The School of Life

IDEALISM AND DEPRIVATION

It’s natural to imagine that those who expect most from love, those who dream most intensely of one day alighting on (as it were) a prince or a princess who will answer all their needs, must also be those who have already enjoyed the most promising experiences of relationships. Idealism must - we suppose - be the fruit of a pre-existing surplus of soul-satisfying moments.

But human nature is stranger. The greatest idealists are not, as we might think, those who have had the most blessed passage through life; it’s precisely those who have been most starved of affection, who have often been most lonely, who go on to expect most of other people.

Deprive someone of love at the start and you will generate an adult who wants only the greatest love, the highest love, the most perfect love. You will breed an idealist; which also means, someone who finds most relationships - probably all those they have had until now - disappointing. Someone very inclined to leave partnerships in search of something ‘better’ and ‘higher’, ‘closer’ and ‘deeper.’ Cut someone off from love and you breed not someone who will be grateful for whatever comes their way, but someone who threatens never to be content with what earthly existence can provide.

Imagine a lonely boy, growing up isolated in a tall apartment building in a large city. He doesn’t have many friends. His parents are absent, mocking and punitive. Back from school, he often gazes out of the window at a threadbare park below. So starts the work of the imagination. Somewhere out there - away from the bullies and the jocks - is a friend, not just a casual friend, not just any old friend, but a very perfect friend. A sibling as it were. A sibling who understands everything. They want to play the same games all the time, they feel all the same losses, all the same sadness, there isn’t a moment of discord.

Later on, the dream shifts to relationships. Somewhere in the vast new university, there is the perfect person: blue eyes, ringlets in her hair, tenderness, kindness. They have no problems, they bring no difficulties, there is simply laughter, communion and gentleness. The great idealists are those who have - for the longest time - had no one to play with.

In turn, tragically, idealism becomes its own prison. One longs so much for perfection, one has no time for what is there and half good. Because one has been deprived, one can’t forgive. One can’t tolerate the compromise, whatever lipservice one might pay to it. One keeps the dream alive in secret, as one had to in childhood. That’s why one rejects the slightly overweight person who is distinctly sweet. The slightly irritating person who is nevertheless bright. The one who doesn’t get everything but does understand a few things. No one can be forgiven. Next.

One looks for faults - and finds them. One picks holes: you said you loved me, but why then are you late, why aren’t there enough crisps in the larder, why were the keys missing yesterday. There are many flies indeed in the ointment. When one has been starving, one doesn’t fantasise about a sandwich; one fantasises about a banquet. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough.
Idealists are also, along the way, the great dreamers. One falls in love in trains, on buses, in airports. There are perfect beings, across the aisle and through the window. One stops talking to the real person beside one in order to imagine the stranger; or the new person on a dating app. The next one will be better. The carousel goes on. One wasn’t perfect enough for the parents who brought one up. So one applies the same ruthless model to those who are auditioning for a part in one’s life now.

The answer is simple enough to sketch: to loosen one’s grip on the dream of a flawless being. Not because one has to or it’s entirely silly. But because one understands where the dreams came from - and that they aren’t overly helpful. They were compensatory. They were what one’s young mind invented to stop one going crazy from loneliness. But now one can realise that one doesn’t need this adaptation, one is an adult, someone who can deal with imperfection (in oneself too), someone who knows how to laugh at the gap between hopes and reality. So what if they are always a bit late and don’t always understand? One develops into someone who has the inner resourcefulness to cope with the half crappiness of most things and most people. Someone who can love and be nourished by what is imperfect. That is, someone who can love on this earth.

Illustration: Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, illustration from an edition of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703) engraved by Cruillon, late 19th century

6 days ago | [YT] | 1,846

The School of Life

THE PERSON WHO WANTS LOVE SO MUCH THEY NEVER GET IT

There is a person who, ostensibly, wants love very much. They are ‘dating with intent.’ That is, dating with an intent to marry, to form a complete life with someone, to stop ever having to date anyone again.

They don’t hold back. They suggest a second date almost immediately. And a third one. They message constantly. They aren’t shy to declare their feelings by the end of the first month. They buy little gifts. They hug a lot. They love holding hands.

It is a hugely moving picture of love; the difficulty is how much this person wants it to come right. They’ve been lonely for the longest time. Arguably since they were a child. They did have love back then, but it was shattered or compromised to an extent that’s never really been dealt with or understood. Maybe a beloved adult died, or went away, or someone got very sick. And now it doesn’t feel like the world can ever be stable. Love always seems on the verge of getting extinguished. Nothing ever quite feels solid. That’s why one has to move very fast and hold on tightly. And ask a lot of questions of the partner: Are you sure you’re OK? Do you still care? Is this real?

It’s because of worry - worry about how safe love is - that the worried person often feels they need to raise their voice and ends up sounding harsh. Anger feels warranted or at least becomes inevitable when their partner has come home ten minutes late. It’s because of worry that they start an argument about the partner’s ex - who they suspect, the more they think about it (and they’ve thought about it all afternoon) - may not be entirely off the scene. It’s because of worry that they spoil a dinner in a restaurant by accusing their partner of flirting with the waiting staff. It’s because of worry that they call their partner ungrateful and, in extremis, threaten to leave them.

They want so much to be reassured, to be told they matter, but they are so alarmed that it seems that all they may really want to do is attack, criticise, create pressure and destroy.

It can be dispiriting to be on the receiving end of love from someone who can’t accept that love might be real. Eventually, the most patient lover may start to get fed up; they have told them again and again that they love them; they spent an hour trying to unpick a fight about nothing; they have done everything to prove that they aren’t having an affair with anyone at work. They have stressed that the weekend they have to spend by themselves has nothing to do with rejection and everything to do with catching up on their projects.

And so begins - by a terrible irony - the very thing the loving-but-worried person has feared from the start. One sombre day, their lover tells them they just can’t take it any more. They need space. They don’t have the energy to explain once more. They might walk out very suddenly - and ask never to be disturbed again.

This sorrowful lover who loves with too much fear alerts us to a curious aspect of love: that wanting a safe relationship with too much intensity can be the very element that preclude us from getting it. That if we never enjoyed security in childhood, we may seek it with excessive urgency in adulthood; resulting in a double punishment and exclusion. That we need to believe that trust and goodness could be real to give them a chance to one day become so.


Image: Lucian Freud, Flowers

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,675

The School of Life

WHY YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GET MARRIED ALMOST AT ONCE

One of the things about our world that would most surprise a magically returned premodern ancestor of ours is how long we take to assess and settle on a spouse.

In almost all societies that have ever existed, the period between first laying eyes on a prospective partner and the moment of committing to them was extremely short. In Sumeria, there was a single audience; in Classical Athens, young men and women might meet three times before arrangements were settled; in the Inca empire, one might never even have been in the spouse’s presence before the wedding.

Contrast this with our own set up. We move extremely slowly. It is typical to date someone non-exclusively for six months, then to commit to seeing them singly for a year and half, then perhaps to move in and further test the waters for four or five years - before either finally getting engaged or else discovering that, after all, one wasn’t quite suited, perhaps because of slightly different attitudes around politics or some clashes over interior design or entertainment preferences.

At the heart of the dispute between the premodern attitude and ours is a contrasting notion of what is required to make a relationship succeed.

We implicitly believe it is about compatibility; they firmly believed it was about commitment.

Underpinning our modern Romantic approach to love is a tightly held notion that the most important ingredient in any functioning relationship is innate congruence, a pre-existing sympathy of souls that will lend us a feeling that we have met someone before (perhaps in a past life). We believe we will need to encounter a lot of people and try them out over extended periods because this, and only this, will help us to see whether we have correctly alighted on a soulmate. It can take a hundred and eighty breakfasts with someone to assess if we really have sympathetic communication styles; we might need twenty-three mini breaks to properly judge a person’s approach to packing and time-keeping; only after sleeping with seventy-six different individuals might one determine whether we’re fully satisfied with sex with a particular example.

Our ancestors begged to differ. They believed that alignments were to be formed, not found. What was, for them, principally important for the success of any relationship was the desire to make it succeed. Commitment came first, any inbuilt compatibility a distant second. It almost didn’t matter who one married, the choice was somewhat secondary to the desire to be married. So long as the rough details were correct (right gender, age, and so on), the rest could and would be sorted out in time, through willpower and dedication. Intention - far more than any innate and possibly fictitious twinship of the soul - would mean that after an argument, partners would come back together and resume the dialogue. Or that they would put aside certain of their spontaneous wishes for the sake of the couple. Or would make effort after effort to grasp how the world might look through the other’s eyes. In the ancestral view, compatibility was an achievement of love; it was not and could never be its precondition.

We don’t have to follow historical precedents in every detail to be at least partially inspired by them. We can recognise that a wish to actually be married might in the end be one of the determining factors in how successful any marriage can be. So long as we and our partner are aligned on this point, the many differences that will naturally emerge between us may not have to be insuperable. In the premodern expectation that trouble is natural and legitimate, we discover a more bearable method of interpreting discord. Working at differences is what constitutes a relationship, it may not need to be seen as a stern obstacle that has to be overcome before one can ever take place.

Everyone we meet will be slightly wrong; our ancestors knew this better than we do. Everyone will fail to understand us intuitively; everyone will have a range of very unfortunate tastes. None of this has to be remotely fatal. We don’t need to be the same person separated at birth; we don’t need to be in spiritual synchronicity; all we really need is to want, very, very much, to be together with someone. The rest are (almost) details.

It might not, with this in mind, after all be so crazy to go on three dates with someone and then, without too much fanfare, set in motion plans for marriage. Once we understand that it’s the idea of commitment that counts, the details can be managed. We may have exaggerated the importance of finding the ‘right person’ and very much underestimated the power of wanting to make a relationship, any relationship, work.

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 2,509

The School of Life

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

From a distance, the disciplines of philosophy and psychotherapy look very similar. Both are interested in large topics of the mind, both seem concerned with helping people to find meaning, both are oriented towards generating happiness.

But there is a central difference. Philosophy believes that people will see the light and change as soon as the truth is presented to them. Psychotherapy, far more wisely and interestingly, knows they almost never do. The discipline is, above anything else, interested in the exploration and overcoming of ‘defence mechanisms,’ the extraordinary barriers we put up to shield ourselves from the kind of bold but terrifying insights that could - if only we could brave them - change our lives for the better.

When philosophy began in Ancient Athens, it was assumed that the truth alone would be sufficient to unlock people’s ethical and spiritual development. In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates is pictured in discussion with a number of his fellow Athenians whose muddled thinking he clears up with extraordinary bravado and brusqueness - in very short order and with near-magical results. After twenty minutes of dialectical thinking, a tyrant realises he should be good to his people; a wealthy merchant decides - on a brief walk from the market square down to the harbour - to reorient his life towards philosophy.

Psychotherapy chuckles quietly at the hubris on display. It knows only too well that one can have an utterly sound picture of what is wrong with someone and yet not, thereby, be able to affect any change in them. The most common result of telling a person about the errors in their conduct is protest, denial and rage. We are masters at finding ways to push away good ideas: we decide that the person delivering an insight is trying to do us in; we conclude that we’re being attacked rather than helped, we listen and then immediately forget what we have heard, we get addicted to alcohol or sport or the news to make sure we can never properly think or feel. Our minds are not - it seems - set up principally to let in insights and grow; they are chiefly designed to maintain the settled order for the sake of sterile short-term peace.

An average psychotherapist will be able to tell, normally, at the end of the first fifty-five minute session, what is ‘wrong’ with a client. They will be able to see clearly enough that they are a people pleaser, or can’t separate from their mother, or are seeking punishment through sex after an abusive childhood. But to come out and say this directly will be next to hopeless. The truth has to be cut into very small pieces and offered across months and years if it is ever to be digestible.

What psychotherapy has understood is that people change when, and only when, they feel extremely safe. Anything too loud, too bold or too urgent terrifies our fragile minds. We wait to explore our flaws and hang-ups until we feel that someone is entirely on our side. Psychotherapy itself took a while to properly absorb the idea. Early practitioners were forbidding and silent (to maintain a quasi-medical model of decorum). They rarely smiled, they looked blank and almost cross - until it was discovered that this kind of dispassion, far from helping clients to look at their lives with courage, was more likely to terrify them into silence and shame.

