Seth Godin speaking on a podcast and he mentioned that people write to him all the time wanting their articles published on his website. He took time to think about this and said that if you want to be successful as an entrepreneur you have to choose yourself because no one is going to choose you. This is true of our relationships also. No one is coming to save you.
The name of this article may have you curious on how this connects to relationships. ‘There isn’t The One’ taps into the fantasies we have about who we are to be in love with. Most of the time, we are looking for a savior.
The savior fantasy is this unconscious fantasy that everyone has and reacts to. This is why this topic of ‘Savior’ is so popular. It exists in religion, comic books, superhero movies and epic tales of mythology. The epic tales of Greek gods didn’t have perfect saviors, but that’s something to talk about later.
Think about those who have this unconscious belief in a savior. You either unconsciously function on the fantasy that you are the savior or someone will save you. You are the white knight or damsel in distress.
White Knights
The white knights will act out their fantasies of being the savior of all women or of all the poor, or all minorities or pick your group that they see as below themselves. When thinking about white knights who are acting out their fantasies of saving women they will say what they believe women want to hear and fall on their sword over and over again as they attack anything a woman attacks.
Many people will just say that these white knights are just desperate to have sex and are weak, low testosterone individuals. Maybe, doesn’t really matter though. What the white knight is doing is being an unhealthy narcissist. In Psychoanalysis, we see narcissism as self-hate, not the overindulgence of self-love that is rampant in pop culture.
A white knight who allies himself with the group think of hateful women hates himself and the one who hates himself cannot love a woman. They also specifically seek out hateful women as their objects of love which will guarantee that they will never even have the opportunity to actually love a woman because they keep having ‘evidence’ that woman are just abusers. They also take on the identity of the misandrist group which makes it that they are not responsible for what they do and again have no identity because they’re a white knight and not a person, not them.
This makes it easy to see why a white knight does not qualify for a long-term thriving relationship. They are constantly self-attacking their mind while surrounding themselves with misandrist groups and women who would keep him in check and attack anything in him that would be considered male and consumes himself within the group think which will attack him any time he attempted to become an individual or even really love.
If you’re not an individual yourself who can, at minimum, tolerate the good and the bad within yourself then you have disqualified yourself.
Your focus is on the external and your focus is driven by the death drive which is hostility and hate. You practice mental death daily so you will not be able to practice life mentally.
The white knight cannot love because they seek out those who themselves do not want to be loved.
Damsels in Distress
Damsel’s in distress have been historically framed in the literature as females. Men fight the dragon and the woman who is the damsel in distress, reaps the reward of freedom (power) by him slaying the dragon and his reward is her (responsibility and support).
Men are also this way when it comes to mental functioning due to many reasons such as how they are raised, who they are raised by, what they are told to value, if they are taught to critically think, and what culture is pushed on them among an additional and very long and complex list.
But, let’s take sex out of the equation since male and females are of the same species and for the many of their differences, they are very much the same when it comes to this type of pathology.
The Damsel is the one who wants to be taken care of. They won’t get out of the tower and fight the dragon themselves. They won’t cut their hair and fashion it into a rope to get out of the tower themselves. They position themselves as hopeless and induce savior types to come save them with the promises of gracious rewards.
How many men and women who have very steady work and are generally responsible fall in love with the “tortured artist type” who has never held onto a job, is tortured by their craft, but have these momentary brilliant eruptions of magic which keeps the savior type addicted?
The damsel says, “Help me!” and the white knight cries out, “I will fix you!”
One of the main motivations and outcomes in being the damsel is to not be responsible for anything. A lot of damsels believe that the external controls their fate. This can be those who use religion and say that it’s X deity who controls everything so we just have to bend to its will or that they’re Scorpio and you’re an Aries so it could never work out. Or that things are just genetic so it must be this way or it’s because my parents did X so I will be the way I am forever.
This is again narcissism. To never be responsible for oneself and to not actively seek ways of maturing means there is great hatred for oneself. You “know” you can’t do anything right so you make sure you don’t have to do anything and when things go wrong you say it’s because of the star alignment and use it as proof that the universe is against you so even if you did “try” nothing would come of it. You’re the perfect victim.
‘The Victim’ disqualifies themselves from a long-term satisfactory relationship. Everything wrong with their lives is everyone else’s fault, they are never wrong and they will never have to work on anything because even if they did the universe would squash their good works. If you are incapable of being responsible for your own actions, then you have disqualified yourself from thriving. It’s actually even worse than disqualifying yourself from thriving. You are actively putting in a lot of time and effort against thriving.