The Shadow's Mating Trap in anticlimatic

Who are we, exactly?

Are we who we wish to be? Who we choose to be?
Or are we who we don’t wish to be? Who we never chose to be?

Jung talks about The Shadow Self. Feral, product of the Id. Everything we repress and dislike about ourselves. Everything we project onto others, not knowing it’s really our shortcomings that are triggering us, unseen. It’s a categorical split in our conscious minds between that we wish to be, or value in ourselves consciously, and that which we do not.

When teenagers come into the age of “rebellion,” it’s similar. Evolutionarily speaking, it’s figuring out how to adapt and negotiate with peers/society at large, rather than just our immediate family- but in both functions the mind pursues a persona wholly new and often inverted to that which it is accustomed.

For instance, I came from poverty in a somewhat well to-do area, and out of both a desire to fit in with society, and a desire to overcome my insecurities and compensate for them mentally, from the top-down, I became someone who leaned hard away from every poverty stereotype, and into every privileged stereotype, from the clothes on my back to the vehicles I drove to the interests and hobbies I took up to my general attitude in general, which became one of condescending sophistication.

A child who wanted nothing more than to be loved and creative and share love and share creations became a distant and aloof adult that never lingered in a room or a conversation for more than five minutes, less he risk growing irrevocably attached to yet another unreciprocating facet of society.

The two forces of interpersonal change and expression at work here- a desire to fit in, and a desire to do so by being who we want by way of repressing that about ourselves we dislike, all occurs right around the time we open ourselves to romance and the mess of interpersonal relationships.

When we get older, we tend to sort ourselves out. Get to know ourselves. Reconcile the shadow with the conscious will. But that takes a really long time, and we are usually nearing the end of child bearing age when it happens. Which is largely what contributes to the divorce rate, I think.

In the meantime, however, The Trap is simple. Two people wearing masks meet, fall for the mask of the other, and are then surprised when the masks fall and reveal exactly the opposite of the person they were attracted to. And the same scenario is happening to our poor partner, who is realizing that we are also not at all what we billed ourselves to be, and now the resentment begins to bake.

Even though none of it was intentional, or avoidable.