There are always more than two people in a marriage. Even when a couple is alone, the relationship is inhabited by the histories, desires, fantasies, and unconscious expectations each brings to the other. Parents, former lovers, friendships, and the people each spouse once imagined becoming may continue to occupy places within their intimate life. Some of these relationships are remembered with affection, others with resentment, and still others are hardly remembered at all. Yet their influence may be felt in the most ordinary moments of married life. The third does not necessarily arrive when someone else enters the picture. In many ways, it was already there. The familiar understanding of a love triangle usually begins with an intrusion. Someone outside the marriage becomes emotionally important to one spouse, leaving the other feeling excluded, displaced, or betrayed. The assumption is that the relationship once consisted of two people and that a third has now disrupted its intimacy. This explains why couples sometimes imagine that removing the third person will restore something they have lost. Yet the third person may not have created the distance between them. The person may have come to occupy a place that was already there.
In The Geometry of Intimacy: Love Triangles and Couples Therapy, psychoanalyst Alan Michael Karbelnig (2018) explores how triangulation participates in both the formation and disruption of romantic intimacy. A triangle may involve another person, but it can just as readily involve work, alcohol, professional ambition, or an idealized image of oneself. Sometimes the third is someone who is no longer living. Sometimes it is the person a spouse fears becoming or the person they believe they ought to be. These relationships may organize intimate life without either partner being particularly aware of them. Stanley Ruszczynski (1998), drawing upon Ronald Britton's understanding of triangular space, approaches the third from another direction. In The Marital Triangle: Towards Triangular Space in the Intimate Couple Relationship, he considers the relationship itself as a third element. There is one partner, the other partner, and the relationship they create together. This relationship belongs to both without belonging entirely to either. It develops a history, an emotional atmosphere, and a life that neither person could have created alone.
A marriage is therefore never simply the meeting of two independent people. Each brings something of their own history, but something else develops between them. The couple begins to recognize familiar ways of speaking, arguing, comforting, withdrawing, and returning to one another. They may come to know what a particular silence means, how a disagreement is likely to unfold, or which subjects are better left alone. Over time, these arrangements become so familiar that the couple may scarcely notice how they participate in creating them. Karbelnig (2018) describes mature intimacy through a balance of "me-ness, you-ness, and us-ness." There is the life each person brings to the relationship, the life of the person they love, and the life they create together. Yet these three are not always in agreement. A spouse may desire independence while longing to be needed. Another may want greater closeness while fearing the demands that closeness might bring. The relationship may ask something of each person that neither feels particularly willing to give. These contradictions are not necessarily signs that something has gone wrong. They belong to the difficulty of loving someone whose separate existence cannot be abolished. The person who knows us most intimately remains someone we cannot entirely know. Their thoughts, desires, memories, and private associations continue beyond our experience of them. Even after decades together, there are parts of a spouse's life that remain unfamiliar. This is one of the more difficult discoveries of marriage. Love may bring two people together with the promise of being understood, yet the longer they remain together, the more they encounter the limits of what understanding can provide. A spouse can become wonderfully familiar without ever becoming entirely known. Psychoanalysis has long been interested in how these limits awaken earlier experiences of dependency, rivalry, exclusion, and loss. The desire to be loved may carry something of the child's wish to be chosen. The fear of abandonment may emerge in an ordinary disagreement. A spouse's independence may be experienced as rejection, while their dependence may feel like an attempt at control. The emotional intensity of these moments often exceeds what appears to be happening between the couple.
