I was just thinking about love, specifically romantic love.  An acquaintance of mine is newly in love and she speaks voluminously about her beloved's every wonderful quality.  Even his defects are seen as charming, nothing at all to be concerned with.   So I think that's how the bonding process starts, the superglue of relationships begins with a willful belief in the wonderfulness of the loved one.  Once strongly bonded together as a couple, hopefully the inevitable disillusions will seem paltry compared to the essential strength of love and gratitude we feel for being in such a partnership.

All that being acknowledged, I was musing about what it is that goes wrong, that lets us drift apart and become bitter.  I think a lot of what we believe about our lovers in the beginning is merely a projection of our wants and needs, so we lovingly twist and pat and force into place all the hoped-for ingredients in our Pygmalion quest for perfection.  I suppose if our lovers prove to be close enough to the template, then this projected image holds.  But all too often, a word, a habit, a behavior that we find unacceptable begins to inform us that our hologram is malfunctioning, that the reality is far from the creature we had hoped to fashion.  

There begins the anger and resentment.  How dare they to have failed us?  How dare they not be who we wanted and needed?  But just now I find myself wondering, how is it that we cannot acknowledge that it is not our lovers who fail us.  What fails us is our projection, our stubborn demand for perfection, our selfishness in failing to appreciate the person before us for the qualities that they have.

I strongly believe that if God chose to put that person in my life, they are there for me to love and learn from, whether they be a lover or a friend, and to the extent that I wilfully deny their true essence as a human being, I shortchange both them and myself.