It is evident that life on this planet is far more awful than it needs to be because of something very peculiar and sad inside we humans: a constant inclination to unleash conflict, beat up our neighbours, seize their lands and lay waste to their cities. How prosperous we could now all be if we didn’t have to restart civilisation every few decades after yet another eruption of horror.

The question is why we’re like this. When the people we call historians talk about conflicts, the blame is almost always laid at the door of material factors. Dictators come to the fore and territories are taken because human beings are apparently very hungry for money and assets. Greed is the motor of history.

But the truth may be rather different – and far stranger. If we properly explore historical upheavals, the violence and chaos almost never have much to do with anything material, and a great amount to do with psychology, and in particular, to put it very bluntly, with love. People overwhelmingly go to war not for the sake of material accumulation but in order to secure honour, to recover a sense of dignity, to insist on respect, to feel applauded, to be looked up to and to correct an otherwise uncontainable feeling of invisibility, neglect and humiliation – a narcissistic wound shared as much by leaders as by a decisive share of their adherents. There may of course be the odd occasion when there is a particularly pressing practical reason to seize a river or a valley, but almost all the time, the real drive to put on one’s boots and pulverise another country lies elsewhere: in a psychologically-based craving for applause and from a wish to compensate through military means for a devastating absence of an inner sense of love.

Think of Benito Mussolini. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the dictator of Italy ordered his troops to invade neighbouring Albania. Albania’s small army was quickly defeated and within a week the country was formally united with Italy. It was a minor but hugely revealing episode in the long history of human aggression. On the surface Mussolini was acting for material and strategic reasons: he wanted access to mineral resources; there was a particularly good harbour where Italian warships could be based; Albania provided a base from which further incursions into the Balkans could be launched. This is the sort of instinctive analysis that historians always go in for: countries act, even if lamentably, out of practical self-interest.

But this fails to capture the real dynamics at play. Mussolini had risen to power in the 1920s because he brilliantly articulated a conviction that many of his compatriots shared: that they were not properly respected or appreciated in the world. He saw his country – and himself – as slighted and snubbed. And he responded by stressing lost grandeur; he deployed the language, gestures and imagery of domination and authority to ward off a painful inner sense of total weakness. His appeal to his supporters was: ‘you feel rejected, lonely and misunderstood, I feel the same, I love you and together we will fight to be noticed’. Like so many others before and after him, this is ultimately what Mussolini was always shouting to his crowds about from flag-draped balconies.

   A sense of humiliation is met by grandiose self-assertion.

Deep down, the modern analysis of politics and history rests on a flawed economically-founded assumption: that the most terrible thing in life is not to have as many possessions as another person. But the truth is different: the most terrible thing in a life is actually to be ignored and not respected, especially when one’s parents weren’t kind to one in childhood; a fate worse than death and (in fragile minds) therefore worth causing untold deaths for and dying for. 

That’s why Mussolini invaded Albania – and that’s why almost every other conflict has begun: with a sense in a people that they didn’t feel very good inside, and so would have to destroy others’ cities in a bid to assuage their gnawing inner sense of humiliation. 

If this all sounds a little ridiculous and petty, that’s is a very a good thing indeed. We do ourselves a central disservice when we discuss wars and politics in so-called reasonable terms. The brutality isn’t ever about strategy or spheres of influence, oil or water. We need to frame matters in far more bathetic and urgent terms: it’s about mental illness. 

There is plenty of land and wealth to go around. What there evidently isn’t enough of is sanity and beneath that, psychological security. We will keep fighting and having to destroy and rebuild civilisation until we properly understand what motivates humans; and grasp that there is literally nothing more dangerous in this world than a certain kind of person who wasn’t cherished in their early years, who feels underloved and invisible and who won’t rest – or leave you in peace or even alive – until you’ve noticed them.

It’s one of the peculiarities of the way we’re built that we lack immediate access to many of our most important emotions. When people ask us ‘how are you?’ and we reply in vague and superficial terms, we aren’t often simply hiding our real feelings from our audiences, we may not be in touch with them ourselves. 

It’s possible to spend a good deal of our lives with our attention trained firmly outwards. We might be chairing back to back meetings, drawing up budgets or travelling from one location to another – and all the while have little active sense that we are – in fact, in the background – exhausted, enraged, jealous, heartbroken or nostalgic. The people and situations that made us so could have disappeared long before we develop any active sense of what they provoked in us. We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.

Claude Monet, Woman in a Garden, c. 1867

Our incapacity to know our minds directly can be traced back to our early years. We tend to realise how we’re feeling only to the extent that other people once took an interest in how we were feeling, especially in emotions that may not have appeared entirely ‘normal’ or ‘good’. Perhaps, as children, we expressed occasional wishes that granny would die, that the school would burn down or that we could get rid of our younger sibling. It’s the mark of a sound parent to be able to bear to listen to such complexities without censorship – which in turn allows the child to be less frightened of, and readier to explore, the less well-lit corners of their own minds. The central legacy of having been heard by others is a greater capacity to hear oneself.

To start to regain a better hold on our true feelings, we should submit ourselves to an artificial exercise: we should ask ourselves a series of structured questions. We should, when we have time off, probably late at night or in the early morning, lie somewhere quietly without interruption, perhaps close our eyes and interview our minds as if they belonged to someone else (they sort of do). 

