Discovering what they told you was wrong.

It's easy to pick up the wrong ideas about life and relationships. Our culture tells us out there is "the one" - the person who will complete us. For many, that leads to inevitable disappointment.

Craig Oliver

Mar 16, 2025

Article voiceover

0:00

-10:31

There was a shocking moment in my life when I found myself thinking:

I followed what they said was the right path – but it’s taken me somewhere I don’t want to be.

When we are young we are like sponges, absorbing ideas, that appear to make sense. Lots of people seem to be asserting them without question – so we assume they must be right. They become embedded in our thinking and it takes a lot of evidence to the contrary before we stop and ask: Did I got the wrong end of the stick?

As Kierkegaard wrote:

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

In other words, we are inevitably going to make mistakes, only really getting it after lived experience.

We take advice, without question, coming to believe, “This is what I’m supposed to do.” A lot works. A lot doesn’t.

Following some of these approaches is like having a faulty map. We march and march and march – only to discover we are nowhere near where we wanted to be.

If you feel unhappy and unfulfilled, you will almost certainly have thinking based on getting the wrong end of the stick.

I certainly did. Mine may be familiar to you – or yours could be different. Regardless, the point is to stop and question if what you were told really works – or if it is actively harming you.

The first thing I got badly wrong was believing the idea:

Out there is “The One”, the person who will complete me and to whom I can sub-contract the job of meeting my emotional needs.

The real wisdom would have been:

You can only find contentment if you deal with your own issues first, and don’t think it’s someone else’s job.

But the evidence to the contrary was everywhere – particularly for a young person like me, obsessed with popular culture.

Check out the lyrics to most pop songs. They peddle the idea that we can only find happiness through another person, and we will be as nothing if we don’t get it. One of the most famous and extreme examples is Harry Nilsson’s, “Without you”, where he pleads:

“I can't live if living is without you
I can't live, I can't give anymore”

It’s an extraordinary performance – Harry (seen below) really persuades us he believes his life will be over unless his now ex-lover relents and comes back to him.

Listening, you want to put an arm round him and say, “Mate, this really isn’t healthy…” But the truth is, most of us have been there.

Sometimes it gets seriously toxic. The misguided lover is celebrated. Leona Lewis’ song, “Bleeding Love” is a great example – hearing it makes you want to insist she see a therapist:

“They try to pull me away, but they don't know the truth
My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing
You cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love”

There’s something bordering on the horrific about the idea of cutting someone and love pouring out, and yet it feels as if we are being encouraged to admire the purity of the obsession.

In the gym the other day, they were playing “Wonderwall” with its plaintive hope:

“Maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me?”

And I thought, “That’s exactly it. Expressing the belief that we will find the person who will sort us out and make everything ok - placing a ridiculous burden on whoever that is.”

I then heard The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, which asserts:

“If you should ever leave me,

Well life would still go on, believe me,

The world could show nothing to me,

So, what good would living do me?”

It’s insanity. Hinting at suicide if another person doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you.

So many examples…

I could go on and on…

I love pop music – but these are the words of people who are not just fools for love, they are self-destructive martyrs. Again, there’s something deeply unhealthy about it all.

To be fair, pop music does occasionally counter this worldview. Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is a stinging rebuke to this way of thinking:

“You say you’re looking for someone, who’s never weak but always strong,

To protect you and defend you, whether you are right or wrong…

But it ain’t me, babe - no, no, no, it ain’t me babe.”

It’s easy to write this off as a sour, selfish response to a lover. In fact, Dylan is saying: Your expectations are absurd, dressing up self-absorbed demands on another person as love. Those expectations didn’t get there by accident – they are advanced as entirely reasonable by society.

As we will discuss in later pieces, a healthier, loving relationship can only happen when you are prepared to take responsibility for your own emotional needs – and not place unrealistic burdens on others. That’s not to say a person shouldn’t support you – even champion you – but it is not their job to take on the burden of filling the vacuum inside of you. It’s not their job to be your “Slave to love.”

Romcoms take an altogether lighter approach to love – but seem to me to be as problematic in their message. Usually, we are shown how a character’s world is misaligned because they are chasing the wrong things. They are following the wrong path, but their course is corrected by falling madly in love and realising their life can only be made whole by a specific person: The One.

