 By popular demand, my name is Sam Bucking, and I'm the author of Malignan Selflam, Narcissism Revisited, and don't you make me repeat this. Today we are going to discuss regulatory loops. Every relationship has mechanisms for feedback. The partners in the relationship use these mechanisms to communicate with each other, and to modify the other partners' behavior. To regulate the relationship, there are two ways to do that, via intimacy or via romantic jealousy. Mature partners achieve a workable balance between togetherness and personal autonomy. It is not easy. Taken to the extreme, personal autonomy becomes freedom and then anarchy. Taken to the extreme, togetherness becomes clinging, suffocating and stifling. Finding the golden mean between these two is a task of herculean proportions. It requires awareness of subtleties and nuances. It requires fine tuning on a minute by minute basis, interaction by interaction, speech act by speech act. It's a full-time job. But these mature, healthy partners engender intimacy via communication and also via actions. They signal to each other. Intimacy feels so good, so warm, involves acceptance and creates such a safe and secure environment in which the partners can be vulnerable, naked, so to speak. So it feels so good, it feels like going back to childhood, that no one in his right mind wants to exit such a bond, a truly intimate bond. So both abandonment or separation anxiety and romantic jealousy are absent in healthy relationships because intimacy guarantees that there's no need for them. Object permanence or object constancy is accomplished and established in healthy and mature relationships. The partners trust each other to always be there. Separation is not a threat and abandonment is not on the cards because who would abandon again a truly intimate, functional relationship? Why would they do that? So such a relationship is devoid of anxiety and devoid of jealousy. But what to do? What happens when one of the partners is a co-dependent or a borderline and the other one is a narcissist or a psychopath or a histrionic? These are very common combinations actually. And what happens when both partners suffer from mood disorders, such as for example bipolar disorder? Well these kind of partners cannot achieve and if they do achieve cannot maintain even minimal intimacy. Instead what they do, they mesh, intermesh, get entangled, fuse, merge. They become a single organism with two heads. Normally such fusion fosters intolerable abandonment or separation anxiety. It's very simple. If you are part of one organism, any separation is the equivalent of amputation. It's intolerably painful. It could even be life-threatening with profuse emotional bleeding taking place. So all separation, even minimal, is perceived as an existential threat. The only way to regulate this kind of profound anxiety is to make sure that the partner doesn't jump ship, doesn't abandon you. But how do you achieve that if you cannot generate intimacy? What incentive or inducement does the partner have to stay in their relationship? If he is a narcissist, you can give him narcissistic supply. But even that has a limit. At some point he may devalue you or he may find a much better source of supply. So it's not a guarantee as far as the longevity of a relationship. So how do you kind of make sure that your spouse or intimate partner remains heavily involved, emotionally invested, infectious and will never leave you? This is done by provoking the partner's romantic jealousy. Jealousy of course is a reaction to anticipated loss. So the partner who provokes jealousy engages in indiscreet, extramarital affairs, adultery and cheating. She displays flagrant promiscuity. She is ostentatiously flirtatious or seductive with strangers. Her behaviors are provocative, as is her dress, her attire or her speech. And she all the time destabilizes the relationship by hinting at the existence of third parties by generating a doom and gloom atmosphere of an impending breakup. And she does that in order to provoke the partner into sitting up and paying attention. She wants the partner to value her. She wants the partner to realize that she is desirable, that she is irresistible to other men or that he is irresistible and desirable to other women. Such a partner introduces insecurity and instability as means to create security and stability. It's very paradoxical. The instigator wants her counterpart actually to set boundaries. She wants or he wants his or her spouse to put his foot down to prove that he cares to say up to here, stopping, I don't accept your behavior anymore. She wants the partner to wake up, to become alive, to become invested in the relationship, to pay attention as I said. Of course such behaviors provoking romantic jealousy, triangulation, such behavior precipitate exactly what they had been meant to prevent. They have the exact opposite effect to the one intended. Many partners anticipating loss and with pain aversion, these combine to drive the injured parting away. Actually guarantee eventual separation and abandonment. If you play this game of romantic jealousy too often, if you triangulate too often, if you introduce third parties into the relationship too often by cheating for example, if you are flagrantly promiscuous ostentatiously flirtatious or seductive in public, if you misbehave, if you dress provocatively, if you upload photos of yourself half-maked or online and if you constantly hint that you're about, just about a second before breaking up and walking away, at some point you're taking the risk that your partner may say, well, good riddance. I can't take this anymore. So exactly like with intimacy, it's an act of fine-tuning. You have to find the balance between provoking enough insecurity and not too much of it. Again, exactly like intimacy. You have to find the balance between creating enough intimacy and not too much of it. Exaggerated regulatory behaviors, intimacy creating or jealousy creating, tend to kill the relationship, to terminate it, because no one in his right mind wants to live in an exaggerated, caricaturistic environment. People seek the middle ground. People want to feel sufficiently themselves and sufficiently merged with the other. They want to create a third entity within which both partners are separate but united. Not easy. And that's why well over 50% of marriages end in divorces and well over 80% of relationships end in separation. Finding this balance, this middle ground, this golden mean eludes most of us and it eludes most of us because of our inherent narcissism, including healthy narcissism. We don't know exactly how to keep our partner happy and ourselves at the same time. We keep failing. The situation is so bad that many people give up altogether and that's the saddest statement about the modern condition that anyone could make.