We should direct the following questions at ourselves, not thinking too much as we answer, simply saying what comes immediately to mind (our real selves tend to hide or lie if given too much time to respond).

1. I feel…

The answer might be sadder, more hopeful or more repetitive than we had imagined or wanted to imagine.

2. I really need…

We are so busy with the requirements of others, we typically forget to observe our own stifled needs. They may not fit the standard view of who we should be or what it is respectable to want, which makes their honest acceptance all the more important. It made not be perfect that we want to go back to our ex or tell our mother we despise her or curl up in a small ball and cry. But it’s extremely helpful to know that these are our wants, which prevents our minds shutting down into depression or anxiety – or our bodies having to nudge us to insight through a twitch or a cold or another bout of back pain.

3. I’m angry that…

From the earliest age, we were probably told not to be too angry, but that doesn’t stop us from being so, indeed, it’s the very underlying suggestion that anger is bad that leads to a build up of true volcanic fury.

4. I’m hurt that…

We are more delicate than we imagine. No hour goes by without some wound to our sense of integrity. We learnt to be tough but the armour only covers our external self. Inside, we’re as often in tears as a four year old.

5. My body wants…

It’s odd to think that our bodies might want anything at all. But they have as much to say to us as our minds. And if we keep not listening to them, they’ll have to start to insist on sending us their messages in the only way they know how: via illnesses.

After twenty minutes of self-interview, we’re likely to have a slightly different sense of who we are to what we’d imagined. We’re stranger no doubt, but we’re also far more interesting and vivid. We exchange a plastified identity for the truth. The more we can be aware of what we truly experience, the lighter and more unburdened we can feel.

All of us regularly have to confront silences where we might have expected responses. We sent someone a message two days ago… but nothing has come back yet. We are awaiting an email… but it’s still not arrived. They said they would call at five…the phone remains still.

It’s a feature of our minds that we cannot help but fill silences; we automatically develop notions of what an absence must signify. And, according to the particular architecture of our psyches, these significations will show radical variations. 

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, c. 1971

For some of us, it seems evident that a silence means something like:

— They have been delayed, they will get back soon enough.

— They are busy.

— It slipped their mind.

— They love us anyway.

But for others, it seems equally likely that the silence is a far darker omen:

— They’ve realised I’m awful.

— They have suddenly turned against me.

— I’ve done something wrong.

— They hate me.

We are catching in a minor area a central element of our emotional functioning, with deep roots into our life stories. What we imagine lies behind the other’s silence reflects in key ways what did happen to us around our caregivers in our early years. We are filling in the gaps with evidence unconsciously drawn from our own experience. We are presuming that the future will in key ways resemble the past.

If we take the silence to be benign, it’s because people close to us would have been – more or less – reliable and kind. There were, as we grew up, no sudden abandonments or changes of mind. We weren’t tolerated one minute, disdained the next. We felt safe. But if the silence is immediately taken to be a cause for alarm and a harbinger of persecution and loathing, it’s because we come from a place of pain. We will have felt, almost certainly before our eighth year, continually at risk of being thought to have done something wrong, we would have been mocked, someone would have turned against us. The sense of danger would have been constant.

We generally have no awareness that we are – as we look at our phones and wonder – relying on past experience. We no more remember how we learnt to feel this way than we remember how we learnt to ride a bicycle or speak. Our characteristic way of interpreting reality doesn’t reveal its personally-flavoured origins – and is therefore less open to question and recalibration.

If we suffer repeatedly from panic about silences, the next step is to notice what we are up to and accept that our minds were not born responding in this partial way, they were scarred and disrupted by specific events from which we have drawn unfairly harsh generalisations: that we are constantly bad, that we will always be in trouble, that we are permanently insufficient. We should with kindness interrupt our instinctual responses and insist on less punitive readings. The catastrophe we fear will happen has – many  years ago – already happened and we need to start to remember it, and feel compassion towards ourselves for having endured it, in the quest for a less frightened, fairer and more innocent future.

The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes. The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective, for what we are dealing with in heartbreak is not some administrative malfunction for which one or two handy pointers will swiftly return a sufferer to the norm, but a wholesale and long-term loss of command over one’s emotional constitution – for which the most apposite response may be limitless acknowledgement of the scale of the crisis, unbounded compassion and a heavy emphasis on the utter reasonableness of madness.

Chaïm Soutine, Woman in Pink, c. 1924

Here therefore are a few slightly less conventional pieces of advice for those who, ten months or fifteen years after a break-up, are still finding few more compelling things to think about today than their lost love.

Don’t expect to get over this any time soon

Severe damage is done by those who, out of great kindness, frame heart-break as something that we must all inevitably get over with time. 

But what if there were no ‘shoulds’ in this area. What if we let the pain last just as long – and not a minute less – as it needs to, which might be three months, ten years or the rest of one’s life but in any case, considerably longer than one’s sensible married friends seem to think it should last. What if we recategorised this as a chronic illness rather than a passing cold. What if we didn’t compound our sorrows by setting bounds to them and then castigating ourselves for trespassing them. What if we assumed – very darkly – that we would just never get over this.

Build the loss into your identity

What if, at the same time, we were to put the loss at the front and center of everything. Not relegate it to some embarrassing corner of our biographies, but build it squarely into our sense of self and presentation to others. We might say henceforth that we aren’t just someone born in this or that country in this or that year with a certain job and set of hobbies but – as importantly – someone who lost an extraordinary person fifteen years ago and that to know us well must be to understand, honour and never forget the resulting still-open incision in our souls.

Give madness free reign

Of course it’s not entirely mature to be found sobbing in bed mid-afternoon holding the stuffed huskie they gave you seven years ago from a shop at Oslo airport. But let’s not compound our losses by an unfair attachment to one’s dignity. 

So write (but try not to send – or do…) that very long letter outlining to them why they must regret this. And then, a bit later, that other letter saying how much you adore them. Even write the letter you hope they are one day going to send you, filled with phrases like ‘I’m so deeply sorry. I see now, finally, how right you were; that you are the only person who can understand me, that I belong to you and to no other…’ Even make the wedding speech (‘after a few bumps in the road…’). There are no rules here.

Don’t merely hate them

All the kind people around you have naturally tried so hard to convince you that they are no good. And they did – of course – behave abysmally at times, especially at the end. But in private, celebrate their gorgeousness. Idealise them until even you can sense that you’ve reached some limit to what others bluntly call reality. Adore them with infinite imagination until – eventually – it slowly starts to occur to you that you’ve lost an often quite annoying latterly very selfish human, rather than a celestial visitor with penetrating intelligence and beautiful hands.

Break the wise rules

Of course you should never call them; naturally you shouldn’t beg them to return. It’s entirely necessary to block their number. But there are grave dangers in trying to be so grown up one never allows oneself to mature; there are certain blows to the ego from which one can only ever recover through unguarded humiliation. Make yourself abject and silly, try everything and watch it fail, observe yourself descending into a mockery of your former coherent self. Sink as deep as the pain commands.

If need be, stay ‘too long.’ Get back together seven times. Try to persuade them in lengthy phone calls. Live the impossibility; don’t just intellectually assume it and then suffer from your emotions never following suit. Properly experience why things can’t be until the lesson sinks in authentically rather than logically. Tire yourself back to health.

No one can make you wise one moment ahead of time – or in your place. The best way to recover sanity is to allow madness to have its full, unfettered, horrific, necessary run.

One of the most conspicuous features of the modern attitude to relationships is the ever greater detail with which we are now able to specify what’s wrong with people. In the past, we had to make do with broad brush complaints: we’d describe the maddening people in our lives as argumentative, sulky, weird or just deeply annoying. Now they are – with far greater authority and sober technical rigour – toxic, avoidant, borderline, co-dependent, trauma-bonded, paranoid-adjacent and (of course) narcissistic.

Central to this increase in specificity has been the discipline of psychotherapy. Therapy has devoted itself to the task of helping clients trace – with immense forensic skill – the pathologies of those they are closely involved with. It has democratised a dense vocabulary with which to turn unstructured unhappiness into an array of clinical symptoms.

Photo by Zachary Keimig on Unsplash

The approach has a degree of real merit. It can be highly salutary to get a firmer grip on the troubling dynamics of our romantic lives. There can be relief and new dignity in understanding that our partner has a maladaptive attachment style rather than just being a nag; or suffers from affect dysregulation rather than just being messy.

The difficulty is what happens next. There is – behind the therapeutic focus – a central unspoken assumption: that there are alternatives. And this is where the premise starts to show its weakness, for on closer examination, after an assiduous scouring of the landmasses of the globe, it emerges that more or less the entire human race, not just this or that admittedly profoundly pathological character we have been forced to deal with, partakes in what we may as well, without regard to professional decorum, call madness. Once we are done with rightfully expelling every last demented and unworthy partner from our domain, we may be extremely proud of how well we have followed the principles of emotional maturity; we may also be entirely alone.

Therapy operates with a consoling ideology which for a heady moment seems to point us to liberation: it teaches us how to fathom and then expel ill people from our affections. But health turns out to be far rarer than we are being prompted to think. We are at risk of misconstruing as a normal condition a degree of emotional evolution that is in fact, in statistical terms, a momentous exception. We are implicitly being taught to interpret as anomalies behaviours that in fact belong squarely and unbudgeably to the tragic norm. 

We have collectively been so busy charting what is wrong with people, we have forgotten to try to make a tenable life among those that in fact exist. Our critical powers have outstripped our educative ones; our skills at pathologising have surpassed our talents at managing.

A priority of responsible therapy should therefore no longer be to inflame clients against the miscreants who cross their paths, but rather to guide them towards ways of generating a more less tolerable mindset with which to handle the imperfect beings who appear to be, after all, an indelible feature of planetary existence. 

We are at present encouraged to believe that the prime explanation for why we put up with less than ideal treatment is because we have been the victims of early neglect that has trained us to expect far less of others than we naturally deserve. Though the logic is impeccable, it ignores an awkward dimension: that people go from one scratchy relationship to another not simply because they are unwell and traumatised (though they may be this too), but because there aren’t in fact very many wholly sound alternatives. In so far as one is going to have a relationship at all, it will – statistically speaking – almost by definition be with someone to whom one will be able to associate a fair number of the ‘red flags’ righteously discussed within therapeutic discourse. 

