Being the Partner I Want My Partner to Be
I’ve written many times before - I’m not a fan of the phrase you have to learn to love yourself before you can love another. Through an attachment lens, our sense of self and other is formed in relationship. Our beliefs about our worthiness, our capacity for intimacy, and the way we interpret another’s behaviour are all shaped in the relational ecosystems we grew up in. A simpler way to put it is - we learn to love ourselves based on how we were loved.
Understanding how our childhood imprints shape our present-day reactions is not optional if we want to show up responsibly in partnership. Without this awareness, we move through relationship with an incomplete map and half-written directions - disoriented, reactive, and often confused about why familiar patterns keep repeating. This is never about “search and blame” or hunting for villains. It’s about seeing how the dynamics, culture, era, and pressures of our family system formed us. How the past echoes into the present and keeps us locked in reactivity that makes us feel powerless.
And when we feel powerless - unable to influence change or get our needs met - we tend to collapse into shame or blame. Shame pulls us into self-soothing patterns that offer short-term relief but no long-term repair. Blame flips the same coin - externalizing discomfort and trying to manage what is not ours to manage. Without self-understanding, we continue acting out old strategies in relationships that are trying to give us something new.
While we cannot control the forces that shaped us, we can take responsibility for how we participate in our relationships now. This is the adult position - holding both truths at the same time:
I was shaped by interactions beyond my control, and
I am the only person who I can control.
If I could reimagine that well-worn phrase about loving ourselves, it would become something like:
By understanding how I was loved, I can understand myself, soften toward myself, and show up in relationship as a full adult - capable of humility, grace, curiosity, and accountability.
Without this inner work, we tend to default to immature emotional strategies that inadvertently cast our partner in a parental role. When our reactions are driven by reactivity that arose from unmet childhood needs rather than present-day realities, our partner becomes “the all-powerful one” and we become the helpless one. All their THEMness is happening to us.
This is rarely conscious - but the patterns are familiar. We might find ourselves:
Scorekeeping - tracking, comparing, and calculating effort (often overlooking what we don’t personally value or what is invisible labour).
Withholding care or affection as a passive form of protest.
Avoiding direct communication in favour of sarcasm, “jokes,” ruminating, or sending angry texts from another room.
Conflict-avoiding by living increasingly parallel lives to “keep the peace,” while holding unspoken resentment underneath.
Exploding with a buffet-style argument when pressures build - pulling in old evidence, future predictions, and everything in between.
Expecting one partner to meet all our needs, then quietly resenting them when we feel unfulfilled in other areas of life.
Assuming we’re the only one suffering or the only person who sees the dysfunction.
Leaning into fantasy or seeking emotional/romantic connection elsewhere, even while in an explicitly monogamous relationship.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these?
Are these qualities you would want from your partner?
This is not about shaming ourselves. It’s about shifting our focus from the content of our complaints to our patterns of relating - to both ourselves and our partner. This is where we start to see how we contribute to the dynamic we are living inside. This is where change becomes possible.
Because from a place of adult accountability and self-governance, we can begin to:
Approach our partner with the love, steadiness, and presence we long for.
Assume responsibility for our own fulfillment rather than outsourcing it.
Accept that disagreement is inevitable - and that learning to disagree skillfully is foundational for satisfying, long-term partnership.
Communicate our inner emotional world in ways that signal this isn’t about you, even when pain is in the room.
Approach difficult moments with a collaborative rather than adversarial spirit.
Remember that memory is faulty, narratives are slippery, and the stories we tell ourselves are almost always incomplete.
Mature partnership doesn’t demand perfection; it requires awareness. Mature partnership asks us to see and understand the child in us without letting that child run the relationship. It asks us to show up as the partner we are asking the other person to be.
To conclude on my own optimistic perspective - many of us do not achieve the level of self-awareness required before relationship - but dysfunction in loving relationships can be the catalyst needed to develop self-awareness, healing, and self-understanding within relationship, so we can love from a grounded, adult place.