Your Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is one of these books : explaining our relationships don’t work because what we sometimes call falling in love is projecting all our hopes of being repaired, saved, and completely validated by someone else. And that our hope is misplaced.
There are other books like this. I find them all very annoying, precisely because they are telling the truth.
Still, who wants to realize we are repeating an old drama over and over again ? Who wants to leave this all consuming attraction, this mesmerizing chemistry, our belief this relationship will make us happy, at ease with ourselves, that we have found the one magical person ?
We really don’t want to. We can embellish or deny facts, ignore what others are telling us, pretend this is not the same old usual relationship with another person, fervently believe this is true love, close our eyes, close our ears, and turn our back on the reality of the person or the relationship.
All of this because there is a part of us who simply cannot accept this magic person will not fix us. And when we finally do accept this particular person will not fix us, we may move on to another person who we believe can.
As I heard in a song the other day, hope is a good swimmer.
Why is it a good book about relationships then ?
To start with, because it does state this (unwanted) truth: incredible chemistry for someone we don’t know puts us at risk of not being grounded in reality, or at least our current one. It’s about a vulnerable and desperate part of us from our past, who wants to be repaired. Real love is more prudent, and gradual: in order to really love someone, we have to know this other person and not see him, or her, as we need them to be.
Our desire to be repaired is legitimate. But unfortunately someone else cannot do it for us. Worse, if we have these expectations, it will burden the real relationship to the point of killing it.
Reading this truth will not all of the sudden make us see the light. We sometimes need a trail of failed relationships before we look for a different ending than “one magical relationship will solve all my problems”. We also need to read or hear this truth several times. Alas, repetition is necessary, it seems.
But this book may help us understand it sooner and avoid months or years of pain. It may even help us save our current relationship, if it is salvageable. When we finally get our partner cannot redeem our broken self esteem, but we can, the relationships gets lighter and more enjoyable. We each mind our own business, and have fun together.
A good explanation of limerence, or obsessive love
Limerence is this unfortunate obsession we feel about a seemingly magical someone, because we deep down believe this person can make us totally happy – even if there is no relationship, or a terrible relationship.
A part of us knows this is bizarre and feels humiliated by this infatuation. And a part of us cannot help it at all. That’s where You are the one you have been waiting for is brilliant: using the Internal Family System approach, it embodies these parts to explain what is happening to us.
The part of us who is helplessly infatuated is a young boy or girl who has been wounded by a hurtful important relationship. This little one feels in pain, vulnerable, and unlovable. We usually have buried it very deep in our psyche and don’t want to hear about him, or her; that’s why it is called an exile. But it’s always here within us, and sometimes it calls the shot from behind the scene.
The part who understands our infatuation is unhealthy is our Self. Our Self is the balanced and wise part of us. It is always here in us also, even if we don’t hear it clearly – sometimes for years.
When our exile is in the background, we can have a very normal life. One day though, something triggers us and activates our exile. And then, watch out: that’s when the limerence fun starts.
Our exiles takes center stage and take all the space, in ecstasy because it thinks it has found the magical one who can stop the pain and repair us. It is so important, so essential for this immature part of ourselves that everything else disappears. Our life often disappears.
At some stage, it finally dawns on our exile that the magical person is in fact not so magical. It can happen because we are tired of being ignored or mistreated. Curiously enough, it can also happen when our relationship is working well, which gives us the opportunity to understand our partner cannot manage this enourmous task of making us whole.
We then may embark on a project of changing our partner into someone else, changing ourselves into someone else, or leave the relationship alltogether. All of this prevents real intimacy and connection.
If something in you resonates with these cycles, reading this book will really help you make sense of it. If not, it can still help, because it describes very interesting dynamics in relationships, using the IFS framework.
There is one thing I don’t like about You are the one you’ve been waiting for: it is very focused on describing the dynamics of an individual or couple therapy by an IFS practitioner. And the DIY stuff is all rushed in one chapter at the end. That’s all great if you are able to get hold of such a therapist, but the reality is most of us aren’t able to. Nevertheless, it can give us a good understanding of what is happening inside us and why, in the context of difficult relationships.