Maybe You Really Were Too Good for Them

It’s one of the harder ideas to take on board – if we’re modest and kind people, which we are, of course.

It feels sentimental and saccharine, something that someone brings out to lighten our mood (it’s perhaps been rather bad of late), not because it is true but because they want to cheer us up. We were let go… not because we are odd, not because we are unsavoury, not because we didn’t earn enough or don’t have the right sort of hair or skin or are bad in bed or snored or were a bit stupid or have questionable taste in clothes and music, but – magically – because we were, of all things… too good. Too kind, too thoughtful, too loyal. Too marvellous. Something about us was too amazing to bear; we were like a resplendent sun that can’t bear to be stared at.

This kind of thing doesn’t make much sense – especially in the middle of a typical night at the moment. Can a restaurant be too tasty, a hotel too beautiful, a coat too well cut? We’re weird, and have been since the start. No one really likes us; we are ugly, especially looked at from the side; our career is on the slide; there are bags under our eyes; we’re objects of pity. That’s more or less how the ruminations can go until six o’clock, when we finally get up and start another bleary day.

But let us – without sentimentality, with all our faculties – return to the original supposition, not to try to charm or support, but to try to do justice to reality.

When every caveat has been explored, when all our faults have been taken into account, we may still have to accept an odd thought: there can – sometimes – really be such a thing as ‘too nice’.

The fear of healthy love

We won’t understand the psychology of love unless we leave room for this peculiar-sounding concept. We won’t be able to make sense of behaviour; we won’t have an accurate account of why certain relationships cannot work unless we have to hand a theory of the repulsive nature, for some, of goodness and tenderness.

The paradox goes like this. If we starve a child of affection, if we force them to subsist on a meagre emotional diet, if we give them love and then brutally take it away again, if we keep comparing them unfavourably to a sibling, if we beat them up or humiliate them, there will be consequences.

One of these sounds especially perverse. They will lose any appetite for kindness. They’ll take fright at its approach. They’ll turn away goodness. They’ll feel nauseated by a gentle manner and sympathetic words. They will have a fear of healthy love. When – many years later – someone comes along and calls them on time, makes them their lunch, reassures them that they will never leave, listens to their sorrows, sits with them through their pain, they will register that something theoretically positive is taking place. They may even sense – as through a pane of glass – that love has arrived, but they won’t be overly in the mood for it. The situation will be deeply unstable. We should – as good psychologists of suffering – be on our guard.

They will in time come to feel that they have been given a gift they don’t deserve. The love will start to feel cloying, hot, uncomfortable. They may not be able to put a finger on the discomfort and the paradox. They may not be able to say to their partner: I hate you for your loyalty, I’m resentful of your kindness. You nauseate me with your constant thoughtfulness. But that is, below the surface, beyond language, what is at play.

Why kindness can feel unbearable

Why should any of this matter when we are alone in the apartment, the shelves emptied of their books, looking out across the kitchen table where we had so many breakfasts together?

Because we don’t need to add self-hatred to the weight of the rejection. We don’t have to suffer twice: from being abandoned, and from the sense that being so indicates a fundamentally broken nature.

We perhaps really were turned down for reasons not of our awfulness but because the gift we were bringing couldn’t be digested.

Where are they now? Not necessarily with someone more wonderful, cleverer, kinder, gentler, more tender, as we are terrified to imagine. They have headed – in a ghastly but predictable way – towards someone who loves them less steadily, less kindly, with less focus – because that is, in the end, far more manageable. It fits, it seems like home, it’s what they’ve always known.

So yes, we are allowed, at times, in the dark stretches, to hold on quite firmly to a strange-sounding idea. We were left, perhaps, because we were ‘too good’, and because of a fear of healthy love. It doesn’t have to be a sop or a denial or a bromide: it can be, at points, an entirely peculiar and entirely necessary truth.