Nowadays, the average therapist proceeds with uncommon warmth. Their smile is indulgent, their manner peaceable and compassionate. They take things very gently. They listen with tenderness, all in the hope of lending us the energy to accept (18 months in) that, perhaps, yes, we do always seem to pick partners who will torment us as our father once did - or do have a pattern of jealousy towards women that relates back to a dynamic with our mother.

We may not be therapists but we can borrow some of the discipline’s patience and humility in our conduct with others. It may be tempting, at family get togethers or in relationships, to simply tell people ‘what is wrong with them.’ We will, next time we see her, tell our mother what her problem truly is, we will - over dinner - tell our partner why they keep sabotaging their chances at work. Psychotherapy bids us to stand down. We may be in possession of the truth; everything depends on our forbearance and patience in getting it across. We’ll have to make our ‘pupil’ feel very safe indeed, we’ll have to assure them of our love over an implausibly long time, we may need a year or two to broach the simplest sounding idea.

Philosophy thought that truth alone might save us. Psychotherapy has understood, with far more canniness, that insight will only reach us through love.

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,678

The School of Life

MEETING SOMEONE AT THE WRONG TIME

The idea of not being able to understand something because one has met it ‘too early’ in life is familiar enough from our relationship to literature.

Take a 17 year old to a performance of King Lear and they will get most of the words clearly enough. It’s the psychological meaning that will elude them - and for a very sound reason: a lack of summers. When the aged King Lear exclaims ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child’, it takes more than a grammatical understanding to determine what is going on. It can require a painful pregnancy, a rush to Queen Charlotte’s hospital at midnight, years of walks to the park, two buggies in a narrow hallway, the yogurt on the underside of the table, 4 a.m wakeups, a surly adolescence… twenty-five years in all, apparently entirely unrelated to an understanding of Shakespeare, which nevertheless provide the loam in which Lear’s lines will eventually, one dark October evening at the National Theatre, fall and start to make sense.

A virginal A-level class might, similarly, do its utmost to make meaning out of Hamlet’s line: ‘Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave’. But the resonance of the words may have to wait for a very long time, until one has sat outside someone’s house in the car in the rain, begged them to pick up the phone, argued that one should be together when they clearly didn’t wish to be and found oneself in an alien bedroom wondering what one had done (again). It may not sound like logical preparation for an understanding of an Elizabethan play; it might nevertheless be the indispensable key to doing so.

So too in our romantic lives, we may find ourselves in agonising situations in which someone cannot grasp our meaning, despite our best attempts to convey it (as careful as that of any English professor) because our interlocutor has simply not passed through the necessary life stages, perhaps unbeknownst to us and to them.

We might, for example, do everything to persuade someone of the value of our love, from a sure knowledge (accumulated over decades) that what we have together is pure and good and immensely rare. They might have great goodwill towards us, they might love us a lot, they might in theory get exactly what we are saying - and yet be powerless to resist the pull of restlessness, surface excitement and masochism. Our entreaties might end up as meaningless as Hamlet’s line ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew’ would to a clever 11 year old. The cup of understanding may have formed, the liquid of experience has not been poured.

The book of love has passages every bit as abstruse as Shakespeare’s, albeit less poetic: about how precious affection is, why one has to communicate rather than be defensive, why masochism can’t be an answer, why the bullying of one’s parents shouldn’t determine what one expects of love as an adult, how one must cherish those who have cherished us.

The words may be readable, but they’ll make no sense if delivered too early. And so one may have no option but to part company with one’s adored one, knowing, almost as a certainty, that they will eventually get it, but only after a lot of pain and maybe a divorce or two, in 2056 or 2072 - when we’ll be long gone.

We can argue all we like, we can’t speed up time, which in many cases - more than we want to recognise - is the only thing that unlocks understanding. We may have to say what we need to - and then take our leave, thinking, as an English teacher might (but with a lot more sorrow): everything that could be was said, it was understanding that was missing and that was only ever a gift of implacable time.