The idea is executed brilliantly in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire”. The lead character, played by Tom Cruise (below), is all heart in his work, but gets it badly wrong by being all head when it comes to his love life. He learns the hard way – and it would take a heart of stone not to mist up when Jerry finally gets it and tells Dorothy, “You complete me.” Don’t get me wrong – I lap it up, but the fundamental message is awry. There is nothing wrong with having a life partner who is a central part of our life - but if we invest in the idea that they are the route to contentment and inner piece, we will have missed the key point that only by fixing what’s going on inside ourselves will we find these things.

Jerry Maguire is a perfect expression of a story so familiar in our culture it is almost part of our DNA.

One of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, analysed the pattern of stories, he created graphs to reveal how they work.

As you can see, Cinderella starts in the depths of ill fortune – effectively a slave. She takes significant steps towards good fortune – and then a dramatic and magical one: accepting certain conditions that will allow her to go to the ball where she meets Prince Charming. It’s love at first sight, but there’s a hitch. The magic only lasts until the clock strikes twelve, when her dress turns back to rags, her carriage becomes a pumpkin, and the horses pulling it, mice.

An understandably confused Prince sets out to find Cinderella. He proves her identity by proving that the glass shoe she left behind fits her perfectly. Whisking her away, they live happily ever after, or – as Vonnegut puts it – her trajectory is towards “off the charts happiness.”

Of course, the story stops before we see reality bite and the challenges of life together kick in. Our childhoods are full of such stories – and as we grow older, they are buttressed by our culture, be it songs, films, novels or adverts. Out there is The One…

The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh is brutal on this point:

“You may feel you require that person for your own happiness. And yet at some point you might find the presence of that person to be a nuisance and want to get rid of him.”

Ouch…

His point is in so many cases we get so carried away with a person being The One, we become blind to who they really are. For a time, they aren’t a person - they are an ideal, and when, as time passes, they inevitably fail to match our inflated expectations, we feel disappointed and even betrayed. He goes on to suggest that if we work on ourselves and are mindful:

“…you will see that the feeling of safety and security you crave doesn’t need to come from clinging to another person…”

As a child I immersed myself in stories, constantly chided for having my nose stuck in a book or hoping to catch a movie instead of going out to play on a hot afternoon. Looking back, I think I liked the certainty they provided. Simple stories, like Cinderella make a promise to the reader – things may get rough, but everything will be ok in the end. I could become completely immersed, distracted from the unhappy reality of my life.

As my tastes grew more sophisticated, I noticed that most stories in our western culture end with resolution and often, redemption. A typical story starts with a character who has something to learn and by the end they will be fundamentally changed. Often, they are redeemed.

There is a profound comfort in this – even in stories which end in tragedy – such as McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson, below) lobotomised and smothered at the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, or Paul Newman shot through the neck in “Cool Hand Luke”, we are left satisfied that others have benefited, and the world is fundamentally altered for the better because of the journeys these heroes have experienced.

I hoovered it all up. And on a core level, I came to hope that the patterns of stories – designed to help us navigate the world, might be the be the story of my life. Of course, there would be struggle, but in the end, right would reign. There would be order. There would be resolution. Out there was “the one” who would complete me; the many wrongs of my childhood would be made right and there would be satisfaction.

It was comforting to believe: People grow, learn and change…and there’s a saviour for you.

But I got the wrong idea about life. Some things will never be resolved, and some people will never change, no matter how much I wished for it. The gap between reality and the childlike, story-world belief that they would, simply added to my pain.

And I learned the hard way, it’s not the job of another to save you. Again, Mary Oliver is so wise here:

“…you must not, ever, give anyone

else the responsibility for your whole life.”

Behind that quote is something profound:

The ultimate responsibility for your feelings and emotions is yours. Only you can do the work of finding the wisdom that will give you a shot at living a balanced, healthy, contented life that doesn’t make absurd demands on another.

As you do that - you find life goes easier, your expectations become more realistic - and you start to encounter people with whom you can really connect.

I still love popular stories as much as I ever did but I now get the neat conclusions they offer and suggestions about what it takes to live a good life don’t translate so easily into reality.

Next time I will, write about another great myth that I followed: if I worked hard enough, there would be a point where I crossed a line and feel fulfilled. I came to see it was another fool’s errand - and I might achieve more by coming at things another way.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?