‘Why Do I Panic and Break Up As Soon As the Honeymoon Phase Is Over?’

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist, a best-selling author, and the host of the podcast Where Should We Begin? She’s also a leading expert on contemporary relationships. This column is adapted from the podcast — which is now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network — and you can listen and follow for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

This week’s caller can’t stop leaving new relationships as soon as the honeymoon phase over. Reality sets in, he finds himself fantasizing about his exes, and eventually bolts. “I end up in this pool of regret that I’ve just let this amazing person go,” the caller tells Perel. “It’s a continuous cycle that I’m looking to explore, hopefully break, or become better equipped to deal with for my future relationships.” Below, Esther Perel helps him locate this pattern in his parents’ dynamic and discusses how to break it.

Esther: You’re describing a pattern. What do you know about what drives this? 

Caller: I understand the timing of it. It usually happens when you start to pivot out of that honeymoon phase: We haven’t had our first proper fight, we haven’t really had any kind of test of the relationship in any way. I think that it’s also to do with my ability to shut out the external world, the feelings that pop up to do with desire for other people as well. So in the example, I reference two partners, a current one and an ex partner. The reality of that scenario was that when the ex partner, in my mind, no longer desired me as a person, was when those intrusive thoughts came in.

I think it’s a loss of desire from someone and that triggers me to think, Maybe I should be with them, maybe I should be with somebody else. That’s kind of the tipping point, usually.

Esther: There’s one thing I would suggest we switch. None of this is external. Even if you think that other people — exes, or potential other partners, or imaginative, imaginary figures — are external, what drives this whole thing is internal. “When you want me, there’s a moment at which I suddenly feel like I need to flee. When you stop wanting me and I begin to feel the anxiety of the rejection or of the aloneness, then I become the pursuer.”

Caller: Yeah, it does sound essentially how it happens. As I’ve gotten older (I’m in my late 20s) and have had more experience with relationships, I have become more aware of it. In previous relationships, instead of talking to my partners about it, I just exited because I’ve had this notion that I can’t put them through this; I can’t explain this to them out of some fear of confrontation or maybe even rejection.

Esther: You don’t do this with friends? 

Caller: No, my friendships are strong. They’re long lasting. I have consistent, long relationships with people who I would perceive as healthy and very fulfilling. It’s just my romantic relationships where I am falling short.

Esther: There is a saying that there are only two relationships who really resemble each other — the one we had with our original caregivers or parents and the ones we have with our romantic partners. Most of us manage to elude our patterns when it comes to our friends, because there’s just enough distance that allows us not to have to repeat certain things. An obvious question then becomes where else have you known this, besides in your romantic relationships? Not the similarity, because it’s not about desire, but it is about the in, out, push, pull, pursuer, distancer, and so on. And the kind of fraught experience around your attachment to them. 

Caller: You know, I think when I do hear that question, my automatic response is obviously my parents. It was pretty awful. It was a loveless relationship. They are amazing people as individuals. They did an amazing job in raising their kids. But as a

Esther: What did you see? 

Caller: A lot of anger, a lot of resentment, a lot of fighting, a lot of crying, a lot of emotion. A lot of volatility. Such small insignificant things would trigger these gargantuan responses. My dad, when he’s late to dinner, it would be World War II. It was never physical, but some of these fights were massive. As a young child that was my first view of what a relationship should be I guess.

Esther: How many kids? 

Caller: Just two. But my brother is significantly older than me. So by the time I was 10, he was already gone. It was kind of like an only-child situation for a significant period of my early childhood.

Esther: Did they sometimes kind of draw you in — not in the middle of a fight necessarily — but in telling you how they felt? 

Caller: One thing that my family is not brilliant at is telling anyone how they feel. It was always: Maybe go and cry in a bedroom or leave the house. It was never “let’s talk about this.”

Esther: Did you have equal sympathy for both or did you find yourself leaning more toward one than the other. 

Caller: I think as a child my automatic sympathy went toward my mother.

Esther: Tell me more.

Caller: At that point, coming to terms with being gay, I would kind of go toward my mother. She was very nurturing; she was very open and loving. I think it’s just easier to relate to her as a child. As I’ve grown older, and I’ve become more aware of my parents and who they are as people, I sympathize with my father more as a person. He’s a brilliant man, he’s funny, he’s caring, he’s kind, and a lot of these big fights, they were my mother reacting to dad not coming to dinner on time. As a young child, it was definitely the nurturing mother, that feminine energy that I gravitated toward.

