Are You Airbrushing Your Relationship?

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Addison rushes into my office, ecstatic about James, whom she’s been dating for three weeks. “I’ve found my soulmate,” she says.

Three months later, she’s devastated that the relationship has ended. She’s had a series of four-month relationships that usually ended badly. “I don’t get romantic love,” she says.

I see this scenario play out frequently. A client gushes that their newest fling is “the one,” casting a relative stranger in the role of their future partner by focusing only on their idealized qualities.

In other words, they are airbrushing their partner.

In the early days of a relationship, it’s tempting to idolize the other person. They’re a blank slate, so it’s easy to project our unconscious fantasies onto them and ignore the signs that they might not be a good match.

Many experience a cognitive bias called the halo effect. In a 1920 study, psychologist Edward Thorndike found that our first impressions of a person can influence how we feel and think about their overall character. This can partially explain how perceiving a few initial good qualities enables people to overlook any bad tendencies.

Signs that you might be airbrushing:

1. Ignoring Relationship Red Flags. At a bridal shower, Bonnie sits in a circle with her 23 friends—all of whom are married or engaged—watching the bride-to-be open gifts. “We need to find you a good man,” someone says to her.

Bonnie politely smiles, but she's mortified. She feels embarrassment and hopelessness that she has failed to find a partner. Nearly all of her friends are married, and she’s feeling pressure from her parents. That’s why she puts so much hope in her relationship with Alex.

In a recent therapy session, she tells me he is a successful British journalist with a great apartment, and he spent their second date gushing about her beauty, wit, and intelligence.

But Alex is awful to Bonnie, she later revealed. Alex knows that Bonnie’s brother died in a motorcycle accident, but still talks endlessly about the good times he had driving his Moto Guzzi around England. He criticizes her appearance in front of others, and then gets angry with her when she says she’s hurt.

Bonnie talks about all of this behavior in her sessions, but she quickly justifies it, clinging to the positive idea of him.

Solution: Play out the tape. I ask Bonnie to imagine that she is married to Alex but he has not changed. He is still invalidating, critical, and emotionally unsafe. When Bonnie looked into the future, and saw herself riddled with the same anxiety and fear, she ended the relationship.

It’s important to not think about your future partner as a “fixer-upper.” When people tell and show you who they are, believe them.

2. Fixating on Your Romantic Partner Checklist. Peter works for a big bank and is quite successful in his career, but not in his relationships. He is highly concerned about optics and fixated on finding someone who makes him look good to others.

He has a checklist, and his girlfriend Emily hits all the marks. She is beautiful, skis, has an Ivy League education, and comes from a good family.

She also treats him terribly, with no consideration for his feelings. She is flaky and disinterested, frequently canceling dates at the last minute.

Checklisters are so fixated on their lists that they ignore the reality of their own experience. They’re not attuned enough to their own needs to see that their partner isn't meeting them. They ignore their feelings to accommodate who they think they should be or what they want their partner to be via external metrics.

Dating apps make checkboxing particularly tempting, because the algorithm is designed to feed your checklist with the data you give it.

Solution: Ignore the optics and focus on how a person makes you feel. This helps box-checkers better attune themselves to their intuition and develop more respect for their lived experience.

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Going through items on the list—Ivy-league diploma, tall, large-friend group, etc.—helps us get curious. By getting very detailed about the “whys,” you can begin to unpack historical or societal reasons for certain nonnegotiable items. This understanding can help you loosen standards that may be preventing you from finding a suitable partner.

3. Wanting to Fast-Forward to Long-Term Commitment. At the beginning of a recent appointment, Nora announced that she had met her future husband. But she was impatient to get to commitment. “I wish I could just leapfrog over all this dating stuff,” she said.

Dating involves a lot of vulnerability and uncertainty. A lot of people, especially once they get past 30, don’t want to go through it anymore. They want to fast-forward to the magic moment when they’re married and imagine everything will be OK.

But if you're fast-forwarding to marriage before taking the time to understand a person, you risk jeopardizing the security, consistency, and knowledge that the dating period creates. You're overlooking critical information for compatibility.

Solution: Slow down. If you're inclined to fast-forward, ask yourself why. Are you terrified of the messy, vulnerable aspect of the uncertainty of dating? Are you tired of being the bridesmaid? Terrified of being burned again? Or, on a deeper level, are you worried no one will ever really love you?

When you slow down, you have the space to see what’s actually going on, good or bad.

Why aren’t you enjoying the first stages of a romance? Is this person making you feel unsafe or uncertain, ignoring you, or being slow to respond to texts?

The beginning might be scary, but it should also be a happy time. This is the time when you are discovering each other. It’s not something you can skip, and you shouldn’t want to. If you want to hit the fast-forward button, it could be a sign that you it might be better to press “stop” instead.

Take off those relationship goggles: Airbrushing leads to disappointment and heartache, so it’s important to watch for the signs that you’re not seeing your new partner clearly.