We would know at once that there wasn’t much point in educating people in precisely how physically unattractive most humans are. We’d understand that it wasn’t useful or kind to guide them to better or more quickly identify asymmetries between the eyes or collapses of folds of skin under the chin. We’d know it wasn’t wise to sensitise ourselves to what cannot easily be altered; to problems that belong to reality. No less of a generosity of spirit should be mandatory in relation to our psychological shortcomings.

The real task of therapy should be to help us to develop a wry, calm regard for our partner’s follies and our own, to nurture a way of greeting the mess of the human animal without too much stunned alarm or incensed agitation. 

Our chances of meeting a partner who is normal are – in truth – close to zero, and therefore the focus on abnormalities can only ever prove so useful. If we can accept that madness is the rule, then dating and relationships would need to be spoken of in very different terms. Therapy would become about the management of imperfection, not (implicitly) about the quest for an ideal. 

Our relationships would still be troubled, but we would greet our crises with a host of tools that would – paradoxically – lighten our burdens substantially. We would learn to laugh, to divert ourselves, to be patient, to set turmoils in context, to sleep on problems, to confess to mutual folly; we would meet our fellow broken creatures with increased tolerance and a livelier sense of the cruelty and impossibility of self-righteousness. We would learn how to love by knowing that very few of us ever properly deserve love – but all of us stand in desperate need of it anyway.

News that two people who had a harrowing break-up are now trying to get back together again – a few months or years down the line – tends, among sensible people, to raise at the very least suspicion, if not outright irritation and despair. Why are these two cursed lovers heading back to the old chaos and drama? Isn’t this just a fantasy sprung from naivety, loneliness and – most probably – short-term lust? Shouldn’t they keep faith with their original choice, double down on the highs and lows of dating and – perhaps – each buy a dog?

Isaac Israëls, Elegant Couple on the Terrace, c. 1865-1934

And yet to deny ex-couples any legitimate chance to revisit their situation also feels excessively punitive and, in its way, naive. Insisting blindly that people can never change – that psychotherapy and introspection, books and conversations, time and long walks – have nothing whatsoever to teach us is as foolish as to assume that change can come readily and lightly. For every misguided attempt to resume a relationship, there must be a proportion of equally misguided refusals to countenance a new start, born not out of wisdom so much as pre-emptive fear and disbelief that people are occasionally able to learn a new thing or two.

We need – to make progress – a tool with which to strip the matter of sentiment and rationally distinguish mature from sentimental plans. 

What follows is a sequence of questions (amounting to an examination) that exes who are meeting up again after a long break should discuss with one another and as importantly with themselves before coming anywhere near to holding hands, let alone (and here we must be very definitive) going to bed. To the question, ‘should we meet up for dinner?’ the standard response should from now on be: ‘Let’s take The School of Life’s Re-Entry Exam first’.

The School of Life’s Re-entry Examination

Can you meet me for a Re-entry Examination that may take up to seven hours over five separate meetings – and involve soliciting the views of two of our good friends as well?

One of the major signs that a relationship is viable is that both parties are willing to give up an unusual, even inordinate, amount of time, to the intellectual exploration of its past flaws. The more they can stand to examine the horror, the less it need to recur. The greatest predictor of success is an advanced capacity to think, without defensiveness, pride or impatience, about all that was most terrible.

Everything that feels un-Romantic is, paradoxically, truly Romantic, in the sense of being conducive to love. Which is why the test is deliberately, provocatively framed in the most boring, hard-headed way possible. It should sound extremely forbidding and very unsexy. We concretely prove our love by being ready to discuss our feelings for hours with some of the tenacity of a lawyer and the steadiness of an accountant rather than abseiling down a clock tower with roses or making furious love in a hotel room.

Are we here because we have learnt things or because we miss one another?

This is a highly binary and leading question and there is only possible answer. Opt for the wrong one and the exam is declared void immediately. Missing someone can be very moving. But it has nothing, strictly nothing, to do with a fitness to return. One can miss someone and know – or should know – that they are absolutely not a person ever to get close to again. One can both utterly regret a partner and not in any way benefit from being with them. 

Of course, someone might tell a lie at this juncture but at least it will be clear to them that they are having to deceive in order to proceed. No one can be in any doubt as the purpose of this exam: to search out, and probe at, signs of learning, rather than signs of love. 

Have we substantially changed since we were last together?

To put it even more bluntly: the only reason two people should ever attempt to restart a relationship is because something has fundamentally changed in them. Nothing else counts: that we once got on, that we almost had a child (or have five together), that we still know each other’s nicknames, that they look really very nice sitting across the table from us… The sole and exclusive reason to be exploring once more is because one feels one has learnt some very significant things in the interregnum. 

Can we ‘say’ why we have changed – at length and in depth – not merely ‘feel’ we have changed? Can we turn warm intentions into words, a lot of words?

The cynic tends to chip in at this point to add: anyone can ‘say’ they’ve changed, but what’s hard and what counts is to ‘show’ one has changed. Actions, not words are where it’s at. To which we’d say ‘yes, of course’ but also that people who can describe at some length (we are talking a minimum of five hours of conversation) about what is going on in them and hear what is at play in the other also have a good chance of following through at the level of action. Analytically-precise words are not always cheap, it’s not a simple matter to speak clearly about one’s past emotional immaturity and idiocy – and by the time people can, it is a sign of a certain dawning wisdom which can stretch beyond mere fine intentions. At the same time, we should be very suspicious of any ex who tries to pass off their reluctance to sit an exam or their unwillingness to speak as a small matter indicating nothing other than a personal preference: ‘I’m not so good with language, words fail me, I don’t do introspection very well, I love you but I can’t always say why…’ 

We’re sorry for such a person; we also know that they plainly do not merit another chance. 