Esther: Mm-hmm. If you were to describe the sequence between your parents, how would you describe it? 

Caller: It’s kind of hard for me to describe what their sequence is because they just stayed together.

Esther: Yes, their sequence is that they are trapped. And being trapped is what makes you bolt. You come in that two-month period, it’s just on the edge. It’s before the first fight, it’s before the first argument, and once the first one arrives, all you can imagine is mayhem. And you go from honeymoon to trap. You’re describing your parents in a state of entrapment. And you’re describing how you, somewhere along the line, to yourself — maybe to others but primarily to yourself — made a vow that you would never be trapped. You would never be in that kind of misery. But you don’t really know how not to be in the misery, except fleeing. So it’s meant as an act of self-protection, but it becomes such an expression of avoidance that in the end, you find yourself alone. So one of the tricks for not being alone is to fantasize about the ex or about the next. 

Caller: Yeah, that’s definitely the sequence.

Esther: When you have a fight with friends, I’m just curious, you know to disagree, you know to get into an argument, you know how to repair, you know how to say what you want I imagine, yes? 

Caller: I would say that I communicate well, I resolve conflicts well, I nurture my friendships well.

Esther: Beautiful. So this lives inside of you. You don’t approach friendships with fear and trepidation and foreboding, whereas you approach romantic relationships with that. 

Let me ask you something. Did your relationships to the men change when your relationship with your dad improved? 

Caller: Yes, they did. There was a lot of resentment toward my parents, and I think that was probably a by-product of me not being fully comfortable with myself and not being fully out of the closet. Once that process of self-acceptance started for me and obviously being okay with who I was, I was able to build that relationship back with my dad. And I see him as the brilliant person that I see him as now.

Esther: Did he accept you? 

Caller: Early on, I always knew that being gay was never going to be an issue. I have a gay older brother, and my parents have always been very forward with their support of the gay community, even when I wasn’t a part of it. But I think what made it difficult for me was that there was an expectation that I was going to be the straight kid, just purely because my brother had already came out. They’re like, “Okay, one is gay, but hey, we got one more to go.” That’s how I kind of perceived the situation at the time. And then I spent a lot of time going back and forth, hiding who I was. I think it made it a little harder for me because I was actually dating women up until the point where I did come out.

Esther: Same pattern with the women? 

Caller: No, not necessarily. I had long term relationships, obviously with this voice in my head saying, “Hey, you find men attractive.”

Esther: No, so no risks of getting entrapped there because that’s not where I belong.

Caller: I think I knew at some point that this wasn’t going to be my life story. But yeah, to answer your question, my relationship with my dad did get a lot better and has continued to get better with age.

Esther: And how did it change your relationship with your partners? 

Caller: Obviously, the first few months of me dating a man seriously, I wasn’t out to my parents. I think I used that relationship as kind of a leverage to have that conversation. I don’t think I would have been at a point to just go, “Hey, I’m gay.” I used that relationship to come out to my parents.

Esther: Was your brother helpful? 

Caller: Not really, no. Umm, he’s, he’s lived overseas for a significant period of time and in a similar fashion to my parents, I had a strained relationship with him. After I came out, his response was “I’ve known for a while.” He never offered any kind of support, which I think to his, I guess, defense, he was allowing me to find my own way and to kind of take my time and not feel pressured. But for me, I felt left on my own, to kind of deal with this and work through it.

Esther: Have you ever spoken with your parents about their misery, about what it was like to grow up with their incessant fighting about how you perceive their loneliness? 

Caller: No, I haven’t, and I think the conversation would be easier with my father than my mother. Why is that? I think for my mother, for a long time now, probably since my early childhood, she’s been medicating with alcohol. She’s been through quite a lot, and I don’t think she has the tools or the desire to kind of seek external help. I just worry that that conversation would be too much and it would trigger this alcohol consumption, this self-medication.

Esther: I hear you. I hear also that you see your mom as the more brittle, the more fragile, and the person who sees herself as the victim. He comes late for dinner, and she feels diminished by his lateness, but it never occurs to her to ask herself if there’s something in the way that she reacts that may make him want to stay out later.

Caller: Yeah, definitely.

Esther: He stays out later and pays the price of not knowing his son as much as he would like and as much as his son would like to know him. So the son is home with mom, for whom he has developed very deep feelings that are very mixed. A part of him resents her for her reactivity, and a part of him feels very responsible to make sure that he doesn’t make it worse for her, because he never knows what she can actually handle and what she can’t. And a part of him feels deeply caring for her, because she’s the nurturing, kind, accepting mother. And a part of him feels guilty because sometimes all he wants is to get away from her. But he feels guilty about it because he knows that she may not be able to take care of herself well and that she’s self harming. 

