Cover photograph by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
On emotional dependency, idealization, and the strange fear of being free.
In some relationships, the happiest day is always tomorrow.
Tomorrow, they'll finally understand you.
Tomorrow, they'll stop hurting you.
Tomorrow, after you've worked hard enough, forgiven enough, sacrificed enough, the relationship will become what it was always supposed to be.
Today, unfortunately, is a bit of a disaster.
But tomorrow?
Tomorrow will be magnificent.
This is one of the peculiar features of emotional dependency. Sometimes the person isn't really attached to the relationship they have.
They're attached to the relationship they imagine.
Falling in love with an image
In a dependent relationship, the partner may become less important as a real person than as the carrier of an ideal.
Someone who will finally provide unconditional love.
Someone who will make abandonment impossible.
Someone whose presence will silence the unpleasant suspicion that perhaps, underneath everything, you are alone.
And being alone is terrifying.
Not simply because there's nobody to talk to, sleep beside, or have breakfast with.
But because solitude means encountering yourself.
Without an audience. Without reassurance. Without someone else constantly confirming that you matter.
Just you.
The ordinary, imperfect, sometimes disappointing you.
For someone whose sense of worth depends heavily on another person's attention, freedom can feel almost as frightening as abandonment.
Freedom means having to decide what to do with your own life.
And being responsible for the answer.
Every warning becomes another reason to stay
The trouble with idealization is that reality keeps interrupting it.
A partner lies.
Breaks promises.
Disappears.
Humiliates.
Sometimes even becomes violent.
These are reasons to recognize what is happening and, where necessary, protect yourself.
But inside the logic of dependency, warning signs can be transformed into challenges.
They've had a difficult childhood.
They're frightened of intimacy.
They're testing whether I'll stay.
Nobody has ever loved them properly.
And the great classic:
Things will be different when they finally understand how much I love them.
Cruelty becomes a problem to solve rather than a reason to reconsider the relationship.
The dependent person isn't necessarily blind to reality.
They may see it perfectly well.
They simply keep placing a more desirable future above it.
A remarkable amount of suffering can be endured in the name of a happiness that hasn't happened yet.
The cycle of tomorrow
The pattern can be described in six movements.
Fear → Idealization → Holding on → Pain → Hope → Fear again.
Fear of being abandoned makes the relationship feel indispensable.
Idealization turns the partner into the answer to that fear.
Holding on becomes more important than evaluating what the relationship actually provides.
Pain inevitably appears.
But pain doesn't necessarily end the attachment. Sometimes it produces another round of bargaining, explanation, and hope.
Perhaps this time everything will change.
Then the fear returns, and the cycle begins again.
The dependent person can be an extraordinary idealist.
They aren't necessarily searching for pleasure alone. They may be searching for one perfect thing that will compensate for the imperfection of everything else.
One person.
One substance.
One experience.
One source of reassurance that will finally be enough.
Of course, substance addiction and emotional dependency are not identical clinical phenomena. But the psychological metaphor is useful.
Dependency can narrow an enormous, complicated world into one indispensable source of relief.
Instead of learning to live with variety, uncertainty, and imperfection, everything begins revolving around a single promise.
When being rescued becomes a way of being loved
There's another strange complication.
Sometimes people become accustomed not only to suffering, but to the attention that surrounds it.
In certain families or relationships, ordinary needs receive very little response.
But a crisis changes everything.
Someone is ill.
Someone is in trouble.
Someone has disappeared, relapsed, or fallen apart.
Suddenly there are phone calls, arguments, urgent visits, accusations, concern, and rescue.
Not necessarily pleasant attention.
Sometimes it's criticism, anger, or shame.
But at least everyone is looking.
And for a person who has learned to associate being noticed with being in trouble, even negative attention can feel more familiar than quiet acceptance.
Now imagine that the crisis ends.
The person recovers, becomes more independent, or starts managing their own life.
As we sometimes say in Ukrainian, radu sobi daiesh: you're taking care of yourself.
Wonderful.
Nobody has to rescue you.
Nobody has to drag you out of a ditch.
Nobody has to organize their entire day around your latest catastrophe.
And suddenly the world becomes rather quiet.
For someone accustomed to receiving care through emergencies, this quiet can feel surprisingly lonely.
That doesn't mean people consciously invent illnesses or manufacture disasters to attract attention. Real suffering isn't a performance, and recovery is rarely straightforward.
But familiar patterns of receiving attention can be difficult to replace.
Sometimes a person has learned how to be cared for in a crisis without ever learning how to ask for closeness in ordinary life.
The person sitting beside the leash
This is where the idea of codependency becomes relevant.
The term originated in discussions of addiction-affected relationships and remains controversial in psychology. It is best used as a description of certain patterns, not as a diagnosis.
Still, it captures something recognizable.
One person organizes life around a dependency.
The other organizes life around managing that person.
Watching.
Worrying.
Rescuing.
Preventing consequences.
Sacrificing plans.
Trying to keep everything under control.
Eventually, the second person's identity may become just as tightly organized around the first person's difficulties.
What would happen to them without me?
A reasonable question, until it becomes the only question.
What would happen to me without this role?
Who would I be if nobody needed rescuing?
There's a cruel little paradox here.
The person being rescued may fear abandonment.
The rescuer may fear becoming unnecessary.
And so both can end up defending a relationship that leaves neither particularly free.
When the future finally stops making promises
The way out isn't simply learning to tolerate loneliness.
It's learning that loneliness is not proof of worthlessness.
That freedom doesn't mean abandonment.
That someone can love you without becoming responsible for your entire existence.
And that being needed is not the same thing as being loved.
For some people, this means grieving the ideal relationship they kept waiting for.
Not necessarily grieving the actual person.
Grieving the imagined person.
The future in which everything would finally be repaired.
The tomorrow that never arrived.
That grief can be difficult precisely because the dream was doing so much psychological work.
But letting go of it makes room for something less spectacular and considerably more useful.
Real contact.
With a real person.
Someone who can disappoint you without destroying you.
Someone who doesn't need to be saved in order to remain close.
Someone you can love without having to abandon yourself.
Dependency can feel like sitting on a leash.
Codependency can become sitting beside the person on the leash, because leaving them alone would feel unbearable.
And perhaps recovery begins when both people discover that love doesn't require either of them to remain tied up.
Especially not until tomorrow.
Related reading
- When Suffering Becomes a Form of Control
- A Threshold Is Not a Home
- The Personality You Built to Survive
- Trauma Doesn't Always Introduce Itself