The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  This is because we don’t fall in love first and foremost with those who care for us best and most devotedly; we fall in love with those who care for us in ways that we expect. Adult love emerges from a template of how we should be loved that was created in childhood and is likely to be connected to a range of problematic compulsions that militate in key ways against our chances of growth.

  Far more than happiness, what motivates us in relationships is a search for familiarity – and what is familiar is not restricted to comfort, reassurance and tenderness; it may include feelings of abandonment, humiliation and neglect, which can form part of the list of paradoxical ingredients we need to refind in adult love. We might reject healthy, calm and nurturing candidates simply on the basis that they feel too right, too eerie in their unfamiliar kindness, and nowhere near as satisfying as a bully or an ingrate, who will torture us in just the way we need in order to feel we are in love.

  To get at the peculiar instincts which circulate powerfully in the less noticed corners of our brains, we might try to finish stub sentences that invite us to share what might charm or repel us in others:

  If someone shows me huge kindness and consideration, I …

  If someone isn’t entirely convinced by me, I …

  When someone tells me they really need me, I …

  Our honest reactions are legacies that reveal our underlying assumptions about the kind of love it feels we are allowed, and are perhaps not an especially good guide to personal or mutual happiness.

  It is common to advise people who are drawn to tricky candidates simply to leave them for more wholesome options. This is theoretically appealing yet often practically impossible. We cannot magically redirect the wellsprings of attraction. Rather than aim for a transformation in the types of people we are drawn to, it may be wiser to try to adjust how we respond and behave around the difficult characters whom our past mandates that we will find interesting.

  Our problems are often generated because we continue to respond to compelling people in the way we learned to behave as children around their templates. For instance, maybe we had a rather irate parent who often raised their voice. We loved them, but reacted by feeling that when they were angry we must be guilty. We got timid and humble. Now if a partner (to whom we are magnetically drawn) gets cross, we respond as squashed, browbeaten children: we sulk, we assume it’s our fault, we feel got at and yet deserving of criticism.

  But rather than seek radically to re-engineer our instincts, we can try to learn to react to our lovers not as we did as children but in the more mature and constructive manner of a rational adult. There is an enormous opportunity to move ourselves from childlike to more adult patterns of response in relation to the difficulties we are attracted to.

  Many of us are highly likely to end up with somebody with a particularly knotty set of issues which trigger our desires as well as our childlike defensive responses. The answer isn’t usually to shut down the relationship, but to strive to deal with the compelling challenges it throws up with some of the wisdom we weren’t capable of when we first encountered these in a parent or caregiver.

  It probably isn’t in our remit to locate a wholly grown-up person to love; but it is always in our remit to behave in more grown-up ways around a partner’s less mature sides.

  THAT WE ARE A HELLISH PROPOSITION

  The idea that one is in many ways an extremely difficult person to live around sounds, at first, improbable and even offensive. Yet fully understanding and readily and graciously admitting this possibility may be the surest way of making certain that one proves a somewhat endurable proposition. There are few people more deeply insufferable than those who don’t, at regular intervals, suspect they might be so.

  We are, all of us, hellish. We don’t need to be thinking of anyone in particular to know this is true for everyone. We have all – in one way or another – been inadequately parented, have a panoply of unfortunate psychological traits, are beset by bad habits, are anxious, jealous, ill-tempered and vain. We are necessarily going to bring an awesome amount of trouble into someone else’s life.

  We tend to be shielded from this unwelcome news through a mixture of sentimentality and neglect. Our parents may have loved us too much to outline the drawbacks; our friends may not have had the will. And our exes are liable to have been too keen to escape to bother with our re-education.

  Furthermore, it is impossible, on one’s own, to notice the extent of one’s power to madden. Our eccentric hours and reliance on work to ward off feelings of vulnerability can pass without comment when we fall singly into bed past one in the morning. Our peculiar eating habits lack reality without another pair of eyes to register our dismaying combinations.

  Eventually, a partner will call us out. It will feel like a horrible personal attack that a nicer person would not have put us through. But it is merely an inevitable response to failings anyone exposed to us would have eventually needed to bring up. We would all do well to have a detailed response to the suggestion, best raised early on, that we might be a trial to be with.

  Everyone, seen close up, has an appalling amount wrong with them. The specifics vary hugely but the essential point is shared. It isn’t that a partner is too critical or unusually demanding. They are simply the bearer of inevitably awkward news. Asking anyone to be with us is in the end a peculiar request to make of someone we claim to care intensely about.

  THE HELLISHNESS OF OTHERS

  In an analogous move, to evolve a clear-eyed and unpanicked view of the grave failings of one’s partner is among the most generous actions we are capable of in love. This is because the success or failure of a relationship doesn’t hinge on whether the other is deeply flawed – they are. What matters is how we interpret their failings; how we understand the reasons why they have previously been and will again in the future be very difficult to be with.