Image: Laurence Olivier, King Lear, 1946

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,488

The School of Life

THE FLIRT WHO DOESN'T WANT LOVE

There is a person who, ostensibly, wants love very much. When they go out in the evening, they dress very finely indeed. They spend a lot of time working on their appearance. Their eyes are sparkling. Their manner is tender, funny, self-deprecating and agile. They find out what you like - and refer back to it artfully. They remember what you said last time about orange juice or electricity pylons or Renaissance art; they zero in on your vulnerabilities. They know how much it hurt when you had to go to school and when your parents got divorced. They send the sweetest messages - very regularly indeed (for a while).

But there’s a problem. They do this a little too widely. You’re in fact one of nine people they’re talking to at the moment. They have six parties to go to this week. They were in a bar in Covent Garden last night, they’ll be at the Dorchester hotel tomorrow, on the weekend, it’s Newmarket, then Gstaad. You last saw them ten days ago.

When, briefly, you have them with you, it is very gratifying. They focus on you very intently. They tell you how pleased they are to see you. They look beautiful in their sleep. But in the morning, the mood is a little grouchy and they scroll through their phone at the kitchen island, and you know you will never possess them.

A long time ago, back in the little apartment they grew up in, this person wasn’t thought very desirable at all. That’s how this pattern began. The parents liked their sibling more; they were laughing together in the living room and the person was left sobbing in their tiny bedroom alone. They lacked friends at school. They definitely had no sense of having been chosen. They’re so good at making you feel seen because they know everything about invisibility and humiliation (in time, they’ll destroy you too, the same way they were destroyed; it makes them feel momentarily stronger to know that you are the weak one).

Being chosen matters above all else. It doesn’t really matter who is doing the choosing. They just need a lot of voices. The digital world obliges. There may be 100 messages waiting for them at the end of an evening. They might have had a partner a few years ago who loved them a lot. For a time, marriage might have been on the cards. But it all began to feel too dangerous: why trust deeply in one person when you could be admired by hundreds and so mitigate the risks of any one person imploding? No one ever chose them; they aren’t going to chose you.

The lesson of childhood was always: you aren’t good enough. This is the wound they are permanently pushing up against. This is what drives them to climb up the very steep steps of the private members’ club in Mayfair at 1am. Now I am OK, because seven people are waiting for me on a plush velvet banquette.

None of this has anything to do with a relationship and it’s extremely lonely (though the loneliness is easier to ignore, when there’s always a phone and some anti-depressants and a party). Relationships are terrifying. One person, one witness, someone to tell you about your faults, someone who might get angry (like father). Someone who might criticise you. Or even worse, foster dependence and then leave you.

The flirt is at the threshold of love - and gives us an insight into the scale of its terror for those who have been ignored and bullied early on. Arrested at this particular juncture, they speak of a universal fear of what we ostensibly all want.

For some of us, all we can manage of love’s challenge is the very first step; that of being wanted. We should be sorry for them - and scared for ourselves.

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 2,166

The School of Life

THE WISDOM OF DATING PEOPLE WHO MAKE US FEEL ILL

The idea of dating people who make us feel repulsed, who bring on a feeling of nausea and discomfort, sounds - at first blush - particularly perverse and insane.

We should evidently more wisely do what we’ve always been told: listen to our gut and follow our intuitions. Love is a feeling and we must tune in to its demands. We should go with who mesmerises us and makes us long. Romantic culture has been teaching us this for 250 or so years. Intuition is the fastest, most reliable route to finding a workable, kind, good and fulfilling partner.

The thesis is compelling, but it is also built on extremely slim psychological foundations and is, perhaps, responsible for causing an undue amount of suffering.

For any of us who have endured a difficult childhood, our instincts are likely to be not just a bit wrong, but extremely dangerous. The first native emotion in coming into contact with someone violent, denying, absent and bullying will be excitement. Just as the primary feeling in relation to a sweetie will be boredom, sexual repulsion and eerie discomfort.

The reason lies in the past. We seek to love in adulthood types who remind us of our earliest caregivers. If these happened to be violent, unfulfilling or unkind, then we will associate these with ‘home’ even when they deny us any chance of the happiness we deserve.

