LOVE DYSMORPHIA

On soul hunger, romantic fantasy and the failure to recognise love

There was a time when romantic love was not expected to carry the entire weight of adult life. People fell in love, of course. They desired, betrayed, pined, wrote poems, crossed countries, ruined families, ruined themselves. But marriage was not always imagined primarily as the culmination of romantic feeling. It carried other purposes and obligations. Kinship. Children. Property. Work. Survival. Religion. Social order. The continuation of a family. Love might grow inside it. It might precede it. It might occur elsewhere. It might never arrive at all.

We have changed the arrangement.

Romantic love has become one of the central organizing myths of modern life. We expect not merely to find a partner, but to find someone who recognises us, desires us, understands us, chooses us, heals with us, grows with us, remains sexually alive to us, provides emotional safety without suffocating us, challenges us without threatening us, shares enough of our worldview to make life coherent while remaining different enough to retain mystery. We ask for companionship, eroticism, friendship, adventure, psychological development, domestic partnership, spiritual recognition and a sense of home, often from the same person.

If this remains unmet, something has gone wrong.

Usually with us, at first.

I am not attractive enough. Successful enough. healed enough. Masculine enough. Feminine enough. Open enough. Boundaried enough. Interesting enough. Young enough. Thin enough. Conscious enough. Somehow I have failed to become the sort of person to whom love happens.

Or the accusation turns outward.

There are no good men anymore. No good women. Everyone is avoidant. Everyone is narcissistic. Nobody knows how to commit. Men have become weak. Women have become impossible. Dating apps have destroyed intimacy. Feminism ruined marriage. Patriarchy ruined marriage. Pornography ruined sex. Therapy ruined relationships.

The explanations differ. The underlying assumption often remains untouched.

The promised thing should exist.

And if I do not have it, somebody must be to blame.

I wonder whether we are developing something like a dysmorphia of love.

The comparison needs care. Anorexia is a serious and complex disorder and cannot be explained by fashion magazines or images of thin bodies. But we know that images can participate in a disturbance of perception. A person can look at their own body and no longer see what is there. The body has become entangled with an internal standard. Shape, size, weight, proportion are perceived through an image of what the body ought to be.

The body is real.

The perception has been trained elsewhere.

Something similar may be happening with love.

We are now exposed to an extraordinary density of images and narratives about relationship. Film, advertising, pornography, dating apps, celebrity culture, relationship coaches, therapy language, Instagram, TikTok, masculinity accounts, femininity accounts, attachment theory reduced to memes, twin flames, soulmates, polarity, divine union, conscious relationship, secure love, wild love, sacred sexuality. We are not merely told whom to desire. We are shown what desire should feel like, what intimacy should sound like, what masculine presence should feel like in the body, what feminine softness should evoke in a man, what safety should feel like, what chemistry should feel like, what being chosen should feel like.

Eventually it becomes difficult to know where desire ends and instruction begins.

A female friend and fellow reader of Jung sent me a post recently and said, “This is the vibe that I want in a relationship.”

It was beautiful. Black-and-white photographs. Handsome men in sharp clothes. Lean bodies. Expensive rooms. Soft light. Lithe women draped over muscular arms. Linen. Stone. Skin. One image moved the same theatre outdoors, into the kind of nature already landscaped, curated and photographed.

Nothing wrong with any of it. I like beautiful things.

What caught me was what she said next.

“This is my standard.”

A standard.

I looked again and wondered what exactly was being measured.

There was desire in the photographs. Elegance. Wealth. Masculine strength. Feminine softness. Sexual polarity. Beauty. Atmosphere. The men brought the suit, the body, the architecture, implied competence, money, containment. The women brought beauty. They leaned against the men, hung from them, looked towards them. They completed the photographs.

Perhaps that is the fantasy.

Fantasy is allowed.

The problem begins when fantasy becomes law.

A desire says: I want this.

The superego says: this is what you should have.

Then: this is what love should feel like.

Then: if it does not feel like this, something is wrong.

At that point we are no longer simply desiring. We are measuring reality against an internal image.

The person in front of us begins to disappear behind it.

