“I fall in love only with people who are already in relationships...”

Why are some individuals repeatedly drawn to unavailable partners?

Why does intimacy become especially desirable when a third person is already present?

And why does the struggle for another person's love sometimes become more emotionally significant than the relationship itself?

Stories like these are not uncommon in clinical practice. At first glance, they may appear to reflect a series of unfortunate choices or mere coincidence. 

From Otto Kernberg’s perspective, however, repeatedly becoming involved in another couple’s relationship or entering into love triangles often reflects much deeper intrapsychic conflicts.

In his writings on love relationships, Otto Kernberg emphasizes that the Oedipal conflict continues to shape an individual’s love life long after childhood. Love almost always contains an element of rivalry, competition for the love of the object, and the capacity to tolerate the existence of a third person.

For this reason, triangulation occupies a central place in the understanding of love relationships. According to Otto Kernberg, mature love requires the capacity to accept that the loved person has desires of their own, other attachments, and a separate inner world. When this capacity is compromised, the love triangle can become a stable way of organizing relationships.

Kernberg pays particular attention to narcissistic envy directed toward the couple. A stable and intimate relationship between two people may be unconsciously experienced as a source of painful envy by the individual who remains outside that bond. In such cases, the desire to win over the partner may be driven not only by love or sexual attraction but also by a need to disrupt the connection between two people or to occupy the position of the person perceived as happier, more desired, or more privileged.

Otto Kernberg notes that love triangles are often sustained not only by libidinal desires but also by aggression, envy, and rivalry. This helps explain why a person may feel a powerful attraction to an unavailable partner yet lose interest once the relationship becomes real and accessible.

An equally important factor is the splitting of love and sexuality. Kernberg emphasizes that difficulties integrating tenderness, sexual desire, aggression, and attachment may lead individuals to experience stable intimate relationships as less exciting than situations involving rivalry, risk, or prohibition.

According to Otto Kernberg, the capacity for mature love requires the integration of love and aggression, the resolution of narcissistic envy, and the ability to tolerate the reality that love does not require constant competition for the object.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy