Your Vivid Imagination is Ruining Your Relationships Right Under Your Nose

The human imagination is a genuine force of nature.

Over the past few thousand years, it’s taken us from scratching buffalo dicks onto the wall of a musty cave to making timeless proclamations about mankind as we stepped onto the face of our craggy sibling satellite that illuminates the night sky.

Currently, this marvel of evolutionary curiosity and adaptive creativity is pulling my attention away from this screen over to the little one I have face down on the other side of the room as I imagine how many notifications my phone must be getting without my eyes being glued to it.

Oh, how versatile this wonder of nature is.

Our imaginations are what set us apart from the rest of the entire ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean they are without fault. We may have used it to rise above our club-toting origins and elevate ourselves to the top floor of the food chain, but when it comes to our interpersonal relationships and the ways in which we inexplicably sabotage what’s in our best interest, we’ve still got some work to do.

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We use our imagination for…well, imagining

Big surprise there.

It’s our way of projecting mental simulations into a reimagined past, the myriad possibilities of the present, or the seemingly infinite potentialities of the future. However, as beneficial as it can be to imagine how things would have gone, should be, or could go, it can be just as much of a hazard.

There are millions of things that our imaginations affect throughout our lives, but as the title indicates, we’re going to focus on relationships.

We all know the feeling of seeing someone we like and getting lost in the thought of being with them either physically or romantically.

We imagine meeting them, how our conversations might go, maybe even if there’s a future where you two date or possibly get married. You might imagine what your kids would look like and what their names would be. You might imagine all the fun things you might do together and the kind of life you could have with this person.

Maybe you’re just picturing what they look like without their clothes on, or even going so far as to imagine you two doing the ol’ horizontal mambo.

No one is judging you. We’re only human. By all means, get your imagined freak on, but maybe let’s keep that steam between the ears for now.

This is all well and good. We all do it all the time as it’s in our nature to make these projections. But the line between innocent fantasy and insidious fixation can be a tricky one to see. It can sometimes be hard to distinguish between the imagined life or person we think we want and what our subliminal nature is trying to tell us we actually want.

Modern culture doesn’t do us any favors in this department

According to it, what we want — or should want — is to become the physical embodiment of material success; to become an example of what you can outwardly achieve if you work hard enough, sacrifice enough of your time, and accumulate enough resources to support the life of “your” dreams.

It doesn’t say this outright, but rather in the form of idealistic lifestyle marketing, emotionally manipulative advertising, and proliferating cults of online personalities all baked within the oven of an impulsive consumer culture.

We’re sold the idea that success is seen and not felt.

So, we’re shown things, and from a very young age are told that these things are the antidote for that nagging dissatisfaction we feel about ourselves and our lives.

We see others with these things and they appear to be much happier than the average person, so it becomes implanted within us that in order for us to also be happy, we must emulate the happiness we think we’re seeing by surrounding ourselves with similar things.

When it comes to relationships and the type of people we think we’ll be compatible with, it’s no wonder so many of us follow the idea of what a person represents instead of the feeling the person gives us by being around them.

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Our imaginations are good for many things, but they’re not as easy to control as we like to think

While you’re looking at this person you’re so enamored with and imagining all the different ways your life with them could go, you can start to actually project these fantasies onto that person. After awhile, you may even start believing some of these presumptions despite never having met them.

But let’s say you haven’t met anyone you particularly like yet.

Let’s say you’ve been trying to date around a bit. You’re going out to bars and various places and meeting whoever wherever, your thumb is getting sore from swiping left on too many different dating apps, and you still haven’t quite clicked with anyone in the way you’re looking for.

You’re ready to find a partner. It’s been a fairly long time since your last relationship and you’d like to find someone new. This is already your first problem, but we’ll get to that.

You’re in the seeking state of mind, so as you keep meeting people who have a lot of qualities you realize you don’t want in a partner, you also start making a list of traits in your mind you know you do want to find in someone. Whether you’re intentionally aware of the specifics, or you just start saving your preferences subconsciously, the list keeps growing.

What’s on the list doesn’t matter. I’m not going to name every single physical characteristic or personality quirk to cover everyone’s preferences. You understand what I’m saying.

Just think of a list. That’s the list.

Now, you’ve got the things you know you like and you start looking again. When you start meeting more people, you now also start looking for these particular traits. Sometimes you find a few, sometimes not.

At some point, let’s say you meet someone that has nearly every trait on your list. Perhaps not every single box is checked, but no one is perfect and this is definitely the closest someone has been to matching your own personal idea of perfection.

Here’s where that first problem comes in

Because you were actively looking to find someone, it means you want to find them.

Nothing wrong with wanting. But sometimes, when you want to find something bad enough, you will eventually “find” it whether it actually is that thing or not.

So, when you finally come across someone that checks the majority of the boxes on your little list of relationship prerequisites, your desire for the feeling of having found the person you’ve been looking for overrides your actual emotional state when with them.

You’ve been tired of looking for so long and this person virtually has it all. How could this not be it?

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The misdirection of imagined magic

Misdirection.

It’s the oldest trick in the book and you’re playing it on yourself.

Your imagination created the fantasy of a person. This person has certain traits. You meet someone who has these very traits. You assume this must be the fantasy you imagined. You follow the direction your fantasy is going.

You ignore any and all seeds of doubt or apprehension because you wouldn’t want to risk losing what you had for so long searched for, and this could really be as good as it’s going to get for you.

The problem with searching for fantasies, though — with focusing on the features and attributes of your ideal partner — is that once you meet someone, anyone, with these characteristics, your imagination kicks into overdrive. It inflates the good things, dismisses the bad, and puts a glowing aura around this person that you see as a clear indication that This is it.

You have finally found the promised land.

The other problem with fantasies is that they promise nothing.

Time may heal all wounds, but it also dissolves all illusions.

What tends to happen is that over time, the traits that you were convinced were so important for your partner to have start to lose the significance they had when you first found them. Your attachments to these qualities weaken and they become no more important than the features you decided to ignore.

You start to notice not the traits you previously desired, but the way you’re starting to feel. You start realizing that the way you actually feel being with this person isn’t a feeling you particularly want, or more importantly, need.

The qualities you once thought were essential to your happiness all seem trivial in the face of the rest of your life.

Once this happens, maybe you decide to stop listening to your imagination telling you what potentially perfect traits a partner could have and simply start listening to your body. You stop intellectualizing your relationship compatibility and need for personal preference and start noticing how you feel internally when you talk to someone; what their real-world presence does to your state of mind.

Maybe you eventually meet someone who doesn’t really have a lot of the qualities on your special list, but being around them makes you feel calm.

Maybe you stop thinking so much about what should be right for you because of what you’ve been told you should want and instead start following the sense of peace you feel when you’re with someone that naturally brings it out of you.

Maybe you stop caring about traits and qualities, characteristics and attributes.

Maybe you’ve been overcomplicating the simplest thing because of how you feel about yourself.

Maybe these sought-after traits were your way of showing the world that you did what you were told.

You decided to want what you thought you were supposed to want, went after it, and found it.

Maybe you shouldn’t listen to the world anymore.

Maybe if you quiet your mind and really listen to how you feel deep down, under all of the influence and assumption, below all the fantasy, and behind all the projections, you’ll be able to hear not what it is you think you want, but what on a fundamental level you genuinely need.

And maybe, when you once again run into thoughts about what you’ve been told will bring you happiness, you stop letting your imagination run wild.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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