I loved who I thought they could be: The fantasy vs the reality of love

This Changes Everything with Sarah Rice

Sarah Rice - Wave Podcast Network

Self Improvement, Education, Religion & Spirituality, The Challenge, Spirituality, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Sarah Rice, Mental Health

4.6 • 884 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Part 7 of the Relationship Series

Have you ever looked back at a relationship and wondered what you were seeing? Maybe you ignored red flags, held on to someone’s potential, or stayed attached to a future that never arrived.

In this episode, Sarah explores the difference between the fantasy of love and the reality of love. Why do we fall in love with potential? Why do we explain away behaviors that later become dealbreakers? And how do projection and romantic idealization keep us from seeing people clearly?

You’ll learn why disillusionment is not necessarily the end of a relationship but often the beginning of real intimacy. Sarah breaks down the psychology behind projection, the role fantasy plays in protecting us from uncertainty and heartbreak, and what mature love actually looks like once the illusion fades.

This episode will help you recognize the stories you may be telling yourself about love, understand why letting go of fantasy can feel so painful, and learn how to build relationships based on reality rather than hope alone.

Because real love doesn’t require perfection. It requires clarity.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends and welcome once again to everybody's favorite therapy themed podcast. I'm your host
0:05.1	Sarah and I am back with episode number seven in our series on relationships. We, like I said, are seven
0:13.4	episodes deep and if you guys have been tuning in to all of these episodes, thank you so much.
0:19.0	I know we've covered a lot of ground and I've given
0:21.6	you a lot of information. And what I've tried to do and what I'm trying to do, or hopefully
0:27.6	doing, succeeding in, is creating a series of episodes that really build on each concept,
0:35.3	like build on each other, rather than looking at this as like a random collection of like tips and tricks.
0:41.3	I want these,
0:42.2	these episodes to help you kind of move through the natural stages of a relationship
0:47.5	and,
0:49.6	hmm,
0:51.2	I don't know,
0:51.6	like get you to a place that feels really healthy and do it in kind of like a
0:57.3	more systematic way, something where you can go, ooh, this was step five was difficult for me.
1:04.9	It was hard for me to identify maybe the physiological feelings or whatever, or it was hard for me to, um,
1:12.2	recognize burnout versus betrayal, things like that. So over the last few episodes,
1:19.3	we've talked about attachment, we've talked about self-worth, we talked about all those
1:24.7	patterns. And hopefully what you were beginning to recognize is that sometimes the biggest obstacle in relationships is not the other person.
1:35.4	Oh man, I keep dating the same people.
1:37.3	But instead, it's the version of them that we've built in our mind or it's us.
1:42.7	It's this like future maybe we've imagined or this potential that we've built in our mind, or it's us. It's this future maybe we've imagined
1:46.3	or this potential that we've become attracted to,
	...

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