What your ideal partner says about you
Step 1
Grab a pen and jot down the 6-10 traits you’d most want to see in your ideal partner. Don’t overthink it, just write whatever comes to mind. Maybe you want someone ambitious, adventurous, kind, playful, emotionally intelligent, or spontaneous.
Once you’ve got your list, go on to step two.
Step 2
Now, before reading more, look back at your list and answer this question:
“How do these traits already show up in me… or not show up in me?”
And if you want to go deeper, try one or more of these follow-ups:
In what ways do I wish I could embody these traits more fully myself?
Do I judge or suppress this trait in myself, even while I admire it in others?
If I already had this quality alive in me, how would my attraction to it in a partner change?
I ask these questions because here’s the twist: Many of the traits you find most attractive in others are actually qualities you long for yourself.
In Jungian psychology, this is called projection. The rest of the post I’m going to dig into what this is, examples that I’ve seen in my own life and in culture, and how else you can spot it in your
What is Projection?
Think of a film projector at a movie theater. A film projector doesn’t create new images. It simply shines a light through the film reel inside it and casts those images onto a blank screen. The screen itself is neutral. It’s just receiving what the projector beams out.
Psychological projection works the same way. The “film reel” is made up of our own inner material: unacknowledged fears, insecurities, and longings. The “light” is our attention and emotional energy. And the people in front of us become the “screen,” the surface we project those inner images onto.
Sometimes, the reel we’re projecting isn’t even current. It can be old footage: childhood wounds, cultural scripts, or past relationship patterns that haven’t been updated. The projector doesn’t check if the reel is fresh; it just plays what’s there. Which means we can end up reacting to old stories rather than the real person in front of us.
Projection can be positive or negative:
When it’s positive, it can feel to our rational brains like unexplainable magnetism toward someone who embodies qualities we’ve denied in ourselves.
For example, in high school and college, I was very attracted to women who moved gracefully and who were in tune with their own and others’ emotions. Looking back, that time was when I was most physically stiff, most obsessed with rigidly structuring my day, and my actions were controlled by “shoulds.” I mean I was studying economics, where we literally called someone who followed emotional impulses over statistics when making decisions an “irrational agent.” So these qualities of grace and emotional attunement were clearly lacking for me and seeing people who embodied them and were still thriving blew my mind.
When projection is negative, it can show up as an irrational irritation toward someone who activates parts of us we’d rather not see.
For example, there were times in college when I’d be with friends or on a date and someone would talk about how much they love sleeping in on weekends or scrolling on TikTok. Inside, I’d feel a pang of Dang, they’re lazy. If they don’t care about making the most of their time, maybe this isn’t a good person for me to spend my time with. Those were times when my own guilt about resting or not being productive flared up, the part that feared that slowing down would make me fall behind.
Why should I care?
Ok, but aren’t those just personality differences? Shouldn’t we be trying to spend time with people who will bring out the best in us and not with people who won’t move us towards our goals? Why should I care about trying to see through the projections? It seems like a pretty academic exercise. Ah well thank you for asking.
I think it’s because projections can create unnecessary suffering by taking away from your ability to connect with others. I like how Marta Brzosko put it in this article when she said:
“When you’re projecting, you stop seeing the person in front of you for who they are. You perceive them through the prism of your own unmet needs."
And if you need to see someone for who they are to truly see them and connect with them and love them and meet them where they are at, then projection can make those things less available. It’s like, you can’t see the screen the movie is being projected on as just a screen when the movie is playing on it.
Examples I’ve Experienced
A few of the projections that loomed largest for me from middle school through college but that have begun to wane in the past couple years are:
Admiring someone’s confidence because deep down I want to embody more of my own.
Feeling annoyed by someone’s laziness because it touches the part of me that judges myself for resting.
Being drawn to someone’s playfulness because my own inner playful part feels buried under “seriousness.”
Projections Beyond the Exercise
Once I started noticing projection through the partner exercise, I began spotting it everywhere. Not just in romance but in family and life in general.
The examples below are things I’m still working through, but I want to share them for two reasons:
1) I think they touch on fairly common themes you might be able to relate to.
2) I’ve initiated conversations about these projections with my parents and partner, and our communication and trust is stronger than ever because of it. So it’s both recognizing your projections and what you do with the information that can really make a big impact.
Career vs. Connection
I feared that my girlfriend might one day prioritize her career over our relationship, or that she’d see me as “not ambitious enough.” But really, this was my own worry: that I’d choose achievement over real connection. I’ve done it before, choosing perfection over connection, and this fear was just my subconscious worrying about it happening again.Sentimentality and Gender Roles
I sometimes imagine my partner might judge me for being too sentimental or cuddly — like I’m relying too much on her. Part of this fear comes from traditional gender roles I’ve internalized: that I should be the stoic, emotionally dependable, not-too-affectionate archetype of a “strong man.” If I lean into affection, I worry it means I’m failing that archetype and it would give her the ick. But the truth is, she isn’t judging me. That fear of being of being too sentimental comes from my own judgment of that softer side of myself. That fear of relying on her too much, I think, comes from having “put all my eggs in one basket” and becoming co-dependent in a previous relationship and judging any part of myself that would let that happen again.Ambition vs. Slowing Down
Then there’s the complete opposite fear: not that I’ll be someone who she’ll judge for making her lose her ambitious, driven edge, but that spending too much time in “boyfriend mode” will make me lose mine. Feeling a subtle resentment if date nights or crosswords on the couch start to come at the cost of getting enough “productive work” done in a day. But when I step back, I can see that the only times I really slow down to do things like watch a movie or lay in bed are with her. This resentment comes from me judging my own lack of productivity, which might appear any time I allow myself to slow down, but because I mostly do it with her I start to make correlation equal causation project my frustration with myself onto her.Responsibility and Adulthood
This summer, when my parents have called me out for forgetting a chore, I’ve noticed an immediate surge of anger at them. But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the anger is a projection of my own frustration with myself. It’s about me judging myself for not fully feeling like an adult after leaving my consulting job and apartment across the country, and moving back home with them for a bit. Their reminder pokes at my own insecurity that I’m not doing enough to be respected as an adult and an equal and that I’m falling back into habits I had when I lived with them growing up and what that says about me.
Journal Prompts and Next Steps
I recently listened to Joe Hudon’s take on projection in this podcast. I think he gives a good definition and some very good examples as well, so I’d recommend giving it a listen.
He says that we can project not just onto individuals, which is what this post is about, but onto the world as well. More about that idea in this follow-up post.
He also gives a couple of questions to explore projection further in yourself, which I’ll include here as journal prompts for you to explore if you are interested:
If you write down four of the things that trigger you most in the world, in what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself?
If you are looking deeply at who you admire or who you put on a pedestal, what are the parts of them that you admire and how do you not own that aspect of yourself?
