How a Bad Childhood Can Leave You Naive About Love

For all their perils, rough childhoods tend to teach us something important about how to look after ourselves. We don’t expect to be pampered; distrust comes easily; we know about vigilance and a hard-heartedness; we don’t harbour too many illusions. And that’s why, despite the suffering they involve, rough childhoods tend to make us resilient and, in the world of work, often rather successful. We don’t expect anyone to solve our problems, we know that no one owes us much and we understand that there is no ship coming to rescue us.

But there is a notable exception to this worldly independent scepticism – and it comes in the area of love. How childhood affects relationships can be unexpectedly tragic Here we find, remarkably, that it’s precisely those who have had the hardest childhoods who may be the least prepared for the pitfalls of adult relationships. For all their wily intelligence and cynicism, the underloved can end up fatefully naive – and in danger – in the intimate sphere.

— First and most importantly, the underloved person doesn’t – deep down – especially value themselves as an emotional being and is therefore unable to insist on good treatment from those close to them. Semi-consciously, they hunt out feelings of being ignored, sidelined and demeaned.

— Never having been properly valued, the underloved tend to be far too patient around desperate romantic situations which healthier people would more cleanly recognise as such and leave behind in short order. They wonder – for months or years – whether a partner who is unsure or unfaithful might perhaps be persuaded to love them after all. They beg, they fantasise, they hope for changes of mind. They cannot muster the self-respect with which every properly loved child grows up. The underloved see nothing peculiar about spending years in the company of people who are cold, frustrating, dismissive and rude. It’s the most familiar of feelings; it’s just like home.

— To survive a difficult childhood, the underloved had to stifle their outrage and scepticism. They couldn’t ask, with appropriate anger: Why don’t these caregivers love me? Instead, they had to turn the blame inwards and speculate: What might be wrong with me for not receiving better treatment (rather than with them for neglecting the person they brought into the world)? What an ugly and deformed wretch I must be to be treated as I am by my seniors! Such a perspective renders them experts at doomed patience. Why not wait five years for a partner to love them ‘properly’, given that they have already spent the first two decades hoping that a father or mother might be kind? The wounded are experts at creative excuses: Mummy isn’t just a bully, she’s got so much to think about. Daddy isn’t just a brute, he’s trying to teach me important things about life in a distinctive way. And later on: Perhaps Melanie is really a sweetheart, she just needs to have some affairs for a while… or I think Jack could be an angel, he just loses his temper badly sometimes… People who wouldn’t take a single excuse from a colleague at work develop – in love – the patience of rocks.

— Having waited so long and forlornly for love in childhood, the underloved exercise none of the requisite care in assessing whether it is with them in true form in adulthood. They melt with daunting ease once someone mentions that they adore them. They follow what their partners are saying rather than doing. Surely the beloved must be nice; they’ve called them ‘darling’ and ‘sweet rabbit’. They can’t have malevolent intentions; they sent a three-line email with many kisses at the end. The underloved are so much in awe that someone has finally accorded them a few shards of the care they crave, they have no strength for due diligence. Unwilling to believe in fantasies for an instant in matters of work or politics, religion or medicine, they show extraordinary faith towards honeyed words and sentimental evasions in love.

— Simultaneously, they harbour no hope that there could – with a little effort – be better to be found. Their own desirability is constantly in question. Having already been accorded bad parents, they cannot muster trust that they might have better luck finding people more decent than their current partners elsewhere. They stay rooted to the spot, as they always have done.

— Overall, the underloved fail, in relationships, to ask themselves the most basic and necessary question: Am I happy here? They don’t believe in the right to their own peace. It wasn’t there in childhood, so why would it be any sort of vivid requirement now? They accept without complaint what they have long put up with: shitty treatment. They have none of the healthy person’s instinctive recoil from neglect. They are always trying to see the upside of desperate situations. They write long letters to their partners speculating on why they might be pulling away. They have an unending appetite for excuses. They don’t see withdrawal as a sign to leave at once – merely a riddle to be solved in encyclopedic detail over many upcoming years of pain.

— And then, of course, on the other side, the underloved constantly shudder and feel nauseous in the company of sweet prospective lovers. Not only are they endlessly tolerant of the mean and the unsure, they are radically allergic to those who threaten to be tender and available. Why would anyone think any better of them than they think of themselves?

It’s bad enough that we should have had rough childhoods. It’s even sadder that we should – on that basis – still so often remain tolerant of inadequate lovers and resistant to the kindness we should have been gifted from the start. Understanding how childhood affects relationships can help us begin, at last, to choose love more wisely.