"Everybody has one soul mate." "True
lovers can read each other's minds." "All
you need is love." A psychotherapist
who's seen it all pokes holes in some of
romance's little fairy tales and explains
why life is saner—and happier—without
them.
If we could each pick a few songs to banish from
our heads, Diana de Vegh would nominate all
those soggy old refrains that say there's one—
and only one—true love for each of us: our better
half, our shining knight, the person we'll be lost
without. That line of thought, says de Vegh, a
therapist in private practice in New York, isn't
benignly corny—it's harmful, feeding what she
calls the myth of love scarcity.
"In the scarcity model, where there's only one
person out there, we're all competing for the guy
who's rich and handsome," she says. Our
relationships become fear based: We obsess and
clutch instead of creating an environment in which
two people try to unfold.
De Vegh, a casually elegant woman with
penetrating blue eyes, meets with clients in her
Greenwich Village office, where richly textured wall
hangings, a deep purple sofa, and a fireplace give
evidence of a delight in color and comfort as well
as an assured originality. Her strong sense of self
was hard-won: The reason she has thought so
much about how we can separate romantic
passion from the misconceptions that often
surround it is that she's seen for herself how
damaging they are. As a very young woman, de
Vegh was swept into an affair with then president
John F. Kennedy—perhaps the ultimate fairy-tale
prince. Her own experiences, and those of so
many of the women she has counseled over the
past 15 years, have sharpened her insights into
the ways fantasy romance, rather than
completing us, undoes us.
Love is the ideological bone women have been
thrown," she says, meaning that in our society,
men often get the real power while women are fed
the false promises of "magic candy" romance—
that someone special will shower us with
attention, give us our identity, read our mind, and
intuit our needs.
"Mind reading," she says, "is useful between a
mother and an infant but not in a sexual
relationship between adults." When you want
someone who can anticipate your thoughts and
desires, you're really looking for an idealized
parent—usually a combination of Mommy and
Daddy wrapped into one. "For years, I was looking
for men who would think I was charming and
make me feel safe—like Daddy's best girl," she
says. The craving for that kind of attention is
rampant. "I see women all the time who say
they're looking for romantic relationships, but I
believe they're really looking to be parented. We
all want to feel special and dear, with our foibles
bathed in the loving glow of a doting father," she
says. "At the same time that we want Daddy's
strong arms, we also want a mother's sweetness
and tenderness." And when the romance goes
south, she says, you end up feeling like a child
who's been abandoned and is lost.
"We all naturally fall in love with a handsome,
married man—our fathers," she says. "They bring
us out into the world. And if we're secure, we
grow up to want something more interesting than
parent-child love; we want an adult partnership."
But the precondition for that, she says, is a good
relationship with ourselves.
It's when you view yourself as powerless, with
your worth dependent on how someone else
treats you, that love gets corrupted, de Vegh
says. "Letting men determine who we are is the
negative hinge that turns desire into vulnerability,
changes our bodies from sites of pleasure to sites
of betrayal, and transforms solitude into
loneliness. I think that when people say they're
lonely, what they're really saying is that they
don't like their own company. And something
should be done about that, because if you don't
like your own company, then you're the victim of
whoever passes by."