We both agree that this exam commits us to nothing whatsoever. 

It’s an exploration, nothing more or less. Both parties have to recognise that they may have to walk away with nothing, and it won’t be anyone’s ‘fault’. 

Why did we fight so much? 

We’re coming to the core of the examination. It’s a luxury of couples who will never get back together again that they can concentrate on the good sides of their story. They can listen to songs and daydream about the sweet times without any need to remember reality. But for those who are thinking of getting back together, there is no alternative but to focus with immense intent on one aspect only of the relationship: what was properly awful about it (and there would have been a lot that was, given that people don’t ever sever a tight bond lightly). The priority is to identify, and then submit to rigorous analysis, all that was most nightmarish, all that it remains extremely painful and eerie to summon. A couple’s right to resume is to be measured against their courage in exploring why they failed.

In one column of a chart, we need to write up no fewer than three arguments, though it could be twenty or more. Then, because every argument involves a clash between two people’s fervent but violated sense of justice and rightness, we should fill in two adjacent columns: what felt so important to person A, and what felt so important to person B. We need to distill overall principles from the morass of specific circumstances. We’re looking not just for what each person said, but for the underlying value or principle that they were defending and that drove the conflict on to its miserable end.

Appalling argumentWhat was important to AWhat what was important to B 
A wanted to go out with their friends.
B wanted A to stay at home.
To go out with friends independently without being ‘monitored.’That a functioning ‘couple’ should do most things together.

A was busy at work and didn’t text back.
B wanted greater responsiveness over texts.
To be able to concentrate on work without feeling a need to placate the partnerTo show, in small ways and large, that one is still a presence in the other’s mind, throughout a working day.

A mentioned they’d be found attractive by someone at a party.
B wanted no mentions of A’s appeal to anyone.
To be able to express sexual feelings and sense of attraction to people outside the couple.To be very loyal sexually simply within the couple.

A was upset but didn’t tell B. They hoped B would know.
B got upset that they hadn’t been told explicitly – and got annoyed for being expected to know what they hadn’t been told.
To have a partner who can be sensitive enough to intuit without me speaking.To be with someone who knows how to put their emotions into words and clearly communicate their anger not long after it’s arisen.

Why did I feel as impassioned as I did?

The breakup gives an opportunity for two people to explore the nature of their impassioned feelings – and in particular, the debt these may have owed to elements of their always tricky childhoods. There will – almost always – be a historical dimension to hysterical feelings. 

What was important to meBackstory
To go out with friends independently without being ‘monitored.’Because my mother never allowed me independence and my sister monitored everything I did.
To be able to concentrate on work without feeling a need to placate the partnerI had to watch what my angry father was feeling at all times. I don’t want to have to second guess others’ moods all the time.
To be able to express sexual feelings and sense of attraction to people outside the couple.I haven’t had much of a chance to appreciate my sexual appeal. There’s a side of me that needs a chance to be a bit vain for a while.
To have a partner who can be sensitive enough to intuit without me speakingI didn’t learn to speak up because no one was interested in what I felt or had to say.

How would I do it differently now? What can I change about my views?

Once our impassioned positions have been identified and their origins explained, we may be readier to explore how we might surrender what we once took to be a non-negotiable part of our identities.

What can’t I change? 

But also: what coping mechanisms might we arrive at to deal with these unchangeable aspects?

We need to acknowledge that – almost certainly – we won’t be able to alter all of our personalities and this is the moment to get clear with our ex about what is and isn’t possible. Broken promises always exact a worse toll than than pre-emptively lowered expectations. What do we feel that we aren’t, despite a lot of goodwill, going to be able to overcome? And how – if at all – can these stubborn bits of our personalities be handled?

How much can we each bear of what won’t change? 

Frank answers can spare a couple decades of squabbling. What could we put up with? What remains – if we are honest with ourselves – something we would be better of never having to deal with?

What trouble do I bring into the relationship? How am I difficult to live around?

There should no bristling here. Bearable people have a good handle on their unbearable dimensions. We don’t need people to be perfect; we just need them to have a decent sense of how imperfect they are – and how much their imperfections cause the other pain.

What trouble do you bring into the relationship? How are you difficult to live around?

We need agreement on the mutual complications that are being brought to the table. Both people should write their answers down, then show the other their analyses. Can both sides agree on what is most horrible in each person? The more alignment there can be, the less future criticism has to feel like nagging; and the more it can fit into a kinder project of helping someone to change as they would (at their saner moments) wish to change.

Which bits of my anxiety and unhappiness did I discover were not after all your fault? What continued to be difficult even without you around?

It is highly tempting, when in a relationship, to assume that all the misery we face is the fault of the lover. We attribute to the main person in our lives a commanding role in determining our state of mind. But when they are gone, we may be forced to realise a more complex truth: that our low moods and neuroses have their origins in large part in us rather than in them. It can – oddly – no longer all be their fault. How did life remain hard even without them? What might they not be to blame for?