Are they masculine enough? Feminine enough? Emotionally available enough? Successful enough? Attractive enough? Conscious enough? Secure enough? Sexually alive enough? Do I feel sufficiently safe? Sufficiently desired? Sufficiently met? Is there enough polarity? Enough depth? Enough excitement? Enough peace? Enough growth?

And there is a still more dangerous question.

Do I feel what I am supposed to feel?

This may be where love dysmorphia becomes most difficult to recognise. We are not merely judging the other person against an image. We are judging our own inner life against one.

I should want them more.

I should feel more alive around them.

I should miss them differently.

Sex should feel different.

Love should feel deeper.

If this were really right, I would know.

If this were my person, I would not doubt.

The culture supplies not only an image of the beloved but an image of the emotional state by which the beloved can supposedly be recognised.

And algorithms are extremely good at supplying emotional imagery.

They do not simply sell objects. They sell anticipated states.

Being desired. Being chosen. Being pursued. Being held. Being understood without explanation. Being wanted with certainty. Being surrendered to. Being protected. Being adored. Being met at exactly the depth at which we believe ourselves to exist.

Again, these experiences are not false. Some are exquisite. Some may change a life.

But intensity is not the same thing as truth.

There are feelings we spend enormous amounts of money and energy trying to reproduce which are structurally incapable of lasting. The first weeks of falling in love may be one of them. A roller coaster produces a particular bodily state too. It rises, drops, floods the nervous system, produces exhilaration and fear, and several minutes later deposits us back on the ground.

Nobody stands beside the empty carriage demanding to know where the feeling went.

Yet in love we often do.

And perhaps the cost is similar. The experience is memorable, exhilarating and extremely expensive to keep reproducing.

Ordinary love has to compete with this.

That is difficult because ordinary love is often unimpressive.

It is repetitive. Domestic. Occasionally boring. Someone makes tea. Someone collects the children. Someone remembers the thing you forgot. Someone irritates you in exactly the same way for eleven years. Bodies change. Sex changes. Money tightens. Parents die. Illness arrives. One person becomes consumed by work while the other becomes lonely. Desire disappears for a season. Resentments accumulate. Some are repaired. Some are not. Two people who once stayed awake until four in the morning talking eventually sit beside one another discussing the boiler.

This photographs badly.

Repair has terrible lighting.

Faithfulness is repetitive.

Forgiveness lacks glamour.

And yet these may be places where love becomes more real rather than less.

This is particularly difficult in marriage because romantic feeling has increasingly become the authority by which the marriage itself is judged.

Perhaps marriage was once partly a container strong enough to survive the changing weather of love.

The weather changed.

The container remained.

Desire rose and fell. Tenderness disappeared and returned. Anger came. Boredom came. Children altered the relationship. Work altered it. Age altered it. Illness altered it. One person became strange to the other and perhaps familiar again. The marriage did not necessarily become invalid every time the emotional weather changed.

Now we often reverse the hierarchy.

Love must justify the continued existence of the marriage.

And by love we often mean a very particular configuration of feeling.

When that feeling changes, the structure itself comes under suspicion.

Do I still love you?

Am I still in love with you?

Perhaps we should separate those questions more carefully.

People sometimes give up on marriages because the marriage no longer contains the love they wanted. In some cases leaving is necessary. There are marriages that are cruel, degrading, violent, dead or simply finished. This is not an argument for preserving a structure at any cost.

But there may also be marriages in which something else is being asked.

Perhaps sometimes the thing that must be relinquished is not the marriage.

Perhaps it is the image of love the marriage can no longer sustain.

That possibility is severe because it offends one of our deepest modern assumptions: that romantic feeling is a form of truth.

I no longer feel it, therefore something essential has ended.

Perhaps.

But perhaps feeling is also weather.

It tells us something real about present conditions. It does not necessarily tell us the entire truth about the climate, the landscape or what will be there next year.

We are rightly suspicious now of structures that ask people to sacrifice themselves for an institution. We know what marriage can conceal. Domination. Violence. Sexual coercion. Economic imprisonment. Emotional abandonment. The romantic critique of loveless marriage did not arise from nowhere.

But every correction can harden into another distortion.

If marriage once possessed too much authority over the individual, perhaps feeling now possesses too much authority over marriage.

