Why We Should – out of Love – Sometimes Not Love Too Much

It sounds, at one level, absurd to have to hold back from expressing the full intensity of our feelings for certain people we love. Surely there should be no room in this area for what we blithely call ‘games’; if we are besotted, we should tell our companion of our adoration without fear or compunction. We should be able to declare plainly that we think about them all the time, find them lovely looking, and might want to marry them one day. We should – in addition – happily expect to see them often, get jealous whenever they stay out late with friends and pull a long face if they tell us that they might one day want to go on a trip to Madagascar, Mongolia or Peru – without us.

It sounds like a sensible strategy, full of an aspiration for closeness and honesty, but it is only wise if we forget one thing: that many of us cannot – with the best will in the world – absorb love in undiluted doses. Some of us grew up in environments that were so lacking in warmth that, in order to survive, we had to remould our characters in the direction of emotional diffidence and self-suspicion. When we received no positive feedback, when all the love went to a sibling, when low self-esteem and defended isolation became the norm, we cannot expect that things will go well the moment a kind – and perhaps puppyish and anxious – lover arrives on the scene. The leading reaction to suddenly finding ourselves the target of another’s adoration may not be gratitude or safety so much as a feeling of danger, confinement, oppression and disgust. We may – to defend our integrity – have to start to hate the person who overwhelms us with an unfamiliar bounty of care, even though, at some level, we are so grateful for all the sweetness they show us. If the emotional food we most lacked in childhood is delivered in rich, over-seasoned portions, we may have no choice but to spit it out.

If we truly cherish someone, we should be concerned not just with telling them they are delightful and that we want to be with them until the end of time. We should undertake the greater additional effort of the imagination: to understand their relationship to being admired and to understand that our care may, in order to make its way through to them safely, need to be cast in more hedged and covert ways.

It’s not, in the end, very kind to choke someone with love, to hold them so tightly to us that they must fight for space, and to leave them feeling hugely guilty and inadequate for not being able to meet us exactly halfway in our ecstasies. To hold on to a person we truly care about for the long term, we may have to put our own ardour aside and attune ourselves ­– perhaps for the first time – to their distinctive way of metabolising affection. We should ask not just ‘What do I want to give?’ but also, ‘How are they built to receive?’ Even if it isn’t our first choice, we may have to leave them room to miss us; we may have to let them see their friends a lot, we may have to let them go on holiday without us, we might need resist calling them all the time and not make a fuss when they are a bit late with a text message. And we will need to do this not because we don’t care but because we care so much, and can at last see that the price for not doing so will be to lose them altogether. That would be an ultimate tragedy we will regret all our lives. We can leave them to their own devices, sure in the knowledge that they need space not because they are bad or uncaring or about to desert us, but because they are – on account of their miserable childhoods – as terrified of love as they are thrilled by it.

When we truly love someone, it may be the greatest kindness not to love them too much, too suddenly, or too insistently. We may have to give them a great deal of room so that that they can remain close. We may have to pretend not to fear losing them, in order to ensure that we never do so.