The Future of Love: Therapeutic Relationships

Though we may think of the process as automatic and innate, the way we form relationships has shown radical changes across time – unlike the way we, let’s say, breathe, fall asleep or drink water. Love has a history, and we can – across the globe – distinguish two of its central phases.

The first, running from the dawn of time to the late eighteenth century, we might call the age of Material Relationships. In this period, we were inducted to form couples principally on the basis of pragmatic considerations: money, diplomacy, dynasty and children. You got together with someone not because you loved them, but because your family had a plough and theirs had an ox, because they were the nephew of the King of Naples and you were the niece of the Prince of Brabant, because someone had a fertile bearing and someone else had resources to raise a family. One didn’t – in the midst of this – expect to be especially attracted to, or respected by, a partner; being happy was close to the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Then, starting slowly in parts of Western Europe, a new idea formed of what a relationship could be like. According to the tenets of Romanticism, the central purpose of coupledom was reimagined as being about mutual understanding, sexual fulfilment and communion with a unique soulmate. This soulmate was to be found not by following the advice of relatives or village elders but by adhering to the rapturous yet mysterious movements of one’s heart. Sudden decisions powered by inexplicable emotions became proof of being well matched (getting married after knowing someone for two weeks felt beautiful to the Romantic mind). It was key to accept someone in their totality: to be thought a good lover, one would need to adore someone exactly as one found them, with no wish to change a thing about them. True love wouldn’t require much conversation either; one didn’t need to use too many words to know a soulmate – one could simply intuit what was going on inside them by sitting with them in silence (perhaps near a waterfall or other sublime element of nature).

We are – most of us – the heirs of this powerful Romantic conception of love, promoted with enormous skill by films, poems and songs, and we have been encouraged to feel that it is a vast improvement over what came before. We recoil at the cold-heartedness of our ancestors who married for ‘sensible’ reasons, lived scratchily alongside one another and took their longings to the grave.

The Need for a New Approach to Love

Nevertheless, it’s hard to survive long into adulthood without a suspicion that there may be problems – even unwitting cruelties – involved in the Romantic approach to love. Do our feelings necessarily push us towards the most appropriate candidates? Judged by statistics, the most calculating dynastic considerations of the old world might have yielded no grimmer results than the dictates of our hearts. Does everyone have a soulmate? Is it always evil to want to change someone? Is it fair to expect that one should be able to understand a person without having to speak? Are pragmatic considerations always by the by? How high should expectations be?

We might go further. For all its promises, the Romantic age has – collectively – failed us very badly. Heightened expectations of love, combined with a ruthless suspicion of rational exploration and communication, have led to punishing degrees of loneliness and confusion.

We stand in need a new start: a third age of love, one that would synthesise the best elements of the preceding two movements. It would be pragmatic and reasonable, but in the name of happiness rather than status and dynasty. It would recognise the hopes of the Romantic age but give us tools and mental disciplines with which to stand a chance of attaining them.

We could call this the age of the Therapeutic Relationship – and it would have some of the following characteristics:

Emotional education:

The age would start from the assumption that love was a skill, and not just an emotion – one that needed to be learnt very slowly and with much humility, in something like a School of Love.

Psychotherapy:

Psychotherapy would become the leading theoretical model by which we understood our romantic dilemmas. Therapeutic Relationships would be founded on the key insight of psychotherapy: that we cannot make sense of our adult lives without first looking at our childhoods, that the way we love as grown-ups follows closely along tracks formed before our tenth birthdays.

Unpicking our distortions:

In a Therapeutic Relationship, two people would accept that they were the ineluctable heirs of distortions set up for them by their pasts. Someone might – in response to growing up around an angry father – have acquired an unhelpfully timid or evasive nature; someone else might – after a let-down from a mother – be tempted to have multiple partners to insulate themselves from disappointment. Therapeutically minded people would not be impatient or defensive about their neurotic aspects; they’d be especially committed to understanding and overcoming them. A standard enquiry on an early (therapeutic) dinner date would be: ‘And how are you mad?’ – the assumption being that everyone is, and only the most dangerous among us claim otherwise.

Work:

Two lovers brought together under a therapeutic conception of love would have high ambitions: they’d want to understand one another, open their hearts and be content in each other’s company. But they would also be hugely modest about the chances of any of this ever happening spontaneously. They’d be careful students of love; they’d constantly apologise for the trouble they were bringing into their couple; they’d daily renew their efforts to know and be known. They’d go in for long conversations that would start with phrases like: I wonder why I always tend to… or I want to check-in on how you’re feeling about our last discussion… None of it would sound very Romantic – and that would be the point.

A mistrust of feelings:

Therapeutically minded people would be suspicious of using feelings as guides to the formation of couples, knowing that feelings tend to guide us first and foremost towards what is familiar, not towards what would make us happy. The child of an alcoholic may – under the sway of unexamined feelings – feel powerfully drawn towards another alcoholic who throws them once more into the doubts they knew when they were little; those who have been neglected as children may be manically attracted to partners who promise to leave them as unseen and unheard as they used to be. Therapeutically minded people would be resistant to the call of love at first sight. They’d know that, after a childhood of suffering, initial feelings of nausea in someone’s company might merely mean that one had, at last, chanced upon someone who promised to be kind.

The Promise of Therapeutic Relationships

It seems we have two choices in love. We can expect very little – and then get very little in return. Or we can expect a lot, but then need to be ready for an immense amount of hard work to realise our ideals.

Romanticism refused the equation: it taught us to expect ecstasy but then gave us no mechanisms by which to achieve it. Therapeutic Relationships recognise and seek to correct the conundrum. They propose that happiness might be possible – but then soberly insist that it would require no less effort to bring about than would be needed to master a foreign language or a musical instrument.