How Sane Are You to Be With a ‘Mad’ Person?

We are used to hearing quite a lot – from those on the dating scene – about just how many awful people there are at large in the field of love. There was one who spoke only about themselves; another who refused to pay for anything; a third who talked incessantly about marriage from the first date then vanished to another continent; a fourth who wanted to dress up in a clown’s costume during sex. And so on and so forth. But behind the anecdotes lies something more telling about our relationship patterns.

Looking Beyond the ‘Mad’ Ones

We can have a lot of sympathy for the casualties – and enthusiasm for exploring the annals of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis to interpret the ways of these perpetrators. We wonder what childhood dynamics might have led to their many oddities; we skilfully size up the scale of their possible madness. We turn failed relationships into case studies.

But at some point, as those who endured the weirdness, we may need to step back and ask ourselves a blunter and more confronting question: why were we there?

Why, if they didn’t ever listen, if they couldn’t speak up, if they were never in the mood for sex, if they were egoistic or grandiose, maniacal or perpetually sarcastic, were we with them? Why did it go on for months, even years or decades? Why, on a planet of many billions of people, did we stick so assiduously to an endemically flawed option?

It isn’t good enough simply to call them mad. They may well have been. But what about the madness – if we can put indelicately – of showing such loyalty to the mad?

Understanding Our Relationship Patterns

Might we not also be relevant material for case studies of sorts: people who prefer suffering to fulfilment; people who harbour their own apprehensions around sex or cosiness but hide them behind more obviously disturbed or withholding partners; people who head for frustrating dynamics to ward off archaic fears of losing control to happiness; people who may routinely have turned down kinder, more present candidates, insisting that there were no other options at large? Why did we stay endlessly with someone who didn’t pay for anything, who couldn’t be gentle, who didn’t want to touch us? What part of us was intrigued, and perhaps (as it were) almost charmed, by dissatisfaction and coldness? What gap did insufficiency fill in our own not-entirely-straightforward hearts?

We can rail all we like about the wrong people, we can nurse our sadness with immense tenderness, but when we are done, when we have poured over their follies for months, we may need to spare a few enquiries for ourselves: we may need to ask – with curiosity and compassion – what might possibly have gone wrong with us for maintaining such stubborn faith in the wrong people; how might we be a touch mad for being so interested in the ‘mad’, and how our own relationship patterns might have quietly guided us back, again and again, to the wrong choices.