Common business rhetoric tends to portrait mergers and acquisitions (M&As) through highly idealized images, trumpeting such processes as great feats and unchallenged victories. Among other images - e.g., "together we will be stronger", or "the best of both worlds" - the most common projection embodied in the M&As discourse has been that of a strongly idealized and "perfect marriage". The objective of this study is to contribute - through an empirical study and a theoretical discussion - to an understanding of the internal dynamic of M&As, and to explore the complex processes that unfold behind the idealized image of the "happy marriage". The empirical study involved 56 cases of M&As in Brazil, and more specifically an analysis of 120 drawings that represented such processes, obtained as part of interviews with 128 "survivor" employees of the companies under integration. In this paper we have opted to focus only on the analysis of the 95 drawings depicting representations at the group level of analysis, which we studied using the three basic assumptions that Bion (1975) suggests groups tend to display about themselves: fight-flight, dependence, and pairing. The study's results suggest that during M&A integration processes, (i) there are intense struggles for power between the groups involved, usually with significant risks and losses for all involved;and (ii) far from being a happy marriage, the unions that result from M&As show signs of cruelty and domination, where people are often required to coexist intimately with those theyhave always learned to hate - competitors who were, until recently, their main opponents. Ultimately, our results suggest that while corporations discourse about marriages derived form M&As, people may actually feel as if they're forced to sleep with the enemy.