The question is not which one should win.

The question is what each can see.

A marriage may know something that the feeling of the moment does not.

It knows the years. The children. The promises. The shared grief. The accumulated acts of care. The thousand accommodations that have made two lives possible beside one another. It knows what survived previous seasons in which one or both people were convinced that nothing would.

Feeling knows something too.

It knows deadness. Revulsion. Longing. Absence. Desire. Fear. The body may perceive truths long before the conscious mind is prepared to admit them.

Neither should be granted absolute authority.

Discernment begins precisely where the easy authority ends.

What is actually here?

That question is much harder than asking whether my relationship resembles the one I imagined.

Is there affection? Is there truth? Is there kindness? Is there erotic life, even if it is quieter than before? Is there contempt? Is there fear? Can we repair? Can we change? Are we still capable of becoming more ourselves in one another's presence? Are we sacrificing something necessary by staying, or merely sacrificing an image of what we thought love would be?

And perhaps the most difficult question of all:

Can I see this person?

Not the person they were when I fell in love with them.

Not the person I thought they would become.

Not the person my wounds require them to be.

Not the masculine or feminine archetype onto which I have projected half my unlived life.

The person.

Jung was suspicious of whatever in the psyche announced itself too confidently as personal. Much of what we experience as “my desire” contains material that is inherited, collective, archetypal, familial and unconscious. Our fantasies of love are no exception.

We inherit them from our parents, including the ones we swear we will never repeat.

We inherit them from religion.

From cinema.

From pornography.

From romantic novels.

From advertising.

From the first person who broke our heart.

From the person who never chose us.

From the father who was absent.

From the mother who engulfed.

From the lovers who followed.

And now, with unprecedented intimacy, from the algorithm.

The algorithm does not know love.

It knows attention.

Attention is easier to capture with longing than contentment.

A person quietly satisfied with the imperfect human being beside them is commercially uninteresting. A person who suspects that somewhere there exists greater polarity, deeper chemistry, better sex, more emotional intelligence, more masculine presence, more feminine receptivity, more secure attachment, greater beauty and a more extraordinary love can be sold almost anything.

Soul hunger is an excellent market.

That may be what lies beneath much of this.

We are hungry.

Not merely for sex or companionship.

For recognition. Belonging. Mystery. Transcendence. Witness. Home. Meaning. God, perhaps, though many of us would no longer use the word.

Much of what once distributed these hungers across religion, family, community, ritual, vocation and place has weakened.

The hunger did not disappear.

It concentrated.

Romantic love became one of the few remaining places where modern people are still permitted to speak without embarrassment about destiny, union, surrender, devotion, eternity, being known completely, becoming one flesh.

Those are religious words, even when God has been removed from them.

Then we place this hunger before another ordinary human being and ask them to satisfy it.

No wonder they fail.

No wonder we fail them.

Perhaps one of the mercies available to us is to discover that some of what we have called relationship hunger does not belong entirely to relationship.

Some of it belongs to friendship.

Some to community.

Some to vocation.

Some to the body.

Some to solitude.

Some to the unlived life.

Some, perhaps, to God.

To admit that would not diminish romantic love.

It might release it from having to become everything.

Then perhaps we could encounter another person with fewer hallucinations.

Beauty would remain beautiful. Desire would remain desirable. The sharp suit, the lithe body, the strong arm, the soft skin, the expensive room, the linen, the candlelight, the terrace, the cultivated wilderness. I would happily take all of them.

They may reveal something real about eros.

They may even reveal something archetypal about what calls to us.

But they are not love.

At most, they are scenery in which we imagine love occurring.

The deeper question is what happens when the scenery changes.

When the beautiful room becomes a kitchen at half seven on a wet Tuesday. When the lean body thickens. When the strong man becomes frightened. When the soft woman becomes angry. When one person fails. When the other disappoints. When erotic certainty becomes ambiguity. When someone has to apologise. When someone has to forgive without being certain the feeling of forgiveness has arrived.

What do we see then?

Perhaps that is where dysmorphia matters most.

The danger is not merely that we will fail to obtain the love we imagine.

It is that we will obtain something real and fail to recognise it because it is the wrong shape.