Getting the Love You Want

To make sense of why we choose this way, Hendrix goes back to childhood — not to blame parents, but to map how a self gets built. In his account, every child moves through stages of development, and at each one has legitimate needs: to be held and mirrored, to explore safely, to establish an identity, to feel competent. No caregiver, however loving, meets all of them perfectly. Somewhere along the line, a need goes chronically unanswered, and the child adapts. The adaptation keeps them functional. It also leaves a mark.

That mark is what Hendrix means by the wound, and it doesn't stay in the past. It becomes a kind of unfinished sentence we carry into adulthood, a sensitivity around a particular need — closeness, autonomy, recognition — that stays quietly hungry. We build defenses around it and mostly forget it's there. Then we fall in love, and the whole thing reactivates. The partner our Imago selected turns out to be exquisitely placed to press on exactly this spot, because they resemble the people who first left it sore.

Then the honeymoon ends. Every couple knows the feeling even if they never name it: the fog lifts, and the person who seemed to complete us is revealed as a separate human with irritating habits and a stubborn refusal to be who we needed. Hendrix calls the phase that follows the power struggle, and he insists it is not a sign that the wrong choice was made. It is the predictable second act of the exact choice the unconscious made on purpose.

What's happening beneath the surface is that the hidden agenda has come due. Each partner has been waiting to receive the healing they were promised, and each is now disappointed, because the other isn't delivering it — and can't, because they're waiting for the same thing. So the tactics escalate. We criticize, withdraw, cling, control. Hendrix reads these not as character flaws but as strategies: clumsy attempts to force the partner into finally meeting the old need. The distant one gets pursued harder; the pursued one retreats further. The dance tightens.

Step back from the mechanics of attraction and wounds, and the larger claim of "Getting the Love You Want" comes into focus — and it's a quietly radical one. Hendrix is arguing that a committed partnership is not, at bottom, a reward for having grown up. It's the place where the growing up actually gets finished. Love, in his reading, is less a state we fall into than a structure we can use: a relationship deliberate enough to complete the development that childhood interrupted.

This turns the ordinary expectation on its head. We usually think a good relationship is one that makes us feel safe, seen, and comfortable, and that conflict is the tax we pay for imperfect compatibility. Hendrix reverses the emphasis. Comfort is real and welcome, but the deeper function of the bond is developmental — to give each partner a person who can, over time and with intention, provide the specific care that was missing. The catch is that this requires giving the very thing that feels hardest to give, because the partner's wound almost always asks for the capacity we most lack. Healing them stretches us into wholeness too.

Hendrix started with a puzzle in his consulting room: why couples who had chosen each other so deliberately ended up fighting the same fight for years. His answer refuses both easy verdicts. The relationship isn't broken, and the partner isn't wrong. The two of them found each other because, at a level neither could see, each recognized in the other the exact raw material for finishing a piece of themselves. The disappointment that follows the falling-in-love is not the collapse of the promise. It's the promise coming due, in the only form it could take.