A friend of mine - Colin - is newly engaged to Lilly, the woman of his dreams and his soulmate and all that jazz according to him. A few days ago, he and I had a conversation about his engagement, and he began talking about a previous relationship with Sara, the one which left him in a deep depression from which he hasn't entirely recovered. He said he still has flashbacks and dreams about his previous relationship, despite that she dumped him over two years ago, and he fears that he'll never truly get over it.

The relationship went something like this: Sara was the "center of his universe" at the time they were dating, and when she left, he felt as if he had been unmade, as if life had lost meaning. His plans for the future, his circle of friends, his very sense of self were wrapped up in the idea of being in this relationship. When it ended, he lost his sense of self.

Without getting into the entire conversation, we ended up arguing about what it means to be in a relationship. I pointed out that he's doing the same thing with Lilly that he had done with Sara - building his sense of self entirely on his relationship with her - and that it's going to lead to the same sort of problems he had with Sara. He argued that when he was with Sara, he was committing himself completely to the relationship, and the only problem was that she didn't feel the same way. He even insisted that this is what one ought to do when in a serious relationship. I flat-out told him that he was wrong and was romanticizing unhealthy ****, and then he called me callous and I called him a cornball and it kinda fell apart.

Anyway, so which of us is right? I feel that I'm right, but I also recognize that I only really understand these things on a conceptual level, so maybe I'm being unfair, and maybe this is the reason I can't bond with people. Also, I'm starting to become aware of how much I see relationships in terms of power differential (I won't allow myself to be defined by a relationship because that gives the other person power over me), and that probably isn't all that healthy. On the other hand, he's been having an existential crisis worthy of psychiatric treatment for like two years, and I think it might have something to do with him tying his self-worth so tightly to a relationship.