Ruszczynski (1998) develops the significance of the third through Britton's (1989) concept of triangular space. In the classical Oedipal situation, the child gradually encounters the reality that the parents have a relationship with one another in which the child is not always included. This discovery can awaken jealousy, envy, and the painful experience of exclusion. Yet it also introduces an important possibility. The child may begin to recognize that a relationship exists between two others, a relationship that does not depend entirely upon the child's participation. Something becomes possible through this recognition. The child can begin to observe relationships rather than remaining entirely absorbed within them. Another person's love no longer has to be understood only in terms of what it provides or withholds. The relationship between others becomes something that can be imagined, considered, and eventually thought about. Britton describes this capacity as triangular space. Ruszczynski brings it into the intimate life of the couple, where the ability to recognize a relationship beyond oneself becomes particularly important. A spouse may begin to consider not only what the other has done but what has happened between them. The disagreement is no longer entirely the fault of one person or the other. Something about the relationship itself becomes available for thought.
Yet a triangle can appear complete without resolving anything about the relationships it contains. Three people may occupy recognizable positions while remaining unable to understand what brings them together. The appearance of a complete arrangement may conceal something that neither person has been able to say. Consider a wife who increasingly turns to a close friend whenever she feels disappointed in her marriage. The friendship may offer genuine companionship, affection, and emotional support. The friend listens patiently, remembers the details of previous disagreements, and understands why certain remarks from her husband are especially painful. The wife begins to feel that this friend knows her more intimately than the person with whom she shares a home. Her husband experiences the friendship differently. He notices that conversations end when he enters the room. He discovers that disagreements he considered private have been discussed elsewhere. He begins to feel that someone outside the marriage has acquired a place within it that he can no longer reach. His resentment grows, and the friend becomes the subject of increasingly familiar arguments.
The wife insists that she needs someone to talk to. The husband insists that the friendship is destroying their marriage. Both have something important to say, yet neither explanation tells the whole story. The friend may have become the person who receives feelings the wife cannot bring to her husband. The husband's anger may conceal his fear of being excluded from a relationship he once believed belonged to him. The wife's insistence upon the friendship may protect her from the vulnerability of discovering whether her husband could hear what she has been unable to say. The husband's wish to remove the friend may protect him from recognizing something about his wife's life that does not belong entirely to him. The triangle provides each person with an explanation, but it also keeps the more difficult questions from being asked.
Karbelnig (2018) describes one form of this arrangement as defensive triangulation. The third helps manage anxieties associated with intimacy while preserving the underlying attachment. Rather than confronting something painful within the marriage, the couple finds a way to organize the difficulty around another person, activity, or preoccupation. The arrangement offers temporary relief without necessarily changing what remains unresolved. This does not mean that friendships outside marriage are inherently defensive or that the spouse who feels excluded is necessarily mistaken. A friendship may be deeply sustaining, while a particular alliance may also become destructive. Confidentiality may be violated, resentment encouraged, or an outside person recruited into a conflict that belongs to the couple. The consequences of these actions matter. Yet understanding their unconscious function requires asking something more than whether the friendship should continue. What has the third person come to represent? What becomes possible through the friendship that has become difficult within the marriage? What does the husband's wish to remove the friend promise to restore? And what might remain between the spouses even if the friendship ended tomorrow?
The third may also appear in less recognizable forms. One spouse becomes increasingly absorbed in work, finding in professional achievement the recognition that seems absent at home. Another devotes themselves to caring for children or aging parents, becoming indispensable to everyone while rarely speaking about their own desires. Someone else may remain preoccupied with becoming the perfect husband or wife, measuring every disappointment against an image of the marriage they imagined having. These arrangements may look very different, yet each can offer a way of managing something difficult about intimate life. The third may protect a person from feeling inadequate, dependent, unwanted, or uncertain. It may also protect the relationship from conflicts that neither partner feels able to encounter. Karbelnig distinguishes these defensive arrangements from what he calls discordant triangulation. Here the difficulty extends beyond avoiding painful feelings. The couple may struggle to recognize one another as separate people, and the relationship may become organized around domination, submission, idealization, or a shared pursuit that displaces intimacy itself. Rather than encountering the person they love, each becomes increasingly occupied with the role the other must perform.
