Emotional Maturity in Love

When the dust settles, the most attractive quality in a partner is not beauty, money or wit, but – hands down – emotional maturity in love: a person’s ability to control their temper, explain their actions, apologise for their errors, deal with their fears of reciprocated love, forgive their partner for their misdeeds, work out what they’re feeling, repair after conflict and stay open and curious as to the mystery and complexity of our mad minds and hearts.

The difficulty is how long it can take to work out just how mature someone might be. A person could be, outwardly, in their mid-40s, just past 21 or approaching their ninth decade. But chronological age says very little about emotional maturity. There are toddlers lurking inside octogenarians; youthful faces can hide the wisest minds.

To help us accelerate the exploration, we might work our way down a list of some of the key ingredients of emotional maturity, to provoke a sense of both recognition and absence:

Dependence

The most basic, terrifying and arduous thing that a relationship asks of any of us is to dare to depend on another human being; love requires us to give someone else vast control over our moods and our esteem; to give them permission to devastate us if ever they choose to leave us.

Mature people can – just about – bear the dangers. They’re not thrilled; they may have had horrid experiences. But they have enough emotional padding to put down their guard and extend a hand. They can dare to give the other the benefit of the doubt.

The emotionally immature, for their part, get involved in love but never quite manage to bear the tension of doing so. They show up but they hold back. They say they want love but duck out when it arrives. They ‘go strange’; extending affection then suddenly withdrawing it as intensity increases. They long for happiness but puncture it every time it looms. They’re only ever partly inside the house.

To mitigate the perceived dangers, they cause arguments for no sensible reason. They love us perfectly for a month, then abruptly declare they need a break. They might take another lover (or two). They keep being swallowed up by their work or a hobby. Or else they hide their anxiety behind aggression: why were you so rude? How come you are three minutes late? Which disguises a less mentionable set of fears: that it will end any moment, that this surely can’t work, that trust feels too hard.

Ultimately, the mature can love because they have made their peace with solitude. They accept that the couple could fail, that they might have to be alone once again – and that they could survive.

Anger

Few of us were brought up in families that took much of an interest in our more complicated emotions. We learnt to stay quiet about what we were feeling, especially if it was anger or jealousy. We became preternaturally good, in order not to upset the fragile spirits of the pseudo-adults around us. The emotionally immature continue with such adaptive strategies; they treat us like the original adults who required their suppression and dishonesty. They don’t dare to tell us that we upset them. They don’t do us the grace of shouting at us (within limits) at around the time when they get annoyed. They stay quiet, they disappear for long periods to their room, they claim to need to see their cousin or to play endless games of golf. The first we know of a problem is that they are rather sullen and don’t want to have sex with us anymore. We’ll know we’ve found a true adult when they do us the honour of telling us loud and clear that we’re a jackass (at times) and allow us to clear up the problem then and there. Blessed are they who can get annoyed cleanly and quickly.

Mind Reading

The mature are alive to the remarkable fact that no one can automatically read their minds. They don’t expect that the partner can tell that they are upset about how we spoke about their mother or forgot the anniversary of their dog’s death. They have come to the dispiriting but grand conclusion that there is no option other than to convey key parts of their concerns through that clumsy and time-consuming medium: language.

Self-Awareness

The mature have made efforts to understand their own minds. They are not permanently puzzled by what they might feel. They don’t go into a dissociated haze every time they need to explore a topic: what job they might do, how to explain a problem to us, their feelings for their brother-in-law. They maintain a line of communication with their hearts. They can tell you what is going on inside them in fairly short order. They don’t need a week to determine that they were frustrated by something at work or got irritated with the film we chose. They are, as the term goes, in touch with their feelings. They are fairly reliable, fairly timely correspondents of their stranger emotional states.

The Unconscious

The mature know they have an unconscious, in other words, a part of their minds that dates back to childhood and is full of mysterious and counterintuitive scripts that make them inclined to do peculiar things: like sabotage themselves, or annoy us for no good reason, or impel them to reject affection. They appreciate that it might be for unconscious reasons that they forgot the house keys or developed a stomach ache on the first day of the holidays or were rude to our aunt. They don’t insist on their sanity and logic – and thereby remain reasonable.

