...we lose the 'substantially' [substantial healing] in beating ourselves to bits trying to be what we cannot be...I am not to set myself at the centre of the universe and insist that everything bend to the standards that I have set upon my own superiority. I am not to say "I must be thus," and if it is not thus, there is nothing but psychological despair. Some people are totally caught in this, but all of us have something of it within ourselves, swinging pendulum-like between conceit and despair.
This is not true only in the psychological area, of course; it is true in all relationships of life...married couples who refuse to have what they can have , because they have set for themselves a false standard of superiority. They have set up a romanticism, either on the romantic side of love or the physical side, and if their marriage does not measure up to their own standards of superiority, they smash everything to the ground...You suddenly see a marriage smashed - everything gone to bits, people walking away from each other, destroying something really beautiful and possible...
TS, p120
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