Correspondingly, those who are sweet will feel at once alien and threatening. Because the only way to survive our childhoods will have been to get used to suffering, we will harbour an endemic suspicion of any ambassadors of the tenderness we learnt to do without.

Naturally, not everyone who feels wrong for us will actually be right. Just as not everyone who feels right is indeed right. We simply need a lot of scepticism about our impulses.

To improve our chances of happy love, we should pause when the evidence on paper is pretty overwhelming (the prospective partner is nice looking, is kind, is intelligent, is available) and yet - for reasons we can’t ourselves understand - we just want to get away in a hurry. We should stop our flight, calm ourselves down and imagine that we may be getting this wrong. That our nausea is not telling us about our prospective partner, it’s telling us about how difficult our parents were. And therefore that what we should do with our panic, is notice it, study it and ignore it - as one might a misfiring alarm. We might show up date after date, and slowly reduce our fear of kindness each time. We might come to see that the partner isn’t an ogre, doesn’t want to kill off our freedom and isn’t a bore. Their physical features may not, once we pause the alarm, have to elicit disgust. They may have a lot to say for themselves, once we silence the voice ordering us to think that they aren’t good enough.

Sensible opinion has been telling us for a very long time that our gut is the clue to everything. It may be better to proceed with some careful questions about our histories: how well looked after were we at the age of seven? Was there a kindly adult we could turn to when we were distressed? Did someone keep us in mind? Did we have a feeling of mattering immensely to a parent? If we can’t answer in the affirmative, we should move extremely slowly before cancelling certain partners going forward. And we might even need to scan back over people we threw decisively away and wonder - very painfully - whether the problem might not have started with us rather than with them.

We should - with a more secure hold on our psyches - cease to hold it against a dinner companion for doing that most generous and natural of things: think well of us.

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,063

The School of Life

THE NICE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T BEAR TO END A RELATIONSHIP

Some of the most sensitive and generous people in the world have a fault which deserves to be named and explored: they cannot end relationships.

Like every adult, they find themselves in situations where an ending is necessary. They need to move on, they fancy someone else, they have to grow in new directions.

The problem is that this sets up an insuperable challenge. Nothing in the past of these very kind people prepared them for this. As children, they were likely to have faced very unstable or angry parents whom they needed to manage and to stay very good around. No one had time for their complicated needs. Father might have been raging about a work crisis; mother might have been crying in her room about a loss in her past. The child learnt to get by by complying. Now they are adults who accommodate others’ needs whenever possible. They smile a lot, they are extremely deferential. Everyone calls them ‘very nice’ - and they really are.

Except at times in love there is a problem. They need to do something very harsh indeed to someone who has been very nice to them - and who has no clue what is in store. They look at them, perhaps asleep next to them, one hand outstretched to meet them, and feel as if they might prefer to kill themselves than to move forward with their plan. How could they possibly cause this very lovely person discomfort? After all they’ve done for them. After the nice holidays, the sweet gifts, the tender moments, their patience with their career crisis.

Nevertheless, the feelings can’t be denied either. They keep surging back at inopportune moments: on a country hike, during a birthday celebration, at the museum. The sense of discomfort doesn’t go away. The partner has grown (despite themselves) properly irksome. They are annoying when they speak, when they come for a cuddle, when they discuss the future.

Eventually, the very nice person does the only thing possible for them. They dial down their affections very, very quietly, invisibly, and trust that eventually the partner will notice - and leave.

For a while, the partner (especially if they’ve been imbued with confidence from childhood) may not register anything. They might not spot that it’s the fourth week that sex has been dodged; or that it’s the third weekend straight that their companion is spending with friends. But eventually, even the most secure partner is likely to make a protest. ‘Why didn’t you reply to my messages?’ ‘How come you never want to spend time together?’ ‘Why don’t you want sex any more?’

To be properly effective, the departing partner has at this point to develop a special kind of entirely deniable, quietly offensive accusatory manner. They have to become a pain. ‘We have tons of sex, what do you mean?’ Or: ‘I’m just very tired from work, please don’t keep bothering me…’ Or: ‘I need to go out as it’s Christine’s birthday, can’t you develop your own friendship group?’

