STOP TRYING TO BE GOD IN THE LIFE OF THE ONE YOU CLAIM TO LOVE

A silent murder is happening right now, at this very moment, in thousands of relationships around the world. It involves no physical violence. It leaves no visible marks. But it is lethal. It is the murder of alterity—the precise instant when you turn the Other into an object, a function, a domesticated extension of your own needs.
You look at the person beside you and believe you see them. Lie. What you see is a mosaic of projections, a collage of expectations, a distorted mirror where your own image reflects back disguised as intimacy. The Other has vanished. In their place you have installed a carefully edited character made to fit the frame you built before you even met them.
And when this happens—when alterity dies—the relationship becomes emotional necrophilia. You are bonded to a symbolic corpse, trying to reanimate through expectations, demands, desperate attempts at control the very thing you yourself murdered: the living, untamable, radically Other presence of that human being.
The question that pierces every layer of social convention, every relationship manual, the entire architecture of what we call intimacy is this: can you sustain the ethical responsibility of standing before someone who will never be fully knowable? Can you renounce the fantasy of total control? Can you accept that the Other will remain, forever, an unexplored territory—and that this is not a flaw, but the very condition that makes encounter possible?
Because here is the brutal paradox no one wants to face: the more you try to capture the Other, the more they escape. The more you reduce them to categories—“my husband,” “my wife,” “my partner”—the more you destroy precisely what first attracted you: alterity. Mystery. The impossibility of complete domestication.
Think of the standard trajectory of a relationship. In the beginning there is fascination. There is wonder. You stand before someone who surprises you, destabilizes you, carries an entire universe you do not control. That excites you. That mobilizes you. That makes you feel alive. But then—and here the tragedy begins—you decide you need to “know this person better.” And in this seemingly harmless operation you initiate the assassination project.
To know better, in daily practice, means to map. To catalog. To predict. To reduce infinite complexity to manageable patterns. You start building a mental file: “He’s like this when stressed,” “She always reacts that way when jealous,” “I can predict how they’ll respond.” Every new entry in that file is a small death of alterity. You are replacing the living person with an operational model. A simulacrum.
What we call intimacy is often only familiarity with our own mental map of the Other. You stopped relating to the real person long ago. Now you relate to your internal representation of them. And when the real person dares to behave in a way that doesn’t fit the map—when they surprise you, contradict you, challenge you—you do not celebrate the resurgent alterity. You get irritated. Frustrated. You feel betrayed. Because they dared to be Other when you had already captured them.
Here is the narcissistic wound no one wants to admit: you don’t really want the Other. You want an adjusted reflection of yourself. Someone who confirms your narratives, validates your perceptions, fits perfectly into the script you wrote before you ever met them. The true Other—the one who emerges with radical alterity, irreducible to any category you can create—terrifies you. Because it demands of you something our culture teaches us to avoid at all costs: renunciation of control.
And so you build cages. You call it commitment. Legitimate expectations. Joint construction. But observe the subtle operation: you are trying to make the Other fit structures that neutralize their alterity. It is not dialogue—it is domestication. Not encounter—it is colonization.
The ethical responsibility that emerges from this recognition is vertiginous. Because it is not a responsibility you choose. It is not a moral obligation you decide to assume to be a “good person.” It is prior to any choice. It is constitutive. The Other summons you to a responsibility that constitutes you as a being capable of authentic relationship, whether you consciously accept it or not.
This responsibility is not to make the Other happy. Not to meet their expectations. Not even to understand them completely—because total understanding is impossible and, if it were possible, would simply be the end. The responsibility is to sustain the relationship with alterity even when it discomforts, frustrates, destabilizes. It is to renounce the capture project. To accept that you will always stand before a mystery—and that this is not a problem to be solved, but the very condition for desire, wonder, life.
Think of the relationships that have died around you. How many of them succumbed precisely because someone got what they wanted—completely captured the Other? The marriage that became administrative. The partnership that turned into mechanical routine. The bond that lost all vitality. What died there was not love. It was alterity. And without alterity there is no relationship—only cohabitation between ghosts.
Now observe the cost of this operation on your own mental health. The chronic anxiety of trying to control someone who, by definition, is uncontrollable. The permanent frustration before expectations that will never be fully met because they are built on the fantasy of a domesticated Other. The anger that erupts when the real person dares to defy the character you created for them. The accumulated resentment because you invested all your energy trying to make the Other fit your categories, and they keep escaping.
