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The best thing about physical maturity is that it’s very easy to spot; we can so easily
tell when someone has another decade of growth to go – and can therefore set our expectations,
and our levels of forbearance accordingly. But we have no such luxury when it comes to
emotional maturity. Here we can be constantly surprised by whom we have on our hands. The
most stunning forms of immaturity can coexist with all the trappings of adult life and a
confident and knowledgeable manner. It may be a long time into a love affair or working
relationship before we realise that we are unwittingly dealing with an emotional neophyte.
It pays, therefore, to try to arrive at a few general guidelines for how an emotionally
immature person can be spotted and if necessary skirted very fast. Here are some of the lines
that emotionally immature people have tendencies to come out with in conversation and that
should, at the very least, set alarms ringing: ‘I’m not so good at spending time on my
own.’ What separates the mature from the immature is, perhaps more than anything else,
a capacity for being on their own, without distraction, and thinking about who they are
and what they have experienced. The mature person can allow themselves to examine and
as it were ‘feel’ their own feelings, even when these are very difficult and hugely
unwelcome. They can stomach an encounter with their own rage, their own envy, their own
shame. They don’t have to do what the immature person is compelled to do: constantly find
someone or something else to prevent them from any risk of understanding their own mind.
‘I don’t really remember much about my childhood.’ There are very few childhoods
in which difficult things didn’t unfold. Without anyone meaning for this to happen,
with the best intentions, children’s development gets impeded and bruised. What counts therefore
isn’t that someone had a ‘happy’ childhood (almost no one on the planet did entirely),
but that a person should have a calm and insightful view of what their childhood was actually
like, in its good and bad aspects. An inability to remember much about the past doesn’t
indicate that it was idyllic or just ‘a long time ago…’, rather that it hasn’t
begun to be processed. ‘I’ve never really thought about that
before…’ Emotionally immature people have great difficulties with conversations that
require them to draw on a knowledge of their own enthusiasms, sorrows, projects and histories.
So, as one sits with them over a drink and asks, for example, why their last relationship
broke up, or what meaningful work constitutes for them or what they regret most from childhood,
one has an above average chance of hearing (perhaps quite sweetly) a reply along the
lines that this is all too new and that they have ‘never thought about this before’.
It isn’t that the emotionally immature person is being cagey; they simply haven’t properly
inhabited, in its authentic pain and intensity, the life they are actually leading.
‘Everything is pretty good. It’s fine, all fine…’ It would be churlish to begrudge
anyone a good mood. Nevertheless, the emotionally immature person isn’t often just in a good
mood, they are rigidly unable to enter a bad one. Everything is declared fine (their parents,
job, love affair, sex life, ambitions) because they have no resources for coping with anything
that might be more nuanced and more real, that might entail anger, loss, confusion or
wayward desires. One comes away from a dialogue with such a person disoriented and lonely
at the idea that any life could be quite so cheerily one-dimensional.
‘That’s just a load of old psychobabble…’ As soon as a conversation threatens their
emotional integrity, the emotionally immature person will shut it down with the imperious
verdict that it is a piece of over-complicated nonsense. They appeal to an idea of robust
simplicity instead, as though the origins of all our problems might lie in thinking
too much. It’s the sort of attitude that might lead them to recommend that an anxious
person ‘pull themselves together’ or to claim that a lot of mental distress comes
from not getting out enough. But of course, none of this stems from confidence: it’s
a terrified way of blocking one’s ears and saying ‘No’ to truths that might hurt
very much. Emotionally immature people can be extremely
charming and at points entertaining to be around. But as a general rule, we’d be advised
to give them a very wide berth indeed and aim to check in on them in a decade or two.
Life is in the end far too short, far too interesting and far too lonely to spend very
long around people who lack any interest in trying to be, where it counts, emotional grown
ups.
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