Sometimes we think we understand why someone loves who they do. Other times, when we can’t begin to place what they seem to see so clearly, we’re reminded of how individual an experience falling in love really is. Idealization plays an important role in this singularity.
The dangers of idealization are widely discussed, in warnings against making major commitments during the honeymoon phase or in the volatile cycling between idealization and devaluation seen in borderline personality disorder.
Idealization, though, is not merely pathology. What becomes possible if we can recognize our idealization of others as something to learn from, while remaining aware of its risks and heeding the warnings?
It can be valuable both to test our distortions against objective reality and to let the exploration of those distortions guide us. The former provides grounding in a shared world; the latter allows for the expansiveness of subjectivity.
A purely rational kind of love, assessed only against objective reality, may feel safe but emotionally empty. A purely romantic kind, without consideration of objective reality, risks drifting into delusion. Reality-testing without the willingness to be moved by imagination produces something joyless and inert, while imagination without an anchor in shared reality eventually becomes unstable.
Psychoanalyst and MD Ethel Person described idealization as an essential stage of romantic love. According to Person, idealization creates a perception of the loved one’s specialness: their shining qualities become brilliantly illuminated, while their shortcomings recede into comparative insignificance. It’s a powerful mechanism that can initiate something mutual and enduring. Its power carries a bid for the idealized person to receive and return it, as well as a risk of destabilization if the ideal image is shattered.
If idealization is a natural feature of romantic life, we are better off acknowledging it than denying it, so that we can navigate love more honestly and freely. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the aim of treatment is for the analysand to “traverse the fantasy.” This is similar to the Buddhist practice of vipassanā, which seeks liberation through seeing clearly the distortions of attachment. Lacan’s traversal of fantasy aims at a different relation to desire rather than its elimination. Both, however, point toward engaging experience with greater clarity rather than becoming captive to illusion.
For Lacan, wise engagement is playful engagement, because playfulness follows naturally when desire is no longer granted undue authority. A clear-eyed relationship to desire in ourselves allows us to surf its rise and fall rather than crashing with the waves.
Clarity becomes possible when we remember that perception never gives us direct or complete access to objective reality; it is always filtered through our uniquely structured psychic lenses; perception is always partial and selective.
What we desire has a way of pointing toward what we experience as missing in ourselves. Idealization, and selective perception more broadly, can be seen as informative rather than deceptive. Noticing what we idealize in another person can reveal what we value, what we already have, what we feel we’re missing, and ultimately what drives us.
For Lacan, the only ethics are the ethics of desire; there is no pure, hidden, true self that idealization threatens. Authenticity, in this view, is not a question of alignment with a static core, but one of continual contact with desire as it reveals itself. An authentic person has an honest relationship with what they want and the choices they’re making.
If everything we perceive is filtered through the lens of individual subjectivity, our perception of ourselves is no exception. We come to know ourselves partly through the place we imagine we occupy in other people’s minds, like a hall of mirrors. This idea is captured in sociologist Charles Horton Cooley’s idea of the “looking-glass self,” which says we are not what we think we are, nor what others think we are, but what we imagine others think of us.
Falling in love heightens this self-awareness. It gives us an opportunity to decide what to reveal, how much of it, and when. Excessive self-consciousness can backfire, because the challenge is to be aware of how we are seen without becoming consumed by managing that perception. There’s a kind of paradox in courtship: we are shaping how we are seen while also hoping to be genuinely known.
The important thing to ask is what that shaping is primarily responding to: our recognized freedom to create ourselves, or a consuming need for approval/fear of rejection.
The developmental context from which idealization emerges impacts the outcome. The same psychological mechanism can occur at different stages of life, and the stakes change accordingly. For someone who has developed a more reliable capacity to engage honestly with their conflicts, thoughts, feelings, and choices, rejection may be painful, but less likely to be devastating than for someone earlier in their development.
While it varies widely in degree, idealization can be seen as an inevitable part of falling in love. What we idealize in another person offers valuable information about our relationships with ourselves. If we can recognize the process while staying grounded in reality, idealization can be less a trap than a guide, widening self-awareness and providing direction for growth.