You are exhausted. And you should be. Because you are attempting the impossible—capturing the infinite. Turning radical alterity into a manageable object. And the more you try, the more the relationship dies, and the more you intensify control efforts, creating a downward spiral that can only end in resentment, boredom, or collapse.
The alternative is not to romanticize alterity. Not to cynically celebrate the impossibility of genuine encounter. It is to accept the tension. To sustain the paradox. You will never fully know the Other. And it is precisely this that keeps the relationship alive.
There is an ancient wisdom that resonates brutally here: when Solon told Croesus that one cannot judge a person’s happiness until the end of their life, he was pointing to something beyond the temporal issue. He was revealing that you never possess the Other’s complete narrative. Not even the person possesses their own complete narrative while alive. The king expected to be recognized as the happiest of men—rich, powerful, at his peak. But Solon refused to crystallize that narrative. He refused to turn a life-in-process into a definitive category.
If you knew the Other completely, they would be dead. They would be an object in your consciousness, not a subject in the world. Fortune can change until the very last moment—not only external fortune, but the very configuration of being. The person you thought you knew yesterday may be radically Other tomorrow. And by insisting on keeping them trapped in a crystallized image, you prevent not only their life but the very possibility of relationship.
So the question reforms itself: can you love without capturing? Can you bond without colonizing? Can you accept that the person beside you will remain, forever, partially opaque—and that this is not their flaw, nor yours, but the very structure of alterity?
In family relationships this becomes even more complex. Observe how we treat children as extensions. As property. As our projects. “My child will be a doctor,” “My daughter will marry well,” “My boy will make me proud.” Where is the real child in these sentences? Vanished. Replaced by a narcissistic projection. By a script you wrote before they were even born.
And when they dare to be Other—when they choose paths not in your script, when they manifest desires that contradict your plans—you do not celebrate the emergence of an autonomous being. You feel betrayed. You feel you failed. Because you confused parenting with control. You confused love with colonization.
The same happens in reverse. Aging parents. You saw them one way your whole life. Strong. Providers. References. Then time transforms them. The body fails. Memory falters. And you get irritated. Because they dared to age. They dared to be Other in relation to the image you built and crystallized. The ethical responsibility here is brutal: to sustain the alterity of the father who is no longer the father you mapped. Of the mother who no longer matches the maternal character you internalized.
Mental health—individual and collective—begins when you stop trying to capture. When you renounce the fantasy of total control. When you accept that you will always stand before walking mysteries. And that this is not a system flaw—it is the very condition for life.
Joy does not come from capture. It comes from encounter. And encounter is only possible when there are two—two radical Others, irreducible to each other, who accept the ethical responsibility of sustaining the relationship even without guarantees, without complete maps, without total control.
You want authenticity? Then you must accept your own alterity too. You must recognize that you yourself are partially opaque to yourself. That you also escape the categories you try to impose on yourself. That you too are Other—even to yourself.
And here resides the possibility of liberation. When you stop performing to be “understood.” When you renounce the impossible project of becoming completely transparent, completely known, completely captured—neither by the Other, nor by yourself.
What emerges from this is not chaos. Not empty relativism. It is the possibility of living relationships. Of bonds that breathe. Of encounters that are not exhausted by familiarity. Because there will always be something more. Alterity will always resurge. There will always be the wonder of standing before someone who will never be fully yours—and who, precisely because of that, can be a journey partner.
So observe your relationships now. How many are with living people? How many are with corpses you keep artificially animated through expectations, controls, projections? How many times today did you really see the Other—and how many times did you see only your mental map of them?
The ethical responsibility that summons you is not comfortable. It comes with no manual. It offers no guarantees. It demands that you sustain the tension. That you accept discomfort. That you renounce the domestication project.
But only there—in that radical renunciation of control—can the relationship truly begin. With living people. With alterities that astonish you, challenge you, call you to become more than you imagined possible.
Because the Other is not a problem to be solved. It is a call to be answered.
This is the only relationship worth having. The only one that does not kill. The only one where you can finally stop trying to be God—omniscient, omnipotent, controller of alterities—and accept being human. Limited. Incomplete. Imperfect. And precisely because of that, capable of genuine encounter.
Without the Other, you do not exist as a relational being. Alterity is not an obstacle to encounter—it is its condition of possibility. And when you accept this mutual incompleteness, this asymmetrical evolution, this impossibility of total capture, you become, at last, capable of authentic meeting.

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