  The crux is whether we can move from interpreting behaviour as a sign of meanness to viewing it as a symptom of pain and anxiety. We will have learned to love when our default response to unfortunate moments is not to feel aggrieved but to wonder what damaged aspects of a partner’s rocky past have been engaged.

  Annoying characteristics almost always have their roots in childhood, long before our arrival. They are, for the most part, strategies that were developed for coping with stresses that could not correctly be processed by an immature mind. An overcritical, demanding parent might have made them feel as if being disorganized and untidy was a necessary rebellion, a crucial assertion of independence against a threatening demand for compliance. A watchfulness around social status might have been the outcome of a succession of bankruptcies in a father’s business during adolescence. An avoidant personality might have resulted from an early unbearable disappointment.

  We are ready for relationships not when we have encountered perfection, but when we have grown willing to give flaws the charitable interpretations they deserve.

  Our partners aren’t uniquely damaged. We just know them a lot better than the exciting stranger. Our partner suffers from the disadvantages of incumbency: of having been in our lives for so long that we have had the opportunity to be patiently introduced to the full range of their inadequacies. Our certainty that we might be happier with another person is founded on ignorance, the result of having been shielded from the worst and crazier dimensions of a new character’s personality – which we must accept are sure to be there, not because we know them in any detail, but because we know the human race.

  A charitable mindset doesn’t make it lovely to be confronted by the other’s troubles. But it strengthens our capacity to stick with them, because we see that their failings don’t make them unworthy of love, rather all the more urgently in need of it.

  THE LONGING FOR REASSURANCE

  There are sweet moments, early on in relationships, when one person can’t quite work up the courage to let another know just how much they like them. They’d love to touch the other’s hand and find a place
in their life; but their fear of rejection is so intense they hesitate and falter. Our culture has a lot of sympathy for this awkward and intensely vulnerable stage of love. We’re taught to be patient about the way people might grow somewhat flustered or tongue-tied. Or they might act sarcastically or coldly, not from indifference, but as a way of disguising a disturbingly powerful enthusiasm. However, the assumption is that the terror of rejection will be limited in scope and focused on one particular stage of a relationship: its beginning. Once a partner is finally accepted and the union gets under way, the assumption is that the fear must come to an end.

  But one of the odder features of relationships is that, in truth, the fear of rejection never ends. It continues, even in quite sane people, on a daily basis, with frequently difficult consequences – chiefly because we refuse to pay it sufficient attention and aren’t trained to spot its counter-intuitive symptoms in others. We haven’t found a winning way to keep admitting just how much reassurance we need.

  Acceptance is never a given; reciprocity is never assured. There can always be new threats, real or perceived, to love’s integrity. The trigger to insecurity can be apparently minuscule. Perhaps the other has been away at work for unusual amounts of time; or they were pretty animated talking to a stranger at a party; or it’s been a while since sex took place. Perhaps they weren’t very warm to us when we walked into the kitchen. Or they’ve been rather silent for the last half an hour.

  Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviours guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims. Within established relationships, when the fear of rejection is denied, two major symptoms tend to show up.

  First, we may become distant – or what psychotherapists call ‘avoidant’. We want to get close to our partners but feel so anxious that we may be unwanted, we freeze them out: we say we’re busy, pretend our thoughts are elsewhere. We could get involved with a third person, the ultimate defensive attempt to be distant – and often a perverse attempt to assert that we don’t require a love we feel too vulnerable to ask for.

  We grow into avoidant patterns when – in childhood – attempts at closeness ended in degrees of rejection, humiliation, uncertainty or shame that we were ill-equipped to deal with. We became, without consciously realizing it, determined that such levels of exposure would never happen again. At an early sign of being disappointed, we therefore now understand the need to close ourselves off from pain. We are too scarred to know how to stay around and mention that we are hurt.

  Or else we become controlling – or what psychotherapists calls ‘anxious’. We grow suspicious, frantic and easily furious in the face of the ambiguous moments of love; catastrophe never feels too far away. A slightly distant mood must, we feel, be a harbinger of rejection; a somewhat non-reassuring moment is an almost certain prelude to the end. Our concern is touching, but our way of expressing it often less so, for it emerges indirectly as an attack rather than a plea. In the face of the other’s swiftly assumed unreliability, we complain administratively and try to control procedurally. We demand that they be back by a certain hour, we berate them for looking away from us for a moment, we force them to show us their commitment by putting them through an obstacle course of administrative chores. We get very angry rather than admit, with serenity, that we’re worried. We ward off our vulnerability by denigrating the person who eludes us. We pick up on their weaknesses and complain about their shortcomings. Anything rather than ask the question which so much disturbs us: do you still care? And yet, if this harsh, graceless behaviour could be truly understood for what it is, it would be revealed not as rejection or indifference, but as a strangely distorted – yet very real – plea for tenderness.

