What Fantasies Reveal About Who You Are in Relationships

Delving into fantasies teaches us that their content matches the patterns of sexual behavior in reality, reflecting how people cope with their insecurities and whether they wish to promote intimacy or escape from it (Read more here). And yet, to fully decipher the meaning of fantasies in your life, you should take into account how your personality interacts with the broader relationship atmosphere to affect what you fantasize about (Read more here).

People with different personalities may react to the same relationship event very differently. Those who fear intimacy, for example, may react to relationship conflict by further distancing themselves from an infuriating partner. Those who suffer from abandonment fears, in contrast, may try to protect a relationship by reacting with appeasing attempts.

As one of our studies demonstrates, such differences are expressed in the fantasy realm as well. In the study, we looked at monogamous couples who had completed a questionnaire assessing their attachment anxiety and avoidance and then kept diaries for three weeks. In these diaries, participants recorded their relationship interactions each day, indicating whether they expressed love, did something nice for their partner, or were supportive or critical. Participants also recorded in detail every fantasy they had as soon as it came to mind.

To examine how negative relationship events, such as conflicts, affected anxious and avoidant people’s fantasies, we analyzed their fantasy diaries. What did we find out?

People were most likely to think about sex with their partners when they were happy with them. This tells you that healthy romantic relationships involve frequent fantasizing. As you might have guessed, on days when couples argued, both men and women fantasized more about people other than their partner, possibly in an attempt to compensate themselves or to take revenge on their partner.

Fantasmatic self-portrait

Source: Samarel - Erotic art & portraits/Gurit Birnbaum's album

But the most interesting finding was what anxious and avoidant people fantasized about when they were unhappy with their relationship. Negative couple interactions threatened the security of relationships. In so doing, they intensified the defensive use of fantasies typical of each attachment style.

Specifically, during unhappy days, anxiously attached people reported more fantasies in which they portrayed themselves as helpless and being controlled. In this wishful-thinking world, they fight deep-seated insecurities by emphasizing their neediness and eliciting caregiving from a powerful partner. Avoidant people adopted the opposite approach, wishing to distance themselves even further from hurtful partners and to feel less at the mercy of them.

At a more general level, this study tells you that when things are not going well with a partner, people tend to protect themselves with the means they are familiar with. Even in the fantasy world, a platform where people have complete control, most do not succeed in escaping who they are. People try to realize their deepest psychological needs through their fantasies, but often end up reenacting their real-world pathologies.

See my TEDx talk on why humans make sex so complicated here.