How To Be a Great Lover

The idea of learning how to be a great lover has a tendency to bring up certain stock images: a slender physique, clear eyes, taut skin, a successful business, a confident manner.

These have their advantages, no doubt, but the true virtues of love might lie in a slightly different, slightly less heralded corner. An ideal lover might be endowed with some of the following:

Imperfection

However pleasing accomplishments might be, what truly nurtures love is someone’s relationship to their flaws: a basic and calm recognition that they may – somewhat surprisingly – have a great many of them. They haven’t understood everything. They aren’t unfailingly decent. They lose focus. They’re prone to jealousy. They mess up all the time. No one who has properly explored and understood themselves can be convinced of their marvellousness for long. An ideal lover doesn’t need persuading of their fragilities; they want our help to be able to bear and overcome them. They aren’t defensive in the face of criticism. They say sorry almost before we have spoken. Such is their degree of self-awareness, they feel – at a base level – really very grateful that anyone would put up with them, which can make them very appealing indeed to be around.

Explanations

We don’t need flawless people. We need people who have a good sense of how broken they are and can warn us about the problems before they’ve done too much damage, in a way that can make us feel hopeful (about change) and unfrightened (about the status quo).

The ideal lover knows the backstory to their anger and anxiety, self-pity and indolence. We don’t have to stumble on their issues and suffer from being told we’re crazy or mean for mentioning, or attempting to make sense of, them. They hand us – early on, with grace – a fairly dense folder of their follies.

Humour

They aren’t – of course – funny for laugher’s sake. The best lovers are – in essence – laughing at themselves. They are inviting laughter about how ridiculous they are, how vain they can be, how conceited they feel. They laugh because they have again said the wrong thing and because they try so hard but keep annoying us anyway. They laugh so that we don’t have to scream or cry.

Benevolence

The best lovers have a benevolent interpretation of motives. They don’t immediately believe that we are doing it on purpose, to punish them or bring them down. They know that, however maddening we are, we probably haven’t set out on a single-minded mission to destroy what remains of their lives. They keep in mind the small, originally sincere and innocent child beneath the very complicated and sometimes no longer so charming adult. They are quick to imagine that we might, deep down, still be dealing with a hurt from a careless parent or a humiliation at work – or might simply be very tired and in need of a hug.

Intelligence

They don’t need to know string theory or quantum mechanics. They need a grasp of the key tenets of emotional intelligence: how anger can mask hurt, how impatience may arise from anxiety, how those who are mean are passing on a meanness done to them, how there is almost always a childhood cause behind an adult snarl, how people mistake figures in their present for ghosts in their pasts, how irony masks pain… They know that the emotional mind is a very peculiar and counter-intuitive organ crying out for interpretation and curiosity.

Oddity

They have room for our strangeness. They are not overly attached to their or our normality. They know – from spending sufficient time in their own mind – that sex is very odd for everyone, that we’re all more envious, anxious, petty, glorious and intelligent than we’re meant to be.

We love them for who they are; we love them even more for how we can feel about ourselves around them – and how, in their company, we start to understand something quietly profound about how to be a great lover ourselves.