So between the guilt and the resentment and the love and the sense of responsibility, he finds himself entwined in a complex set of contradictory feelings for her. And all of that sits in the background when he falls in love with any other man. 

Caller: Yeah, like, I can’t put it any different. That’s exactly how it is.

Esther: But say it in your voice. 

Caller: In my own words, I would say that I am overwhelmed with these feelings toward specifically my mother. It’s kind of a feeling of helplessness in some ways because I just don’t have the tools to navigate feelings that I have toward her, and I don’t have the tools to kind of help her either.

One of the parting words that my parents always said to me when I moved out of home is that, “We’ll be fine. Go and live your life.” It just feels likeI can’t do that. This sense of being helpless and overwhelmed and confused filters into my romantic relationships because I see myself when I’m in these relationships and they’re good and they’re healthy and I feel like I’m in love. It feels like at any particular or any unspoken point that that might just turn and I will end up being my mother or my father. That’s how I liken those two relationships and how it impacts me.

Esther: When you tell me, “This is happening in all my relationships, I recognize the pattern. I basically enter a state of panic. I don’t know what the panic is about, but I have a state of panic and I start to deflect.” The fact that it has to do with desire and fantasies about an ex or about others, that’s just the mechanism with which you’re doing it. Don’t get caught there because the relationships are good. You can’t say, “I have communication issues.” So you find something to fantasize about — others. Basically, “I start fleeing,” and if you think it’s a conversation about desire, you may miss the point. 

So then the first question I have is what are you replaying? What makes you bolt? What’s the panic? And if it’s recurrent, it’s a logical next step to say, tell me about home. 

Caller: I think in the last relationship that I had, it was kind of like this whirlwind and up to a certain point I was thrilled with that. There was a point that I remember quite vividly, a discussion around my partner starting to feel anxious within the relationship and —

Esther: About wanting to know where it’s going? 

Caller: No, so we were committed at that point. We’d traveled overseas, we said we loved each other and that was all very genuine. When I reflect on me, in that relationship at that period of time, that’s how I want to be consistently, I suppose. But the anxiety conversation came up. My partner at the time didn’t really understand what that anxiety was or what was triggering it. For me, I was comfortable with that conversation to try to offer my assistance, to try to kind of get an understanding of what the trigger points were for that anxiety. And he didn’t have the answers and he didn’t really want to talk through that with me. I think after a few failed attempts at trying, I got an understanding of what that anxiety was and what it meant. I think that’s when I started to pull away and that’s when I —

Esther: So when he talked to me about his anxiety, but was not willing or able to explore it with me, what happened to me? Don’t tell me just what you did. Tell me also, if you can, what you experienced. 

Caller: I think I experienced at the time frustration and shortly thereafter, I started to wonder whether this relationship was right, and I started to have that questioning thought process of “should I stay, should I go,” and then eventually the thoughts of this person that I was with before, my ex. I think we were really well suited.

Esther: I get it, but I’m gonna slow you down for a moment. Because you can describe the steps and I would like to see if we can go underneath the surface for a moment so that you get a different awareness of what is driving you. He says, “I’m anxious.” Your first response is, “I’m curious. I’m interested. I care.” And as you try to go back with him in the conversation, and he isn’t able to join you, you get frustrated. That frustration is like an open door to the history with your mom entering inside your internal home. From frustration, what follows? Responsibility? Fear? Annoyance? Impatience? Resentment? Which one? 

Caller: I would say fear.

Esther: Fear of? “Shit, I’m gonna find myself once again?” 

Caller: Yeah, in a position where I’m going to start pulling away from this person. I’m going to be …

Esther: No no before I’m going to start pulling away. Pulling away is a response to something. It’s not the initial behavior. Pulling away happens to me when I’m in front of this man who I thought I loved freely and I suddenly start to once again experience this overwhelming sense of responsibility and helplessness and burden and weightiness. 

Caller: Yeah. I think burden is a good way to describe that. This feeling of my parents and all those complex feelings, it’s an additional burden on top of that. I think when I’m in those early stages, it’s easy. There’s no baggage, there’s no additional stress. And then when anxiety creeps in, or whatever the trigger is, I think I see that as potentially the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back in regards to stress or burden.