This can go on for a very long time. There is much talk at large about needing to work on relationships; and some people (unfortunately in such cases) have a lot of willingness to try. The more bratty the departing lover gets, the more indulgent and thoughtful their partner may become. Even so, if the departing lover is lucky, their partner will eventually lose patience. One evening, or perhaps morning, over text or in the kitchen, something will snap. The tension will be too great; the feeling of being held at bay, unloved but not dispensed with, will grow unbearable.

‘I’m so sorry but I’m unhappy here and I think I need to get out,’ will say the partner who has been dismissed-but-wants-to-stay to the partner who pretends-to-want-to-stay-but-has-been-dismissed. To which the firing lover can reply: ‘It’s really sad that you feel this way, but I do understand…’ ‘It’s really unfortunate you want to leave, I won’t hold you back…’

For a time, the heartbroken partner will be too muddled to follow the complex trail of blame to its source. They’ll feel guilty about how critical they have been rather than explore how right they were to be furious. An overwhelming sadness will cloud their ability to do much more than pack their bags and leave.

For months and probably years after, the fired lover will wonder what they did wrong. Would the relationship have survived, if only they hadn’t lost their temper over the constant absences? Were they too possessive? Were they wrong to complain about the missing messages? They might take these questions to a therapist. The exploration will last an age.

The fired partner will in the process - quietly - go mad, carrying the burden of ending something they desperately wanted to continue, for reasons they cannot put a finger on.

For their part, the firing partner’s mind will have more or less shut down on the issue. Why did the relationship end, kind friends might ask. ‘Oh, it’s complicated, they were so nice, but you know, some things don’t quite work. It’s hard…’ One can get away with that, in most circles.

In a small antechamber of the heart, they will of course know the reality: that they had to execute the partner; that they are necessarily far too nice ever to hurt anyone; and that no one must ever, ever suspect the truth.


Painting by Sean Scully

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 924

The School of Life

HOW TO SPOT AVOIDANT DANGER IN EARLY DATING

A great majority of people in the dating world will declare, at first blush, that they are very interested in, and capable of, love and long term relationships. And yet the collective fate of relationships suggests that this cannot be the whole truth. Whatever the stated intentions, a huge number of unions end up foundering on the inability of one or the other person to remotely live up to their stated goals: on someone’s inability to sustain the intimacy and longevity of which they had declared themselves entirely capable and keen over the first cocktails.

The mind then naturally moves to wondering whether there might be some way of flushing out the situation earlier. Is there anything other than experience that could enable one to determine what one has on one’s hands? Might there be a way of avoiding the rigmarole of trying to build a relationship with someone who doesn’t, in time, reveal themselves to be constitutionally capable of one?

We suggest a range of questions and conversation topics. This is no science, some of the approaches are deliberately crude; they are a useful starting point nevertheless:

How much space do you need?

Everyone needs space; this much is a given. Those who too actively declare a love of space are often those who will panic when a modicum of presence is asked of them. We should be reassured and relieved by someone who can smile and admit: ‘Not that much, I actually really like being around my partner…’

WhatsApp use

Whatsapp is a medium of particular significance to those for whom connection is - ultimately - tricky. We should ask with feigned innocence (we’re not being deceptive, just trying to save ourselves years of pain) how a person relates to this technology: ‘Are you someone who answers messages right away or do you tend to get a bit behind?’

No one can answer messages immediately all the time; but watch out for those who hint at real complexity around the topic: ‘Oh, I’ve been told before I’m very bad at messaging. I am trying hard as I know it annoys people…’ Or: ‘I’m so terrible with getting back!’ This could signal more than a problem with messaging, it is a relatively sure sign of a problem with intimacy.

If you really liked someone, how fast or slowly would you want to move in a relationship?

There is crazy fast, but there is crazy slow too. What one is looking out for is someone who can, overall, countenance rapid movement, who doesn’t need to make a speech about the horrors of speed, who isn’t terrified about finding themselves, in relatively short order, in a deeply committed situation; who might not balk at the idea of being engaged within six months.

