The Suspicion of Love

The claim: that we might, somewhere inside us, out of reach of day-to-day awareness, be suspicious of love; that we might, in key ways, be keen to ensure that we never properly love, that, thanks to a thousand extremely carefully buried strategies, the happiness we so passionately declare we want never has a chance of becoming real.  

The idea makes no sense. It’s an insult to our rational beliefs: why guard ourselves against something so objectively pleasing? Why take up arms against tenderness, acceptance, sweetness, intimacy and a jointly supportive, kindly, playful future? We might until now have been unlucky in love, that we can admit; we are not – surely – in any way suspicious of love.

Let’s consider the foundational story of Western culture: a tale of two people who found happiness beyond their powers. There were, we can imagine, the most succulent fruit trees, the most beguiling views, the softest beds, the most cooling rivers and warming beaches out there in Paradise. Echoes of Phuket, Mauritius, the Maldives… Yet Adam and Eve were driven mad by the niceness. Genesis doesn’t go into the psychology; the story is a little blunt and theologically focused. But we might, through contemporary eyes, say: they couldn’t stomach ease. They felt unworthy of delight. Some kind of primal itch led them to choke on what was given. It felt unearned; it seemed unreal; they were impelled to render life more horrible than it needed to be.

We refind the pattern of the expulsion in relationships. The beautiful young couple who begin with health, looks, opportunities, friends – and manage, in a few short years, to turn their marriage to anger and bitterness. The talented, attractive person who, again and again, fails to secure anyone who could understand them. The one who gives up a kindly lover in order to find a candidate who betrays them. The ungenerous, scratchy arguments that destroy promising days; the lack of forgiveness; the absence of imagination; the soothing words not spoken; the rupture that isn’t repaired; the vindictiveness that could have been avoided. When it isn’t us, we shake our heads. We wonder what serpent entered their hearts. We can see – so clearly – the pity and the waste. When it’s closer to home, we’re inclined to lay the blame elsewhere: timing was against us; they were crazy; we haven’t yet met our person…

Why We Resist What We Most Desire

We propose something more systematic: that the human race is afflicted by a rooted suspicion of love that we can’t admit to or see clearly, a suspicion that rests on a complicated web of doubts and terrors:

— If we allow ourselves to trust in love, we may be left devastated when they abandon us or die. We will grow at ease with what we cannot control and suffer intolerably from our weakness and naivety. We would rather not pay the price of love in grief. We would prefer to be strong masters of our melancholy than defenceless victims of satisfactions that lie in others’ hands.

— There is a fear of the unreality of happiness. It doesn’t seem lasting or fundamental; it’s not what we grew up with. Our basic condition is resignation and misery. To believe in fine promises is to leave ourselves unprepared for what we’ll need to take on once again when we are let down. We head for what we know, not what is nice.

— Another’s kindness seems undeserved. Why would anyone be so enthusiastic about who we are, given what we know of ourselves? To be adored may feel – strangely – like being misunderstood.

— Niceness can feel ‘boring’. We can’t notice or appreciate it. Our senses go numb. We feel more alive in storms, when there are insults, slammed doors and arguments in the early hours. We can’t spot the wonder of so-called boring days, early nights and sweet reliable messages. Drama is how we can tell we exist.

— In other words, the naked ecstasy of mutual, reciprocated love presents an untenable risk to our hedged, frightened, dispirited, cowed relation to our fellows. We can’t take the sublimity of paradise.

The Strategies of a Suspicion of Love

Because emotional happiness is so challenging, we become masters of a range of strategies that ensure it won’t ever be a true or permanent possibility:

— We fall in love with the unavailable: those who are married to someone else; those who are physically present but mentally elsewhere; those who won’t have sex with us or hold us; those who will maltreat and humiliate us.

— We tether ourselves for decades to people we know can’t deliver and yet whom we profess to believe are about to change. We fixate on people who have shown again and again that they won’t respond to us and assume they will next time.

— We find fault with people who are – by all balanced measures – good and kind. We criticise their appearance, their tastes, their manner. It is safer to attack than to acknowledge merits. We come away from dates complaining that someone seemed ‘boring’ and ‘too nice’; by which we really mean: ‘unlikely to make me suffer in the way I need to suffer in order to feel I am in love.’ We are far more at home, and so much calmer, with solitude and sadness.

— If we end up with good partners, we raise the stakes around petty issues. What we can’t say is: I’m scared of your essential decency. It’s so much more of a relief to criticise how they have fallen short than take on board that they might be at once good and yet outside our control.

— We don’t offer the reassurance we know they need. We provide paltry levels of maintenance so as to keep the temperature, and the chances of contentment, low: we call our chilly, distant behaviour being grown-up or busy.

— We fixate on a random anxiety: we worry about our weight, our aging, our financial situation, the bags under our eyes. We use one worry to deflect from the true unspeakable worry: that we might open our hearts very wide and be left.

— To attenuate our alarm, we perpetually manage the distance. Three nice days, and then an argument that puts everything back into question. A growing sense of closeness, satisfying sex, then a rupture around a minor arrangement. Sweetness, then a nasty comment. We can’t understand what we’re up to. We just don’t feel like answering their messages. We get into a bad mood at the beach. We don’t notice ourselves ensuring we always remain in low cloud; that we are busy preventing love from flourishing lest its disappearance destroy us.

— In extremis, if joy is really on the cards, we betray: we have an affair. We don’t know why we’re doing it. We find ourselves giving someone our phone number; it feels like it’s about lust; it’s something far more serious: a suspicion of love.

Learning to Outgrow Our Fear

The only way out is to rehabilitate the problem and normalise our sabotage. Not to make it seem as if we might be uncommonly odd or ill to have a suspicion of love, but rather to frame it as a wholly standard part of all of our functioning. Couples on an early dinner date should ask one another soberly: ‘How does your suspicion of love manifest itself?’ The issue isn’t whether there is one or not; the curiosity should just be about what kind. ‘Oh, I pick people in other countries.’ ‘Really, my thing is to yearn for years for married types.’ The sole worry should be if someone doesn’t have a ready confession; if someone insists they might be well.

We should nurse ourselves through our suspicion of love, extending sympathy for how much we terrify each other, not through absence or cruelty, but through presence and focus. We should acknowledge how deeply complicated it is to say to anyone: I want you; I think well of you; I want to offer you my life.

We may ruin fewer relationships once we accept that love may be one of the kindest and also most threatening and unsettling things we may ever be offered.