Do You Love the Person—or Who You Want Them to Become?
During one of the family constellations I facilitated, I worked with a woman who had felt unseen and rejected for much of her life. Her father had been absent, while her mother—caught in her own suffering and addiction—had been unable to give her what she needed most as a child: love, closeness and the feeling that she truly mattered.
When she grew up, the same absence began to repeat itself in her relationships with men. Her partners were expected to be present, strong, attentive, affectionate and ready to fill the emptiness created many years before. The problem was that none of them could do it.
Not because they were bad people or incapable of love. They were simply being given a task that no partner can fulfil: they were expected to repair the childhood of an adult woman.
During the constellation, she was unable to look at the representative of her father for a long time. There was a great deal of anger and disappointment. Underneath, however, we found something much deeper—a little girl who was still waiting for her father to finally see her, choose her and give her everything she had not received from him before.
That was when an important question appeared:
Do we love people as they really are, or do we love our idea of who they should become for us?
Expectations do not appear without a reason
I do not believe that we should get rid of all expectations. In a relationship, we need respect, honesty, safety and responsibility. We have the right to set boundaries and decide what we are—and are not—willing to accept.
The problem begins when we unconsciously expect another person to fill everything that is missing inside us. We want a partner to replace the father or mother we needed. We expect our parents to suddenly become people they never knew how to be. We wait for someone to finally prove that we are important and worthy of love.
At that point, a partner is no longer simply a partner. They become the person responsible for repairing our past.
Every time they withdraw, it may feel like the abandonment we experienced years ago. Every lack of attention can remind us of not being seen as children. Every “no” can awaken the old belief that once again, we are not important enough.
We are then no longer reacting only to what is happening today. A part of us is still responding from the place of the child who continues to wait for something they never received.
I also had to leave to begin finding myself
I know this process from my own life. My family lives in Poland, while I moved to Spain partly to free myself, gain distance and discover who I really was outside my family’s expectations, patterns and stories.
For a long time, I wanted the people closest to me to understand me. I wanted them to see the world as I did and to become more open, conscious and willing to face their emotions.
My mother, for example, became mentally and emotionally closed off in many areas because of trauma connected with my sister. For years, I tried to show her something different, explain another perspective or help her see what I believed could change her life.
Part of this came from love. But another part came from the desire for her to change because her transformation would have made my life easier. At some point, I had to recognise that trying to save another person can become a very subtle form of control.
This understanding did not come easily. After seven years of intensive inner work, many moments of anger, crying and hitting my head against the same walls, hundreds of constellations that I have either facilitated or participated in, and more than thirty ayahuasca ceremonies, I still encounter things that I understand intellectually but cannot yet fully embody in my own life.
I am not going to pretend that I have mastered all of this.
Becoming conscious does not mean suddenly having an answer to every question. It is more like peeling an onion. We remove one layer, and only then can we see what is underneath. Sometimes we think that a particular issue has already been resolved, and life shows us another, deeper part of the same pattern.
Acceptance does not mean agreeing to everything
Acceptance is often confused with passivity—with tolerating harm, abuse, addiction or a lack of respect. That is not what acceptance means to me.
I can accept that someone is who they are today and still decide that I do not want to remain close to them. I can love someone and establish a clear boundary. I can understand their suffering without allowing that suffering to destroy my life.
Acceptance says: “I see who you are and what you are currently unable to give me.”
A boundary says: “I am responsible for this part of my life.”
Control says: “For me to feel okay, you must change.”
The difference is enormous, even if it is not always easy to recognise in everyday life.
Do we allow people to love us in their own way?
Sometimes we become so attached to one particular expression of love that we cannot recognise any other.
We want someone to use specific words, hug us more often, speak openly about emotions or react exactly as we think they should. When they do not, we conclude that they do not love us.
But perhaps they express love differently—through their presence, responsibility, actions, care for everyday matters or by remaining beside us during a difficult moment.
This does not mean convincing ourselves that what we received was enough if, in reality, we received too little. It is about widening our perspective. It is about asking whether we can recognise love even when it does not arrive in the form we expected.
Our expectations are shaped by our perception, and that perception is connected to our experiences, traumas and unmet needs. When I expect another person to behave in a particular way, it is worth asking: am I really seeing them, or am I mainly trying to use them to fulfil something that is missing in me?
If we look at this through the perspective of resonance, an expectation may constantly communicate: “I still do not have this.” The mind then begins to notice mainly the evidence that confirms the absence. We overlook what is already reaching us because we are still waiting for another version of it.
This is why expectations so often end in disappointment. Reality rarely follows the script we have written for it.
The hardest part is allowing another person to take responsibility for their own life
This is probably one of the most difficult lessons of love.
We may see someone making choices that will eventually cost them. We may sense that the path they have chosen will lead to suffering. We may want to show them a solution that already seems obvious to us.
We have the right to speak, to warn, to share our experience and to offer help. Some situations genuinely require decisive intervention, especially when someone’s health, safety or life is in immediate danger.
But in a relationship between two adults, we cannot live another person’s life for them. We cannot make their decisions or force them to accept our perspective.
Real love does not give us the right to take control of another adult’s life.
We can stand beside them. We can extend a hand. We can honestly tell them what we see. But they will decide whether to take that hand and what they choose to do next.
For me, this is one of the hardest aspects of love because it requires letting go of control. It also requires accepting that someone we love may choose a different path from the one we believe would be best for them.
Perhaps that path is exactly what they need at this stage of their journey.
Love does not always look like a fairy tale
Real love is not always comfortable. Sometimes it means staying close, and sometimes it means leaving. Sometimes it means helping, and sometimes it means stopping the constant rescue. Sometimes it means saying, “I am here with you,” and sometimes it means calmly and firmly saying, “I cannot accept this.”
The point is not to stop having needs. It is to recognise which needs genuinely belong to the present relationship and which ones we are still trying to fulfil on behalf of the child we once were.
When we begin to accept our parents as they were and as they are—with what they were able to give us and what they simply did not know how to give—we slowly stop demanding that our partners repair the past for them.
By accepting others, we also begin to accept ourselves. No longer as the black sheep, the rejected one or the person who must constantly prove their worth.
Perhaps we are simply human beings going through a deep transformation. We are learning to remove one layer after another and look at ourselves, our parents and our partners from an increasingly wider perspective.
We do not always need to understand everything immediately. Some experiences first need time to settle. Clarity often comes later.
So perhaps it is worth asking yourself one final question:
Do I love the person standing in front of me, or am I still waiting for them to become someone who will fill all the empty spaces inside me?
Some details of the client’s story have been changed to protect her privacy.