  A central solution to these patterns is to normalize a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how predictable it is to be in need of reassurance – and at the same time, how understandable it is to be reluctant to reveal one’s dependence. We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. ‘I really need you. Do you still want me?’ should be the most normal of enquiries. We should uncouple the admission of need from any associations with the unfortunate and punitive term ‘neediness’. We must get better at seeing the love and longing that lurk behind some of our and our partner’s most cold, stern or managerial moments.

  PARTNER-AS-CHILD

  Small children sometimes behave in stunningly unfair and shocking ways: they scream at the person who is looking after them, angrily push away a bowl of animal pasta, immediately discard something you have just fetched for them. But we rarely feel personally agitated or wounded by their behaviour. And the reason is that we don’t readily assign negative motives or mean intentions to very small people. We reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We don’t think they are doing it in order to upset us. We probably think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore, or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. We’ve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations which defend us from panic or agitation.

  This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults in general and our lovers in particular. Here we imagine that others have deliberately got us in their sights. If the partner is late for our mother’s birthday because of ‘work’, we may assume it’s an excuse. If they promised to buy us some extra toothpaste but then ‘forgot’, we’ll imagine a deliberate slight. They probably relish the thought of causing us a little distress.

  But if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different: maybe they didn’t sleep well last night and are too exhausted to think straight; maybe they’ve got a sore knee; maybe they are doing the equivalent of testing the boundaries of parental tolerance. Seen from such a point of view, the lover’s adult behaviour doesn’t magically become nice or acceptable. But the level of agitation is kept safely low. It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children; it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.

  It sounds strange at first – and even condescending or despairing – to keep in mind that in crucial ways one’s partner always remains a child. On the outside they’re obviously a functioning adult. But the partner-as-child theory urges us to recognize that parts of the psyche always remain tethered to how they were at the early stages of life. This way of seeing the person one is with may be a helpful strategy for managing times when they are very difficult to cope with: when there are outbursts of deeply unreasonable petulance, sulkiness or flashes of aggression. When they fall far short of what we ideally expect from grown-up behaviour and we dismissively label such attitudes as ‘childish’, we are – without quite realizing it – approaching a hugely constructive idea, but then (understandably though unfortunately) seeing it as simply an accusation, rather than what it truly is: recognition of an ordinary feature of the human condition.

  The therapeutic benefit is the observation that we are generally very good at loving children. Our ability to continue to keep calm around children is founded on the fact that we take it for granted that they are not able to explain what is really bothering them. We deduce the real cause of their sorrow from amid the external symptoms of rage, because we grasp that little children have very limited abilities to diagnose and communicate their own problems.

  A central premise of the partner-as-child theory is that it’s not an aberration or unique failing of one’s partner that they retain a childish dimension. It’s a normal, inevitable feature of all adult existence. You are not desperately unlucky to have hitched yourself to someone who is still infantile in many ways. Adulthood simply isn’t a complete state; what we call childhood lasts (in a submerged but significant way) all our lives. Therefore some of the responses we reflexively offer to children mu
st forever continue to be relevant when we’re dealing with another grown-up.

  Being benevolent to one’s partner’s inner child doesn’t mean infantilizing them. This is no call to draw up a chart detailing when they are allowed screen time or to award stars for getting dressed on their own. It means being charitable in translating things they say in terms of their deeper meaning: ‘You’re a bastard’ might actually be a way of trying to say, ‘I feel under siege at work and I’m trying to tell myself I’m stronger and more independent than I really feel’; or ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ might mean, ‘I’m terrified and frustrated and I don’t really know why. Please be strong.’

  Of course, it’s much harder being grown up around another adult whose inner child is on display than it is being with an actual child. That’s because we can see how little and undeveloped a toddler or a five-year-old is, so sympathy comes naturally. We know, and are visually reminded, that it would be a disaster to suddenly turn on the child and try to hold them fully responsible for every moment of their conduct. Psychology has been warning us for half a century or more that this isn’t the right route.

  However, we don’t yet have this cultural back-up fully in force to assist us in coping with a partner’s childish sides. The problem with adults is that they look misleadingly adult – so the need for an accurate, corrective reimagining of their inner lives is more unexpected. We need to force ourselves to picture the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sheer confusion in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. Our lover may be tall and able to chair meetings at work, but their behaviour may still sometimes be dramatically connected with their early years. We’re so keen never to seem patronizing by treating someone as younger than they are that we overlook the need occasionally to ignore the outward, adult sides of our partner in order to perceive, sympathize with and assuage the angry, confused infant lurking inside.