San Francisco Bay Area Marriage and Family Therapist Intern
Registration #IMF 42021
Supervised by Kim Ives Bailey, MFT
License #MFC 32076

“You’re not the person I fell in love with!”

Falling in love can feel so profound and captivating, so mystical, that it transports us into a different world where colors are brighter, where we feel magically connected, where we feel truly “known” and understood for perhaps the first time in our lives. Part of what happens during the stage of a relationship we call falling in love, however, is that we know only a set amount about the person we’re falling in love with. We’ve already done some unconscious sorting before we got together with this person, and we’re feeling strongly attracted. What we often don’t recognize, though, is that we tend to fill in the unknowns — and there are a lot of them — with our best or idealized ideas about who the person is. The result is that we fall in love with our idea of who the other person is as much as with the person himself or herself. As we get to know him or her better, we start to encounter things that contradict our ideas about who the person should be. It’s at this point that we start to realize he or she isn’t the person we fell in love with. It feels as though the person we love has changed, and while that may be part of it, we also begin to see the difference between who the person really is and who we thought he or she was. At that point, we have the opportunity to learn more about him or her and, depending on what we discover and what we decide to do about it, there can be a significant deepening of the relationship.