What I now appreciate more properly about you is…

We’re meant never to lose sight of what was great about them, but in reality, we need the perspective of time to get clearer about their virtues. In the long months since we were together, what sides of them did we realise we most deeply valued?

What did I learn from meeting other people? 

A truly tickly subject but as we are realising, it’s a capacity for eating humble pie that stands a restarted relationship in such good stead. What did the bad dates teach us? What did the rejections bring home to us? What did we learn from the flaws of others about the merits of the one we left behind?

What will happen when we argue next time? Define six arguments that might take place in the future – and explore what could be done differently.

Design six arguments that might occur going forward: 

— There’s another party…

— You’re busy at work again…

— You’re tired and upset that they flirted…

How will we behave differently? What could we do other than break up? How might diplomacy replace warfare?

Each person should approach one of their very good friends who lived the break up from close quarters and ask them to meet the ex in private, then provide a deep evaluation of the prospects for a successful return. Does this ex now feel safe? Should the couple do this?

It seems extremely odd to bring in a third party. We imagine that couples have all the answers to their own problems. But most people who survive a break up only do so because they have – somewhere in the background – a wise kind sceptical friend who listened to the sobbing, counselled when to text and when to block, was always on hand and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the entire trauma. It seems foolish not to benefit from this person’s experience – and inevitable degree of scepticism. They don’t want to go through another catastrophe all over again. Even better, they don’t love our ex, they won’t be going to bed with them, they only stand to face the downsides – and that is why they are so useful. They aren’t a sworn enemy (that won’t be of assistance) but nor are they any kind of indiscriminate romantic. They are a hard-headed realist who saw what the ex put their friend through and doesn’t ever want it to happen again.

They need to be brought into the discussion. They need a one-on-one meeting with the prospective partner (who should be very intimidated by the idea but go through it anyway in the name of love). If the partner can convince this battled-wearied person, true change will have occurred – and vice versa. The friend must assess the ex on the following points – and score them out of ten:

— How much do the ex understand of the problems they brought into the relationship?

— How much do they seem able to change?

— What is their level of defensiveness?

— What have they understood about themselves?

— How might they manage conflict more successfully?

— What do they appreciate about their ex?

— Assess the overall viability of a return. In short, yes or no?

We take the gravest decisions of our lives on a whim. We will properly honour love and spare ourselves cycles of dismay and pain when we learn – at last – to disregard our desires and follow instead the pedantic dictates of sober, sensible, beautifully tedious logic.

Of course, back then, when we all lived in villages, there were some grave problems. It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings, the animals smelt – and so on and so forth.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, A Village Fair, c. 1564 –1638

But there was one enormous advantage. When it came to settling down, there were so very few options to choose from. If you were 22 and a man, there’d be three candidates, maybe four – and vice versa – and once you were paired off, the task was simple: to do your very best simply to make it work. You understood immediately that the person wasn’t perfect, that this wasn’t the end of all imaginings, but the next village was a three days walk away across the mountains and your entire mindset was consequently oriented towards hope and accommodation. Yes, they might be a bit stubborn, yes they let out an odd whistling sound when sleeping, but they were clever enough at building sluices or moulding pots – and that wasn’t nothing. Of course, they were a bit obsessive about their mother but they were charming some of the rest of the time. And perhaps they weren’t ideal looking around their chin but does one even notice after a little while and how nice their hands were at least.

Whereas now, far from those now deserted villages, not a second goes by without a mania and another glance. What about someone less… someone more… or not so…? Someone basically like what we’ve got – or had dinner with last week – but just a little bit younger, or older, or better built or without that thing about their teeth or slightly peculiar backside. And the machine doesn’t ever complain or rebuke, why would it, this malevolent slot machine surreptitiously hungering for our coins. Let’s take another lucky dip or ten or twenty. The casino is open 24 hours. Here’s someone from Sri Lanka, 39, a doctor who likes badminton and dogs. Don’t like dogs? OK, what about 32, an accountant, originally from Bremen… Not keen on Germans? What about this amazing one, a special of the week in fact, Dundee, still only 29 but so accomplished; a PhD from somewhere one doesn’t recognise but pretty spectacular in most ways.

And it isn’t – naturally – just we who are looking in this way. We are only a momentary stop on everyone’s else’s marathon. A world swiping in the bath and at the gym, on the bus and on forest walks. We too – even in the intimacy of the bedroom – when we finally think we have a refuge, remain aware that the beloved still has their phone, still in the secret hours will be looking, will be sending the odd friendly greeting back (in a tone within the bounds of deniability). It isn’t a sign of madness to be paranoid, only a folly to be anything but. We’ve killed love in an unyielding search for it.

We may explode at points: I want none of it. I’m out of the funfair. I can’t take the fickleness. I can’t bear that no one sticks at it – as a parent will with a child, who isn’t going to be sent back on bad days. I want to go home.

How much we might long for a deity to stop the dance definitively, to take away these hideous illuminated carousels from our guilty hands and simply say to us, as if from on high, in an unquestionable divine voice: this one goes with that one; that one with that one. And that’s it, I brook no opposition. Make it work or face a thousand hellfires.