Esther: So, remember, the desire to flee is commensurate with the size of the burden and the responsibility that creeps up inside of you. “Oh shit, I’m once again going to have to take care, carry, hold, feel responsible, but then not be able to manage the responsibility, so feel overwhelmed and helpless. Oh, gosh, I gotta go. I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here as fast as I can. Because if I stay one extra minute, I’m gonna be swallowed up alive.”

Caller: Yeah. Yep.

Esther: You feel it in your body? 

Caller: I do, yeah.

Esther: Where? 

Caller: It’s kind of like a clenching inside of my stomach when I hear that said out loud.

Esther: You feel it? Can you stand up for a moment so I can see? And just put your hands right there where you had them. Just breathe into this. Because it takes over and there is just nowhere to go but out. And see if you can breathe inside, into, you can sit, you can sit back. If you can breathe into your hands, not just up here, but literally expand your ribcage and just make space. Because your whole experience is an experience of contraction. And you don’t differentiate between your mom, your dad, especially your mom and your lovers. It’s as if the past and the present collapse. 

Caller: It’s hard to hear.

Esther: Because you thought, “I’m gone, I’m out of the house, I left all of this behind”? 

Caller: Yeah, I think.

Esther: What the fuck, this is all inside of me? 

Caller: What the fuck, yeah. I think I felt that by the time I moved out, me having my independent life, having this relationship with them that was, you know, not there every day. I can kind of come and go as I please and regulate my interactions with them. I definitely thought that that was going to help, but I don’t think it has. It’s just a what the F.

Esther: But the good thing about this, what do you, what do you call it? WTF. I spell it out. That’s why, you know, is that, you know, now with a little bit more clarity, What is actually playing out inside of you? When I get close to someone, the closeness triggers a reenactment of the trap that my parents were in, and that I experienced in the overwhelming sense of responsibility I carried for mom. And I need to learn to experience closeness. and bring in different associations.

Caller: You know, my logical mind has always been …

Esther: No, there’s nothing logical about this thing. This is all in your belly, in your gut, not in your head, which is why the story you tell about me coming close, honeymoon, then moving away, fantasizing, that’s the story line. 

But that doesn’t tell the actual driver underneath, which is another story. So when you want to flee, you’ll ask yourself, “What just happened to me? What did I just feel? How did the past just intrude on the present? And what can I do in this moment to anchor me in the present in my life?” Because maybe this guy was anxious, but that doesn’t mean he was becoming another version of your mom, and you, another version of her son. Or he was becoming whoever he was and you were becoming Mom or Dad. See, there are very few characters in this story. We need new characters. 

Caller: It’s a small story. Yeah.

Esther: No, it’s a deep story. It’s a painful story, but it can open up and bring in new characters, new parts. 

Caller: I think I’m ready for some new characters.

Esther: The beauty of making this a story about sex and about desire is that it puts you in an adult story line. Adults talk about desire and sex and fantasies for others and all of that. And so it covers up the fact that it is the story of the little boy because it plays itself out in a pseudo version of an adult. Sex is a good cover up for that. 

Caller: I agree. I think even when I described that relationship, I was like, the sex was amazing, the adult connection was amazing, but I still fled, I still had that process.

Esther: Is he around? 

Caller: The relationship is strained. There was a lot of hurt. He said he was blindsided by this sudden departure and said that he preferred that if we didn’t talk. And that does hurt.

Esther: Unless you can one day go and tell him what you’ve learned about yourself that he became the subject of and had nothing to do with him. 

Caller: I still have very strong feelings toward him, but for us to re-spark that …

Esther: No, we’re not talking about re-sparking. We’re talking about accountability. We’re talking about just clarifying and apologizing. To say he was recruited for a play that he didn’t audition for 

Caller: Neither did I, by the sound of it.

Esther: Your drama, you are able to begin to connect the dots. And that’s the beginning. That’s really so that you actually know what happens to me? What happens to me at the end is that I flee. But the first thing is a host of very old feelings get triggered inside of me and they bring me back to a place of overwhelming, helpless anger, guilt, fear. It’s a big maelstrom of contradictory feelings. It’s a mess and it’s intense and it’s painful. I first need to go and clear that up a little bit so that I can free myself to be in my own relationship and not feel like I’m branded. 

Caller: I imagine it’s a story that’s well told by not just myself …

Esther: You’re not alone. But we have strange ways to protect ourselves sometimes. We create other storyboards to not see the real story.

This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Esther Perel , 2024-04-22 18:00:51

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