What Happens When We Put Someone on a Pedestal

A couple of months ago I got a long and unexpected email from a guy I knew in college. We had a class together early on and had shared a very platonic dinner at a Thai restaurant once before drifting in our own separate directions. I was in a long-distance relationship throughout college — a fact I made clear immediately, just to avoid any confusion — and for me, this classmate’s role in my life can be summed up in a single sentence (see above).

For him, it was a different story, at least according to the novella I received in my inbox. I had been cast as “the one who got away,” and placed on a pedestal in his mind that I neither deserved nor wanted to be on. For nearly two decades, this false narrative had persisted, and now he was seeking some sort of renewed connection or validation or…I’m not even sure.

I’ll be honest that the email made me deeply uncomfortable. It’s unsettling to hear someone else’s version of a “relationship” is wildly different from your own version — that’s certainly part of it. But I also felt a stab of painful recognition: I have been on the other side of this impossible equation. And getting over it hurt more than almost anything I have experienced before or since.

Idealizing someone we love spells out certain doom in a relationship. Our partner is a human, and therefore imperfect, but to keep them on their pedestal we have to excuse away every flaw or misbehavior, often by stifling our true feelings and insulting ourselves: I must not have understood properly; I’m being too sensitive; I’m overly needy.

The longer we buy into this narrative, the harder we have to work to maintain it. We ignore the voices in our lives trying to make us see reality. We open the door to mistreatment and possibly even abuse. We lose sense of our own self worth by over-inflating our partner’s worth.

There are certainly some abusive or narcissistic personality types who encourage this kind of lopsided romantic scenario. But more often than not, our partner never asked to be placed on a pedestal and would much rather come down to earth. The weight of expectations on someone who is being idealized can be overwhelming, and that is an unfair burden.

Relationships in which one partner is glorified may include love on both sides. But they are built on a lie and a fundamental imbalance, and that simply isn’t sustainable for the long term. In my own case, the person I placed on a pedestal gradually checked out, and as my head started to clear I was faced with some harsh truths about his flaws and how far I had gone to overlook them.

I had to deal with the simultaneous pain of heartbreak and disillusionment: I had loved this person, but had I ever really even known them? And how did I sacrifice so much of my self-esteem in the process?

It was a brutal recovery, but also a valuable lesson about what I really wanted and needed from a relationship. Turns out, it wasn’t perfection after all, it was genuine connection. It was seeing my partner’s flaws and loving them anyway. It was having my own flaws seen and being loved anyway. It was meeting each other on the same level.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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Photo credit: Stefan Spassov on Unsplash