Quick summary: The quality that once made a partner feel free is often the same quality later called irresponsible, because each person has projected a capacity they were not allowed to live themselves. Those rows run hot precisely when the complaint is older than the incident, so a fury out of proportion to a forgotten payment is a signal to ask what you have forbidden yourself, while ordinary reliability problems can still be negotiated and left alone. Writing the original word beside the current one, reclaiming even 1% of the forbidden capacity, and separating this work from abuse that needs safety planning gives couples a practical route towards seeing the person they actually married.
A couple came to see me after seven years together. Within the first two minutes the woman told me the problem was simple, because her husband was irresponsible. I asked what she had noticed about him when they met. She thought about it for a while and said that he was the only free person she knew.
The same man had been described as free at the start of the relationship and as irresponsible seven years later. Nobody had changed in the meantime, and only the word attached to him had.
I am a Ukrainian clinical psychologist working in the Jungian tradition, and I have sat through that exchange more times than I can count, with different words in the two slots. Solid becomes controlling, warm becomes needy, and ambitious becomes never here. The couples differ while the list stays remarkably similar.
The mechanism behind it
Jung wrote that the contents of our unconscious are continuously projected into our surroundings, and that only by recognising certain qualities of the object as projections can we tell them apart from the object’s real properties. The word projection sounds clinical, yet the experience is entirely ordinary. You meet someone and feel you have known them for years.
Marie-Louise von Franz described a projection as an arrow that sticks only where there is a soft spot to receive it. Your partner did not invent the trait you fell for. It was really there, and it was the hook.
What made it fascinating, rather than merely pleasant, is that the same quality was missing in you. The capacity itself was usually present, but you had been forbidden to use it. The woman enchanted by a man with no plans had grown up in a home where being reliable was the price of being loved. Spontaneity was something she was never allowed, and her husband was living the part of her that had been shut down at about the age of nine.
For a while that feels like wholeness, which is why the first months of love are so often described in the language of religion. Something of yours has come back to you, wearing someone else’s face.
Projection runs in both directions
Couples usually arrive expecting to find one patient, and almost always there are two. While she was falling for his freedom, he was falling for her steadiness, and steadiness is now what he calls rigidity. Both halves of the argument are doing the same thing at the same moment, in opposite directions.
This is why such conversations never end with a verdict on who is right. Neither person is really describing their partner. Each is describing the part of themselves they handed over.
What happens when the idealisation fades
Two things tend to happen next. The first is inevitable. Nobody can carry an idealised projection indefinitely, and sooner or later the other person turns out to have feet of clay. James Hollis writes about couples who are genuinely astonished to discover that their partner is also merely human, and he adds a sentence I would hang in every consulting room: it is far easier to be disappointed in the other than to ask something of yourself.
The second is the part couples rarely see on their own. The trait keeps reminding you of your own prohibition. Every time he acts freely, something in you registers that he is allowed and you are not. Because that is unbearable to feel directly, it comes out as prosecution, and we end up punishing our partners for living what we forbade ourselves.
This explains why these rows run so hot. Ordinary disagreements are annoying, whereas these ones replay at three in the morning and arrive with the words always, never and deliberately.
How to tell a projection from a fair complaint
Not everything that irritates you is your own material. Some partners really are unreliable, and adults are entitled to want someone who turns up. Two questions help to separate the cases.
- Is the intensity proportionate? If a forgotten payment produces the fury of a betrayal, something older than the payment has been touched.
- Can you put it down? A fair complaint can be stated, negotiated and left alone, while a projection follows you into the shower and rehearses arguments for you.
There is one line I will not blur. Projection is never an explanation for abuse. Where there is violence, intimidation, financial control or systematic humiliation, the issue is no longer a Shadow asking for integration. It is a question of safety, and it belongs with a specialist and, where relevant, the police.
3 Things that help
- Write the pair of words: Each partner writes down what first attracted them and what they call that same quality today, such as free and irresponsible, solid and controlling, or warm and needy. The root is almost always the same, and seeing it in your own handwriting does more than an hour of arguing.
- Reclaim 1%: Ask what your partner does freely that you have forbidden yourself, then take a small piece of it back. One client began leaving the house on Saturday mornings with no plan and no destination, and her complaints about his character quietened before his character did.
- Change the grammar: Saying “you are irresponsible” starts a war nobody wins, whereas “I envy how easily you do that, and I am angry that I do not let myself” opens a conversation you have probably not had before.
What closeness asks of both partners
Jung was blunt about what this costs. Real closeness becomes possible only after the demanding and often painful work of withdrawing mutual projections and meeting the other person as they actually are, and he did not pretend that every couple survives it. The couples who do tend to describe the result in words far less romantic than the ones they started with, often saying that they finally know who they are married to. The trait that attracted you is still there, and what changes is whether you recognise it as something you carry too.
Anna Bulat is a Ukrainian clinical psychologist trained in analytical psychology through the Ukrainian Jungian Association, a Group Member of the IAAP. She works with anxiety, dreams and trauma, and sees clients online across Europe at Bulat Company.
