Stop-Start in Love

We can try to understand one of the oddest, most painful, most widespread phenomena in love. It is going on right this moment between a couple – he a dentist, she a nutritionist – in Rio de Janeiro; two teenagers are at it in Canberra, there’s a pair involved in the rigmarole in downtown Dakar, another in Svalbard, another still in Winnipeg. If every time it happened a light went on, most of the earth would glow from space.

We can refer to it as push-pull or stop-start relationships. Or ‘distance management’. The structure is identical – and predictable. Growing intimacy, then retreat. Altitude, then a drop. Two good days, then a fight. Five warm messages, then silence. A weekend away, then a call for time alone.

It can seem like a horrible but ultimately mysterious curse. It’s in fact an almost logical phenomenon with a singular purpose: to protect one (or both) of the parties from a generally unconscious but violent fear that love might work out, that happiness might become real, that a true partnership could build, that vulnerability might be created and then, when the shield was lowered, when one had grown to depend on someone completely, that everything might go catastrophically wrong. The other party could change their mind, they might abscond, they could die.

The Hidden Logic Behind the Pattern

To prevent such worries, the mind of the stop-start lover looks around for ingenious solutions and finds one in a committedly dispiriting game. Older than chess, more harmful than poker, it would have been played in Ancient Egypt. The Aztecs were at it. The rules state that love can happen but that it must never pick up velocity. There can be intimacy, but always within bounds. The exits must forever remain open. There can’t be too much security; that would – paradoxically – generate an untenable impression of danger.

In practice, the game requires a vigilant monitoring of every exchange and repeated quiet injections of disappointment. If last night was beautiful, this morning has to be moody. Tuesday was good, Wednesday must be awful. If the dialogue was getting very cosy, there has to be a disappearance. The weekend must be ‘busy’ to ward off a fear of claustrophobia.

Where Stop-Start Relationships Begin

What cannot be allowed to occur is what almost certainly once occurred a very long time ago: an unprocessed, unexplored letdown in which cosiness was achieved and then torn away. Mummy was the best mummy in the world, before the doctors said she wasn’t well. Daddy was the sweetest, then Jill came on the scene. The holidays were nice, except for when the drinking began.

Let’s believe that they aren’t doing it ‘on purpose’. A secular version of Jesus’s ‘they know not what they do.’ The lover who needs to pause isn’t aware, as they put down the phone and decide not to answer a message for four hours, that they are interrupting the flow of affection in the name of self-protection – and, along the way, devastating a fellow human being. The most potent players of the stop-start game have no real insight into their tactics. They just register an overwhelming need not to type anything back, not to be free tonight, and not to say ‘I love you too’ at the end of a call or evening in bed.

Surviving the Stop-Start Dynamic

What can we, the martyrs of stop-start, do? For a start, feel extremely sorry for ourselves in our misery. There aren’t any political outlets or solutions. There aren’t protests one can attend. There isn’t a support line. But to be on the receiving end is torture – we are not dreaming. We don’t need to compound our pain by making light of it. Or hoping it can easily end. There can never complete relaxation. Doubt is never far away. Protests aren’t going to work. Long speeches won’t do it.

It would be hard to explain this to a group of six-year-olds. When you are older, you will form things called relationships. You will meet a nice person. A special friend. Some days your special friend will call you. On others, they will vanish. One might not want to make it to adulthood after that class.

The sole effective weapon we have in stop-start relationships is knowledge. To describe it accurately the moment it appears. To provide a succinct explanation as to why this is happening. To give the other party a few chances at reform. And then to walk away because we know what we are up against and recognise that lonely calm truly is better than continually agitated togetherness.