Often, our partner isn't necessarily
being terrible in any overt way
but we feel a growing sadness
about the character of our relationship.
The partner isn't as focused on us as we'd hoped.
There are often times when
they don't understand us properly.
They're often busy and preoccupied.
They can be a bit off-hand, or abrupt.
They're not hugely interested
in the details of our day.
They call their friends rather than talk with us.
We feel disenchanted and let down.
Love, was supposed to be lovely.
But without any one huge thing having gone wrong,
it doesn't feel much that way, day to day.
This sorrow has a paradoxical source.
We're upset now because
at some point in the past,
we were really rather fortunate.
We're sad, because we've been lucky.
To explain this seeming paradox,
we need to have a look at the intimate origins of love.
Our idea of what a good, loving relationship
should be like
and what it feels like to be loved,
doesn't ever come from what we've seen
in adulthood.
It arises from a stranger, more powerful source.
The idea of a happy couplehood
taps into a fundamental picture of
comfort, deep security, wordless communication,
and of our needs being effortlessly understood
that comes from early childhood.
At the best moments of childhood,
if things went reasonably well,
a loving parent offered us extraordinary satisfaction.
They knew when we were hungry or tired.
Even though we couldn't usually explain.
We didn't need to strive.
They made us feel completely safe.
We were held peacefully.
We were entertained, and indulged.
And even if we don't recall the explicit details,
the experience of being cherished
has made a profound impression on us.
It's planted itself in our deep minds
as the ideal template of what love should be.
As adults, without really noticing,
we continue to be enthralled to this notion
of being loved.
Projecting the best experience of our early years
into our present relationships.
And finding them sorely wanting as a result.
A comparison, that is profoundly corrosive,
and unfair.
The love we receive from a parent
can't ever be a workable model
for our later adult experience of love.
The reason is fundamental,
we were a baby then
we are an adult now.
A dichotomy with several key ramifications.
For a start, our needs were so much simpler.
Back then, we needed to be washed and amused,
put to bed..
But we didn't need someone to trawl
intelligently through the troubled corners of our minds.
We didn't need a caregiver to understand
why we prefer the first series of a television show
to the second.
Why its necessary to see our aunt on Sunday.
Or why it matters so much to us that the curtains
harmonize with the sofa covers.
Or that bread must be cut with a proper bread knife.
The parent knew absolutely what was required
in relation to certain basic physical and emotional
requirements.
Our partner on the other hand,
is stumbling in the dark
around needs that are immensely subtle,
far from obvious, and very complicated
to deliver upon.
Secondly, none of it was reciprocal back then.
The parent was intensely focused on caring for us
but they knew and totally accepted that we
wouldn't engage with their needs.
They didn't for a second imagine
that they could take their troubles to us,
or expect us to nurture them.
They didn't need us to ask them about their day.
Our responsibility was blissfully simple.
All we had to please them, was to exist.
Our most ordinary actions, rolling over on our tummy,
grasping a biscuit in our tiny hand,
enchanted them with ease.
We were loved, we didn't have, to love.
A distinction between kinds of love
which language normally artfully blurs,
shielding us between the difference between
being the privileged customer of love,
or its more exhausted and long suffering provider.
Futhermore, our parents were probably kind enough
to shield us from the burden
that looking after us imposed on them.
They maintained a reasonably sunny facade,
until they retired to their own bedroom.
At which, the true toll of their efforts could be witnessed
but, by then, we were asleep.
They did us the honor of not quite showing us
what looking after us cost them.
Which was immensely kind,
but did us one lasting disservice,
It may have unwittingly created an expectation
of what it could mean for someone to love us
which was never true in the first place.
We might in later life,
end up with lovers who are techy with us
who are too tired to talk at the end of the day,
who don't marvel at our every antic,
who can't even be bothered to listen to what we're saying
and we might feel, with some bitterness
that this is not how our parents were
The irony which has its redeeming side,
is that in truth, this is exactly how our parents were,
just up in their bedroom, when we were asleep,
and realize nothing.
The source of our present sorrow
is not, therefore, a special failing
on the part of our adult lovers.
They are not tragically inept nor uniquely selfish.
Its rather that we're judging our adult experiences
in the light of a very different kind of childhood love.
We are sorrowful not because
we have landed with the wrong person,
but because, we have sadly
been forced to grow up.