We’d hate it but at the same time, how calm we’d feel, how settled would be our lives. How free we would be, at last, knowing we had no choice but to love here and nowhere else – forever without end. We’d make it work.

We tend to assume that people are either very nice to us – or not – according to certain fixed criteria in their natures that we have very little control over. If they treat us well, it’s because their characters are fundamentally decent and generous. If they treat us badly, it’s because they are inherently corrupt.

But what we tend to miss here is a more perturbing insight: that people’s behaviour towards us is to a large extent determined by what we unconsciously communicate that we deserve from others. Their degree of kindness or meanness is subtly calibrated to fit in with what we ourselves are largely unconsciously communicating as to what we can and should take.

André Derain, Bathers (Sketch), c. 1908,

People will on the whole try to get away with whatever they can. There is a natural inclination to the lowest forms of behaviour: selfishness, meanness, callousness, laziness, messiness. What then decides the precise intensity with which such behaviours manifest themselves around us is whether or not we stop them – and insist on something better.

The arena in which this fluidity occurs most intensely and often tragically is relationships. Imagine two people who have recently come together. As they get to know one another, both people will be broadcasting microscopic messages as to their expectations – and their relative power to act when these have not been met. Suppose that one person says that tidiness matters to them. But suppose too that when their partner leaves the contents of a take-away meal across their study desk, they say very little or get petulantly angry but no more. Through such a breach, a message reaches their partner: this person doesn’t stand up for themselves, this person says all sorts of things but doesn’t follow through. From such small beginnings, larger consequences may follow. In the most awful relationships, a person may sniff out that their partner will let the most egregious behaviours pass – betrayals, violence, lies etc. – and these will all indeed come to pass.

The tragic element is that people who end up being badly treated are almost always those who have already been badly treated before, usually in childhood. A bad childhood doesn’t just impose a one-off penalty. Unless its legacy is understood, a further price keeps having to be paid, multiple times, until the suffering that our past made us condone is identified and stopped.

There are some of us who, in order to survive the circumstances of our early years, had no option but to put up with terrible behaviour. Our father might have been sarcastic and belittling, our mother entirely self-absorbed and passive aggressive. But we couldn’t – aged five – do anything about this. There were no lawyers to call or other homes to go to. And so we developed a faculty that, though at the time it made perfect sense, has imposed a heavy toll on the rest of our lives: we learnt to put up with appalling treatment, we grew used to our boundaries being violated; we learnt to survive by putting up with being trampled upon.

These are then the expectations we take into our adult relationships. Here, from the earliest days, we leak out a terrible message: you can treat me badly and I won’t know how to protest. You can take more than your share, and I’ll think it’s my fault. You can exploit me and I don’t know how to say no. You can take advantage of me and I’ll think this is normal. I have been habituated to unfeasible degrees of harm and you can have your way with me.

For a long time, we don’t know this about ourselves. We don’t even know that we are in a cruel relationship and have lost any ability to say the loud and necessary ‘stop.’ Feeling miserable is the norm; we tell ourselves that everyone is complicated, that there is no such thing as a perfect relationship: we twist viable truths to our own sad self-neglectful ends.

It is time to ask ourselves two simple questions: 

1. Did our childhoods force us up to put with unreasonable parental figures?

2.And might there now be evidence that – considered with a dispassionate but kindly eye – we are putting up with far more ill treatment than we should in our relationship?

If the answers to both seem to be ‘yes’, we should have the courage of our dark insight. We shouldn’t waste too much time being angry with our partner; we should reserve anger for the original childhood situation that schooled us to tolerate them.

Then we should do something we were never able to do before: take a careful look at our situation, and with politeness and diplomacy, but most of all with firmness, leave.

Few things could sound as offensive and unromantic as to draw comparisons between hiring an employee – and getting together with a partner. 

We’re highly attuned to the many differences between commercial recruitment and love: money plays an overt role in the first, ideally rather little in the second. One is about cold objectives and annual targets, the other about feelings and tenderness.

But we can end up emphasising the differences at our cost. An unhelpful nebulousness can afflict our search for love. We can fall prey to notions that it would be vulgar or unseemly to think directly about how to accomplish our ends, that we must trust in fate and keep things ‘old fashioned’. We may imagine that if someone was truly meant to be with us, they would – paradoxically – arrive in our lives with minimal intent on our part (the less we have to do, the more it was meant to be). 

Photo by The Royal Danish Library on Unsplash

But when we look back at the embers of failed relationships, what often emerges is that we simply weren’t clear enough, with ourselves or with the other, as to what we needed. We failed to see that we had certain implicit requirements which we omitted to explore with necessary forthrightness.

Compare this with our approach at work. It would be odd, when tasked with hiring someone, to conclude that we had to let time take its course. We understand the urgency. No less intense time pressures exists, in a more concealed form, in love (we need only ask an older person about the windows that lie between 20 and 30 and 30 and 40). 

When recruiting at work, we also have little compunction getting clear as to what a role entails. We understand that there are criteria and that it helps to list them. Somewhere inside, we have comparably defined requirements in love, we’re just a lot more hesitant about drawing them up. We might (let’s imagine) need someone who was: 

— Interested in psychology

— Working on themselves

— Ready to put a relationship above their friends

— Settled in their careers

— Neither having nor wanting children

— Keen to travel

— Attractive to us – which probably means not too tall and maybe with glasses.