Yet neither arrangement allows the couple to escape the incompleteness of intimacy. The friend cannot provide perfect recognition. Professional achievement cannot finally secure a person's worth. Even the most devoted spouse cannot become everything the other desires. Something remains beyond the positions each person has learned to occupy. It is within this incompleteness that thirdness becomes particularly important. Triangulation gives relationships a recognizable arrangement, while thirdness makes it possible to consider what the arrangement cannot explain. The third is no longer simply the friend, the career, the parent, or the idealized image. It becomes a possibility for thinking about the relationship itself, including what remains unknown within it. This does not mean that thirdness suddenly comes into existence when a triangle fails. Our relationships are already shaped by language, family histories, expectations, and meanings that precede us. We do not invent these influences simply by becoming aware of them. Rather, the incompleteness of a familiar arrangement allows something that has always been present to become recognizable.
Thirdness can therefore hide within triangulation. The husband believes the problem is the friend. The wife believes the problem is her husband's inability to understand her. Both become so occupied with defending their positions that neither can consider what the triangle has come to mean. Yet the very difficulty of making the arrangement complete eventually invites another question. What if the problem cannot be located entirely in any one person? The reverse is equally possible. Triangulation can hide within the apparent achievement of thirdness. A couple may learn to speak eloquently about independence, emotional maturity, and mutual recognition while continuing to organize their relationship around rivalry or exclusion. One spouse may insist upon respecting individual friendships while quietly defending against feelings of dependency. Another may appeal to the needs of the marriage while expecting the partner to surrender something essential about themselves. Even the wish to become the more understanding spouse can become another way of seeking recognition. A person may take pride in being reasonable, emotionally aware, or psychologically mature, while the partner is left occupying the familiar position of being difficult or unreasonable. The language of understanding becomes another arrangement through which the couple avoids something it cannot yet bear to recognize.
Ruszczynski (1998) approaches some of these difficulties through the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification. Drawing upon Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, he considers how unwanted aspects of ourselves may become located in the people we love. A spouse who cannot tolerate their own dependency may repeatedly experience the partner as excessively needy. Someone struggling with anger may experience the other as hostile or persecutory. What feels intolerable within oneself becomes increasingly recognizable in the person across the room. These arrangements can become remarkably familiar. One partner withdraws while the other pursues. One becomes critical while the other becomes defensive. One assumes responsibility for keeping the peace while the other becomes increasingly dependent upon that responsibility. Each person begins to anticipate the other's response, and the relationship repeats itself. Ruszczynski describes certain forms of this repetition as psychological gridlock. The couple becomes caught in an emotional arrangement that leaves little room for reflection. Each person's experience confirms something about the other, and neither can easily recognize how they participate in maintaining the conflict.
This is why the difficulty cannot always be resolved through better communication. Couples may communicate a great deal through their arguments, silences, disappointments, and repeated attempts at reconciliation. What remains difficult is recognizing what these communications reveal about the unconscious life of the relationship. The question of enmeshment becomes especially interesting here. Two people may appear inseparable while finding it difficult to tolerate each other's independent desires. Another couple may maintain considerable distance while remaining bound to the same repetitive conflict. Neither closeness nor distance tells us very much on its own about the possibility of intimacy. What matters is whether each person can recognize the other's separate existence without experiencing that separateness as an unbearable loss.
For Ruszczynski, the development of triangular space involves a capacity for mourning. This is not necessarily mourning a death or the end of a marriage. It is the mourning of the expectation that another person can be entirely possessed, understood, or made to satisfy every emotional need. The beloved remains someone separate, with desires, memories, and relationships that cannot always be shared. There is something quietly painful about this recognition. The person who once seemed to promise an end to loneliness cannot finally eliminate it. The spouse who knows our most intimate habits may still misunderstand something important about us. The marriage we imagined having may never entirely resemble the one we have created. Yet mourning these expectations need not diminish love. It allows another form of intimacy to emerge, one in which the person we love no longer has to become an extension of ourselves. The relationship becomes less occupied with securing perfect understanding and more capable of making room for what remains unfamiliar.
Psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy offers an opportunity to consider these arrangements without assuming that they can be resolved by assigning responsibility to one person. The therapist may also become part of the triangle. One spouse may seek the therapist's agreement against the other. The couple may unite in opposition to the therapist. Feelings of exclusion, rivalry, idealization, and resentment may emerge within the therapeutic relationship itself. The analytic listener does not create thirdness simply by entering the room. Nor can the therapist guarantee a position outside the couple's conflict by claiming neutrality. The possibility of thirdness emerges as something about the relationship becomes available for thought, including the ways the therapist may have been drawn into its familiar arrangements. Through interpretation, what has been repeatedly enacted may gradually become recognizable. A spouse may begin to hear something different in an old argument. A familiar silence may no longer mean quite what it once did. The couple may discover that the positions they have occupied for years are not the only ways of being together.
The aim is not to eliminate triangulation or to create a marriage free from ambivalence. Such an ideal would require the abolition of the very separateness upon which intimacy depends. Rather, the work involves becoming more intentional in how the third is recognized, negotiated, and given a place within the relationship. A friendship might become a source of vitality rather than a substitute for marital dialogue. Professional ambition might sustain a person's independent identity without becoming a refuge from intimacy. An old identification with a demanding parent might become recognizable rather than silently determining how a spouse is experienced. The third remains, but the couple's relationship to it may change. The incompleteness of triangulation is therefore not simply a problem to overcome. It allows the couple to discover that their familiar explanations are insufficient. The friend is not the entire problem. The spouse is not the complete answer. The relationship cannot be secured through perfect recognition, exclusive possession, or the elimination of every competing attachment. Something remains beyond what either person can explain.
The possibility of intimacy depends less upon eliminating the distance between two people than upon discovering what becomes possible within it. The third is not simply what comes between partners. It also allows them to encounter one another as separate subjects, to consider the relationship they are creating, and to recognize that neither person can finally complete the other. Yet within the couple, each may encounter their familiar partner as someone strange and new. This is why I use the term lOver, with a capital O. The lOver is the Other within the familiar other of the partner. The distinction may seem to contradict the promise of monogamous coupling, where two people commit themselves to a shared life and gradually become familiar with one another. Yet the lOver is not someone new who must be found outside the marriage. The lOver is the person who remains strange within the partner we have come to know, whose desires and inner life cannot be exhausted by familiarity. The enduring possibility of love depends in part upon this very strangeness, the discovery that the person beside us is never entirely the person we already know.
The lOver is a partner in play, a site of sensual satisfaction, and the guardian of a self-knowledge that cannot be arrived at alone. Through the lOver's passionate gaze, we encounter something of ourselves that never quite feels like our own, yet may be precisely what the lOver most dearly loves. It is something irreducible to an image, such as beauty, or a symbolic identity, such as husband or wife. It is encountered instead in the intimacy of being someone's darling, a name that carries something more particular than any role or description could contain. This darling-ness is not the discovery of a hidden, complete self. Neither person possesses the final truth of the other. Rather, something of who we are becomes present through a love that cannot fully explain what it loves. The lOver remains strange to us, just as we remain partly strange to ourselves. It is here that the couple may encounter the third most intimately: not as someone who must be removed, but as the incompleteness through which desire, play, and the possibility of discovering one another remain alive.
References
Britton, R. (1989). The missing link: Parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. In J. Steiner (Ed.), The Oedipus Complex Today: Clinical Implications. Karnac Books.
Karbelnig, A. M. (2018). The geometry of intimacy: Love triangles and couples therapy. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(1), 70–82. https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000144
Ruszczynski, S. (1998). The marital triangle: Towards triangular space in the intimate couple relationship. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 15(1), 33–46.