It’s not for nothing that in almost all pre-modern societies, the dating process was very fast indeed. You went on 10 or 15 dates, then engagement followed. It sounds peculiar, even demented, to us, but there is something equally demented, and very dangerous too, in the idea that you might need to circle someone for four years in extreme ambiguity before one person decides they need a bit more freedom after all. The modern dating world, with its entirely diffuse timelines, has become a paradise for the avoidant; and a guard-rail free hell for the anxious.

When there’s a conflict in a relationship, do you lean in or step back?

People with avoidant temperaments cannot bear what they call intensity. They don’t want you to want anything too much from them. They don’t want to deal with your demands, they certainly don’t want to hear about your anger - even if they might have caused it. Their response to relational difficulty is solitude.

‘Tell me how you repair a conflict in a relationship?’ is a useful question. Those who have almost never repaired will be particularly stuck. Throw out a novelistic scenario: You’ve just had to cancel a weekend that your partner was especially looking forward to. They are now furious with you. How might you repair things?’

What would it take for you to feel smothered in a relationship?

It’s a provocative approach. Because the ‘right’ answer could be: A bit of smothering might not be too bad, if it was done right.

Those who cannot bear closeness will respond by being particularly incensed: There will be an emphasis on the dangers of being too often around other people. We can sympathise, till those other people turn out to be us.

Why did your last few relationships break up?

A classic avoidant approach to the problems of intimacy is to have a passionate love affair with someone who doesn’t care. The avoidant are notorious for their investment in multi-year relationships with people who never show up, who might have been married, or lived in another country, or couldn’t commit. The way the story is initially told over dinner, it looks like it was the other person who was uninterested in love; it may just as much have been your dinner companion. We signal our readiness for love not just by what we profess to want but who we pick to realise our wants. Those who repeatedly end up with partners who aren’t present are unlikely to want to truly show up for love themselves.

Watch out too for stories where an ex is made into a villain for what may - through a fair lens - simply have been a very legitimate desire for affection. In describing the reasons for a break-up, a date might say: ‘They were so cloying… They wanted me to message them all the time… They were very needy…’ The word ‘controlling’ is a particularly interesting one in this context, for it is as ready to be applied to a truly coercive situation as it is to a much more innocent desire for a partner to be present. ‘They wanted to control me all the time…’ could just be an avoidant way of admitting, in effect, that it made them very uncomfortable to be asked for love.

Were you loved by anyone steadily and kindly in childhood?

It sounds like a very unfair question. Few of us have perfect pasts, but if no one loved your dinner companion with warmth over many early years, you must not be surprised if they gradually start to hold it against you for loving them now. Deprived grown up children are very easy to feel sorry for and to love. The most predictable result for doing so isn’t gratitude but (eventually) aggression, abandonment and silence.

It would be foolish to imagine we’d ever catch everything on the first date; but equally foolish to imagine that the signs wouldn’t mostly be there, to the eye that has been trained through suffering.

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,896

The School of Life

FOR THE VICTIMS OF AN 'AVOIDANT DISCARD'

The arrival of love should ostensibly always be a matter of celebration. Imagine that, finally, after years of waiting, along comes what might be called ‘a nice person.’ They are mature, they apologise for their flaws, they listen, they ask questions, they take an interest, they are generous. The new couple go on a number of holidays. First to Pisa. Then a weekend in Wales. Then a trip to Nottingham. Introductions are made to best friends from the training course, to an aunt, to a brother-in-law. There is laughter, some innovative sex, some deep conversations, some tears about past traumas; a sense, at last, of having come home.

But in the background of one of the parties, the lover who is fearful of love, there is also rising discomfort. For a time this is managed through strategic lowerings of the temperature. There is an argument on the steps of the museum which ruins one afternoon. There is a mysterious bout of illness which puts pay to a few dinners. There is an urgent need to see a friend which shatters the intimacy of the third weekend. There is a pressing need to attend a course or fix a shelf - subtle attempts to ensure that love cannot deepen, that dependence is stymied, that a home is carefully dismantled at the same time as it is being put up.

To continue reading this article, click the link: www.theschooloflife.com/article/what-is-an-avoidan…

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,189