But to draw out such criteria, we need to understand ourselves – and then feel sufficiently legitimate and confident about our wishes to dare go out into the world in search of them.

We should import into our hunt for love some of the unembarrassed state of mind that naturally accompanies us in the workplace. Why wouldn’t we use technological tools? Why wouldn’t we set aside a few hours regularly for the search? Why wouldn’t we tap our networks in undisguised ways? Why wouldn’t we – on dates – run through a prescribed set of questions (subtly delivered)?

To do anything less disregards the fundamental basis of our lives: that we have limited time.

Jane Austen would have understood. Every date is at heart a recruitment interview, for which we need to show up with a privately held brief and the right set of questions. The breadsticks and olives shouldn’t distract us: this is possibly the most serious work of our lives, given the contribution that love can make to life’s richness.

The best way to guarantee our finer, higher emotions may be to double down on their practical underpinnings: the best guarantor of love is a very un-Romantic mindset.

In many relationships, we may find ourselves asking, with continually renewed frustration, puzzlement and pain: ‘Why can’t they change?’ We ask because there is so much at stake. Because we have invested so much in them and they in us. We ask also because we know they are intelligent. They understand so much. They follow arguments, they ordinarily communicate in sophisticated ways. They may have attended a good university. Surely, surely then, they will be able to hear us and grasp what needs to be done. 

It isn’t – after all – very complicated. We need them to be more reliable. We need them to call us when they say they will. We need them to kiss us more. We need them to ask us about our day. We need them to initiate sex sometimes. We need them to be softer and more focused. These are the signs that we need from them and upon which everything hangs: the survival of a relationship or a marriage, where children go to school, who owns a house, what’s in a will.

Paul Kotlarevsky, Man Reading, 1916

The pain and strangeness is deepened because they don’t say a flat out ‘no.’ They insist – repeatedly – that they do love us. At points, they appear to listen to us. They don’t want the connection to unravel either.

The things we’re trying to get them to do have an elemental simplicity: a few more words here and there. Not those annoying behaviours. Some more gestures at key moments. You’d think this was entirely obvious. Not least because so many people – we included – have absolutely no problem with such matters; they come to us as readily as, to some, does the gift of mental arithmetic or a facility with language.

We suffer because we can’t, unlike in other areas of endeavour, ‘see’ or grasp the effort required to change psychologically. We know it’s hard to climb a very tall mountain. We know the limitations of our limbs and intuit how hard those granite sides will be – and so don’t find ourselves crossly saying: ‘Just go and climb K2’. But in the emotional realm, there are no visible markers of challenge. Why don’t they just reach out to us more, think of us more, hold us more…? It’s so simple. Except it’s not. Not for them at least. It would be as hard for these people to take this on board as it would be for us to run up a cliff face, levitate a car or fly between buildings. The difficulty may be traceless. It is every bit as real and as incontestable.

We have to accept something beyond the evidence of our senses – in the way we have to accept a principle of physics that defies the naked eye. We have accept that for a certain sort of person, to say a sentence like ‘I can’t live without you; I need you so much,’ though it’s made up of ten commonplace, non syntactically arduous words, is as much of a challenge as would be lifting up a tree with one’s little finger or flawlessly translating a text from Finnish to Korean in an instant.

When we protest and say ‘why don’t they just…’, in our disbelief, there is so much that we’re not – at that moment ‘seeing’: the decades, especially the first one, that very slowly, over thousands of small incidents, with some of the patience of water shaping stone, moulded them into who they are. We’re not seeing the small boy or girl who had to cope with a father who left the family, or a mother who undermined them across long years. We’re not seeing how they had to adapt to make it through and why certain learned responses made sense. We’re not seeing that ‘character’ is a substance as tough as cat gut and as hard to alter as muscle. This has nothing to do with intelligence in the standard sense of an ability to understand an argument and respond to information. They can do this extremely well every day in their work, as we know. But this is of another order, it has to do with the way they were assembled as an emotional being, it touches on the wiring of their soul.

We can no more ‘just’ become a person who runs at a certain emotional temperature than we can be a person who ‘just’ competes in the Olympics or ‘just’ changes their eye colour. The difficulty doesn’t signal itself; it is every bit as concrete and unbudgeable as the most strenuous feats of the visible world.

We shouldn’t add to our suffering by believing that we are against some kind of stubbornness or wilfulness, that they are doing it on purpose, that we are destroying years on something that could change tomorrow. We need to dignify our problems. Our lives haven’t become unmoored by a haphazard matter or nastiness of character or streak of spite. We’re up against what we might as well learn to see as one of the central tripwires of existence. We’re facing the Pyramids of Giza or the direction of flow of the Rhine. They function in one kind of emotional way; we function in another. Despite a total lack of visual evidence, we’re fundamentally different people.

We would, to change them, need to put them in a time machine, fly back to the past and give them an entirely different upbringing. We’re insulting ourselves and the process by which people become who they are, to keep assuming that a few more paragraphs or one two more chats will do it. 

If we need to leave them, and we may, let’s not compound our suffering by assuming it’s caused by negligible factors. We were trying to remake a human being, we were trying to bend the laws of time and space, we were attempting to retool DNA with our bare hands. How noble and how brave of us to try. How very normal that we ran into difficulties.