Offence

The immature know, at once, that you meant to harm them. That you are trying to destroy their lives. That you did it on purpose. They are experts at getting offended – a perfect strategy for not taking responsibility for anything they might have done. The mature feel the sting all the same but they are able to extend their imagination further. It might have looked like an insult, but it could have been an unintentional wound fired by a mixture of tiredness and humiliation. You might have hurt them rather badly and been driven by nothing more than exhaustion and anxiety. Bad outcomes can have innocent origins.

Self-Righteousness

The emotionally mature do not cling too tightly to notions of their own dignity. They don’t insist that they are fabulous. They are fully aware of how awful they may be and have been. On this basis, they forgive you for much of what you do – and say sorry very quickly. They also laugh – largely at themselves.

Accountability

The immature are under such internal pressure, they cannot possibly accept that – on top of everything else – they might have done something wrong. It wasn’t them who could possibly have left the stain on the carpet; they didn’t create the upset; they aren’t the ones who ruined the plans. They can’t take yet more reasons to hate themselves.

The emotionally mature, on the other hand, operate with a saner, more charitable view of themselves. They can be allowed to exist and make errors. They do have odd motives and dark sides. So it probably was them who chipped the sideboard and dented the car, who got the dates wrong and didn’t act politely at dinner. They are capable of that magisterial move that requires at least a layer of self-love: apologise.

Politeness

It can be fun – almost Latin – to let rip. To shout when one’s angry. To hang up the phone. To come out with a stream of insults. But it’s also tiring and wounding. The emotionally mature, while respectful of passion, have wearily come to terms with the beauty of politeness. Whenever they can manage it, they display extreme good manners. They’re almost old-fashioned and formal. They nuance their points with a ‘perhaps…’ or a ‘maybe…’ They say ‘that’s so kind…’ and ‘How thoughtful of you…’ They treat their partners as they might an old, highly esteemed friend or ambassador – and know it’s love after all.

Fury or Silence

The mature try to eschew the two great bugbears: fury or silence. When there is something wrong, they don’t shout. But nor do they go silent and retreat. They try to tell you what’s wrong in a voice that sounds moderate and gentle. It may take a lifetime to get there. We give out medals for people who do long jump. In a better arranged society, there would be medals for those who had skirted fury or silence in the name of a careful, honest conversation on the sofa between 7 and 9 p.m.

Difficult News

The mature are kind enough to give it to us fully and early on. They don’t try to clumsily protect us from facts we need for our survival: like that they have stopped loving us perhaps or that they are furious. They do us the honour of destroying our weekend so that we might save the next five years.

Seduction

The mature know the fun of seduction like any of us; but they learn to keep it in check. They only seduce those they have an intention of being with and treating well. They resist being admired by those they can’t be admirable with.

Pessimism

The mature are deeply pessimistic about love and relationships. They know that everyone is flawed, that love is unlikely to go very well and that everyone is (in part) crooked. These bleak thoughts, far from ushering despair and nihilism, help to make them patient, kind and very funny. What need is there to shout at every single infraction given that the whole business of love is a bit of a disaster? Why have an affair, if everyone is somewhat awful? They know they are no angels so will stick with the devilish bits of you.

Curiosity

The mature are able to be curious about the crises that befall them. Why are we arguing about this again? Why is sex not working? How come I’m feeling jealous? They have energy to ask questions. They are theorists of love. They are never bored. They do the emotional labour: they talk, imagine, reflect for the couple. They wonder: why has it been difficult? How might we have more fun? Why are we scratchy?

Repair

The emotionally mature know that things can break and they’re interested in the glueing bit. They don’t sit back and say nothing for days when there’s been a rupture. They come back to the table. They want to give it another go. They have energy to reassess a problem: why did I get hurt? Why did you shout? What are we both not seeing? They want to talk – and have the courage to pick up the phone. They see love first and foremost as a job, not a feeling.

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The lucky ones among us learn about emotional maturity in childhood, from watching true adults negotiate a relationship. The rest of us have to go to school. And it is often only as adults that we realise how central emotional maturity in love really is: the quiet foundation beneath every apology, every repair, every moment of patience. There could be no grander ambition than to say, in answer to the question of what we might want to do when we (finally) grow up: become emotionally mature.