The partner who never quite fit

We often imagine that somewhere in the world there is a person made just for us, the exact piece that completes the puzzle, as though human beings functioned like animals that mate according to a perfect fit between male and female, one to one, with no room for error or doubt.

But that is not entirely true: for those of us who speak, this perfect fit does not exist in quite the same way. Language itself empties out the place of the other and turns it, in part, into an open space that each person fills with their own fantasy, rather than with a natural, automatic, and guaranteed correspondence established in advance.

That is why the loved person, as soon as we seek them as the exact half that was missing from us, strangely begins to fade before our eyes. Clinical practice shows that pursuing the perfect fit means pursuing an animal model that never fully applied to speaking beings.

Reading

Lacan, J. (2012). El Seminario de Jacques Lacan. Libro 19: ...o peor, 1971-1972 (G. Arenas, trad.; J.-A. Miller, ed.). Paidós. (Obra original publicada en 2011)