Is There Really No One Out There For Us?

Among people who are dating, we often hear the same complaint: that there is no one out there at all. We may have been on fifty dates and come home disappointed from each one. This one didn’t understand anything about psychology. That one was friendly, but their ears were wrong. Another one came from a background we can’t relate to. A fourth was unusually tall – or perhaps short.

Taken case by case, the complaints all make sense. Viewed in the aggregate, there may be a more pervasive issue.

Is It a Supply Problem, or a Perception Problem?

We put our problems down to supply: we say we haven’t met a sufficient number of the ‘right’ people. But it might also be a problem of perception: we aren’t seeing people clearly.

What if properly seeing were an active process that required us to deploy our imaginations rather than merely open our eyes? For example, our date’s nose might be a little crooked; its meaning changes when we perceive it in the context of a searching intelligence or a noble mouth. Another date’s laugh that struck us as manic wasn’t necessarily theatrical; it might be a tribute to parents who needed to keep their own depression at bay. At first glance, we may notice a pinched face and aged cheeks. We look again and could perceive a sparkly little boy or girl who has suffered grossly and has been waiting for decades to find a proper friend. We see a lot more through the eyes of love.

Whom we can see out in the world reflects our degree of inner evolution. Let’s take another example across a lifetime. From the vantage point of fifty, we might look back on a person who was interested in us when we were 25. They had a pleasant appearance, they were lively and curious, they gave us their time – but we weren’t able to ‘see’ them at all. They left us cold. We may have run away from them. We might have described them as boring or unsexy. We might have wounded them rather badly.

Now we understand their value because of how much we’ve understood of ourselves. We were frightened by warmth and kindness. We came from a background of neglect whose impact we hadn’t charted. Sweetness felt foreign and unearned.

If similar people came into our lives now, we would be ready. We would see them and their virtues clearly. We would have learnt not to hold it against someone that they were kind. We would have worked through our masochistic impulses. We would have overcome our interest in chilliness and unreliability. We would have grown more at ease with physical affection and sexual exploration. We would be ready to ‘see’ so many more good people, because we had grown up.

What Time Teaches Us to See

There’s an analogy with travel. At 17, on a trip to Venice funded by generous grandparents, we might chiefly have thought of our friends from school. The churches and palaces might have gone by in a blur. We might have followed the history books dutifully, but the details set off no deeper resonances. But by 60, we could be transformed. On a return visit, we’d be immensely curious about, and patient around, noble altar pieces and sombre churches. We’d have places inside us for the goodness outside us.

We know from literature too how much we can miss when we meet it too early. A 17-year-old at a performance of King Lear will hear words clearly enough; it’s their psychological meaning that will elude them. When the aged King Lear exclaims ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child’, it takes more than a grammatical awareness of English to determine the meaning. It can require a decade of dating, an eventual marriage, childbirth, years of walks to the park, a surly adolescence… thirty more years, apparently entirely unrelated to an understanding of Shakespeare, until one acquires the loam into which Lear’s lines can eventually fall and germinate.

The book of love has passages every bit as abstruse as Shakespeare’s and requiring as much time to make sense: about how precious affection is, why we must communicate rather than be defensive, why we should dare to accept happiness, how we should mourn the parents we never had, how we shouldn’t expect someone else to rescue us from ourselves.

The words may be readable; they’ll make no sense when we hear them too early.

Seeing People Clearly Takes Time

It is melancholy when, at a late age, we fall in love with someone whom we suspect we would have ignored had we met them in our youth. We might have been too frightened to handle their sexual openness; we would have been too interested in torment to be able to stomach their tenderness of spirit. We know how right they are, and how easily we might have looked through their qualities for most of our lives.

There could be so many more people to love – once we learn the art of seeing people clearly and finding the goodness and maturity in others. And an equal number of people to run away from, once we lose our interest in grief and cruelty.