we can still need and love someone while also feeling hurt, threatened, or diminished by them. Making the person smaller resolves that conflict for a while.

People who have lived through these relationships often describe the strange experience of discovering that the qualities their partner once admired have become the very things they are criticized for. Independence is welcomed until it creates real separation. Confidence is attractive until it survives disapproval. Ambition is fascinating until it begins taking the person somewhere the relationship cannot control.

The shift can feel incomprehensible because the partner remembers being loved for precisely what is now being criticized. In a sense, they were. But idealization loved those qualities while they belonged to a particular version of the relationship. Once the actual person could no longer remain inside that version, the qualities acquired a different meaning.

The real person did not suddenly appear one morning. They had been there all along. What changed was that reality could no longer be arranged around the original image.

One of the crueler features of a toxic relationship is that intensity often increases as security decreases.

The brain pays close attention to uncertainty. When affection is reliable, it becomes part of the background of life. When connection alternates unpredictably with withdrawal, the mind has more work to do. It begins tracking tone, timing, distance, and return with unusual precision because the outcome is no longer easy to predict.

That unpredictability can amplify motivation. Dopamine is involved not only in pleasure but in anticipation and pursuit, which helps explain why an inconsistent relationship can become mentally consuming even when it is painful. The person becomes harder to ignore because the brain has learned that something important may happen at any moment.

Threat adds another layer. If closeness is repeatedly followed by rejection or coldness, the body begins moving between arousal and relief. Reconnection can then feel disproportionately powerful because it ends a state of distress. The relief is real, but relief should not be confused with evidence that the relationship is healthy.

Sex can intensify the bond further, especially when it arrives during periods of reconciliation. Physical closeness after emotional distance may feel unusually charged because several systems are active at once: desire, attachment, anticipation, and the temporary easing of threat. The experience can be profound enough that people interpret it as proof that the relationship must be exceptional.

Popular language often reduces this to “dopamine addiction,” which is far too crude. The brain is not making a moral judgment about the relationship. It is learning what is unpredictable, emotionally charged, and consequential. A person can therefore become biologically salient while the relationship itself becomes increasingly damaging.

That is why intensity can be such a poor measure of love. The brain can become exquisitely trained to monitor someone who is hurting us.

Most people do not wake up one morning and realize they have become smaller. The change is usually much less dramatic than that.

It usually starts with learning the emotional weather of the relationship. You know which subjects are likely to ruin the evening and begin leaving them alone. You see a friend less often because dealing with the jealousy afterward has become exhausting. Even good news may require some thought about when and how to share it. Eventually, it can seem easier to carry a need alone than to deal with everything that follows from expressing it.

Most of this can feel perfectly reasonable while it is happening. People make allowances for each other. We learn what hurts someone we love, what makes them anxious, what is worth arguing about and what is easier to let go. But over time, one person may notice that they are doing most of the adjusting. They are choosing their words, changing plans, giving things up, and anticipating reactions, while the other person’s distress increasingly determines what is possible in the relationship.

Gradually, more of your attention goes to anticipating the other person. You notice the change in tone, reconsider what you were about to say, or decide that something you wanted is probably not worth the reaction it will create. After doing this for long enough, you may stop noticing how much editing happens before you speak or make a decision. What used to come naturally now passes through an internal calculation first.

You begin to notice that some parts of you are easier for the relationship to tolerate than others. You can be enthusiastic, but certain interests create tension. Confidence is attractive until you make a decision on your own. Anger takes days to recover from, so eventually you express less of it. You are still yourself, but more and more of yourself stays outside the relationship.

This kind of adaptation can happen almost without being noticed. We learn very quickly what brings someone closer and what makes them withdraw, become contemptuous, or start a fight that lasts all weekend. When the attachment matters enough, we adjust. After years of doing it, what began as a way of protecting the relationship can become the way a person lives inside it.

That is why people often struggle to explain later how they became so unlike themselves. There may be no single moment to point to. There were hundreds of small corrections that seemed easier at the time than fighting every battle.

The light is not devoured all at once. It is edited.

Leaving a destructive relationship can be strangely disorienting. The person is gone, but so is everything you had learned to do around them. You are no longer watching their mood, wondering when they will call, preparing for an argument, or recovering from the last one. Even a painful relationship can occupy an enormous amount of mental life, and its absence leaves more than grief behind.

For a while, the mind may continue behaving as though the relationship is still there. You reach for the phone, anticipate a message, notice the time they usually came home, or feel uneasy at an hour when something often happened between you. Months or years spent paying close attention to another person do not disappear on the day you decide to leave.

Leaving can also reveal how much of yourself had become tied to the relationship. You had spent so long calming things down, anticipating trouble, repairing what happened, and trying to keep things together that these were no longer just things you did. They had become part of who you understood yourself to be. When the relationship ends, that role disappears with it, and for a while you may not know who you are without it.

People are often ashamed of wanting to go back because they assume the longing means they still want the relationship. Sometimes they miss something else entirely: the familiarity of it, the relief when things were briefly good, the purpose they found in trying to fix what kept falling apart, or even knowing exactly who they were supposed to be with that person.

After leaving, there is suddenly no crisis to manage and no familiar role to return to. Part of recovery is finding out who you are when so much of your attention no longer belongs to the relationship.

At first, the absence of all that activity can feel strangely empty. You have spent so much time thinking about another person that you may have forgotten what you did with your attention before them. Gradually, ordinary things begin to matter again. You notice what you want to do with an evening, whom you want to see, what you enjoy, and what you no longer want to explain or negotiate. Decisions that once came with an automatic calculation about someone else’s reaction begin to feel like your own again.

For some people, leaving is followed by the uncomfortable realization that they have to get to know themselves again.

Love becomes impossible if only one person is allowed to remain fully real.

Loving someone means living with the fact that they have a mind of their own. They will want things we did not choose, fear things we may not understand, stay loyal to people and parts of themselves that have nothing to do with us, and continue having an inner life we cannot fully enter.

In some relationships, that separateness gradually becomes difficult to tolerate, and one person begins giving up more and more of it just to keep the relationship steady.

When we become too dependent on what another person does for us emotionally, it becomes harder to tolerate the parts of them that have nothing to do with us. Their needs can feel like interference. A boundary can feel strangely personal. Even a change of mind may be experienced as betrayal, as though loving us meant remaining the person we expected them to be.

The feelings in such a relationship can be enormous. Someone can want another person constantly, suffer terribly when they pull away, and feel unable to imagine life without them. Yet intensity alone does not tell us how much room there is for the actual person on the other side of it.

Love does.

One passage in The Zahir stayed with me. Coelho writes about the distance between railroad tracks, a measurement that survived centuries because each generation kept building upon the one before it. Relationships inherit invisible measurements too. Families, cultures, and old fears quietly decide how close two people are supposed to remain, how much freedom is acceptable, and how much change begins to feel dangerous. But people are not railroad tracks. They are living minds. They continue becoming themselves long after the relationship has begun. Love has to make room for that, or later it begins demanding that one of them stop growing.

To love someone is to remain interested in their reality even when it does not flatter ours. It means allowing them to be disappointed in us without turning them into an enemy, to grow in directions we did not choose, and to possess parts of themselves that are not available for our use.

The first essay in this series was about recognition, about seeing another person clearly enough that fantasy begins to give way to knowledge. This one arrives at the same place from a darker direction.

The person beside us must be allowed to remain other.

Otherwise we may be holding on with extraordinary force to someone we have never fully allowed to exist.

Vera Hart, MD, PhD

@verahartmdphd on Instagram