If Only They Could Just…

We are, on many days, made intensely aware of just how calm and good things could be, if only they– the troubling person ruining our sleep and our thoughts – could just be a little more… Or a little less… A little less closed, a little more ready to give affection, better at admitting fault, faster at accepting their role in key issues. This is the breeding ground of false hope in relationships: the sense that happiness lies just one small shift away. How blessed we’d be if only they could tell us, ‘I hear you, I’m going to think about that…’ or ‘That’s interesting, I’m taking this seriously; this is going to stop.’

We may be annoyed with them, but only because we are, beneath it all, also – fundamentally – hopeful; hopeful that things could and will one day be otherwise. What we want from them seems, after all, so modest. A relatively minor adjustment here or there. By a fully grown adult who is accomplished and intelligent in a dozen areas, who trained for a demanding profession, who might have mastered a complex hobby. So we stick at the relationship, we keep going with the friendship, we write some long emails explaining our position. We ask to meet them for coffee (again). We go to therapy with them. We believe in change.

Why we expect change where none may come

We aren’t equally optimistic in every area. We don’t fantasise that a mountain could turn into a lake or a horse could speak German. We understand the limits of reality. But there is a special problem around psychological issues. We don’t reliably determine what reality might be – largely because it is entirely physically invisible. We lack any sense that a phenomenon like ‘emotional withholding’ or ‘poor communication’ is, in the end, as fixed an element in the world as a rock or a tree; because it lacks material dimensions, we confuse it with an idea, a mood or a light pencil mark.

If we kept asking an accountant to turn into a zebra, we’d know we were asking a lot of existence. But if we ask for evolution from someone who can never communicate clearly, we fail to see a comparable scale in our demand; we fail to notice that we are, in effect, being entirely unreasonable, that we are asking a waterfall to sing an aria.

False hope in relationships

People’s psychology is the way it is for well-founded, longstanding reasons. The one who laughs too much all the time; the one who is permanently cynical and angry; the one who has no confidence; the one who dreams always of elsewhere. These aren’t coincidental traits. They are as hard as titanium, as tough to uproot as a redwood tree, as tenacious as a lion’s hold. They are etched in granite. We mess with such indelible structures at high cost.

They came into being for good reasons. They were – once upon a time – adaptive, protective responses. Not communicating anything was a clever move in a household led by an abusive parent. Getting upset very quickly was strategic at the hands of a parent who might otherwise ride roughshod over everything. There was – once – a firm logic to today’s so-called irritating traits.

Now they are as hard to change as a language one’s been speaking since infancy.

The fantasy of one last conversation

We dream of one more deciding chat. We marshal our eloquence. I wonder if we might think together about… Couldn’t you just… One more pretty sentence might do it.

It won’t. They aren’t doing any of this on purpose. They probably don’t understand what we are saying – not properly. Their character is founded on not getting it. This is the tragedy of false hope in relationships: the belief that insight, patience or love can melt what is structurally solid. They won’t change at our instigation, and not on a timescale that can work for us, given how fast the sand is flowing. Psychology may well be physically invisible; it’s one of the hardest, most solid things in the universe.