Mate selection

Wow. Eye opening!

This should be compulsory reading GC!

This passage is particularly appropriate for me... and probs a few more of our lovely members.


The Inability to Leave SomeoneFor many of us, a major obstacle to getting into a good relationship is an inability to leave an unfulfilling one to which we’re deeply but unhappily committed.Though we may long to flee, we don’t feel ruthless enough to break away. Our present lover seems so content with us, they have emitted so many signals of their trust and investment in our future, they are so vulnerable in front of us, we can’t bring ourselves to be the bearers of terrible news. We fear two things above all: that they will collapse without us; and never find happiness again. And that our rejection will render them immensely furious and vengeful. We are at once concerned – and scared.Almost always, our fears have escaped realistic proportions. People leave each other all the time, almost always without anything properly horrible happening. What is striking then is why some of us can come to be so afraid of upsetting someone, projecting onto another a degree of extreme fragility that they are, in reality, unlikely to have. Of course, they will be furious and very upset for a while. But, in reality, they will – most likely – survive.It’s not so much the idea that they won’t be able to cope that holds us back. It’s the feeling that we won’t be able to cope with upsetting them. We have become people for whom the thought of upsetting another person (even for a very good reasons) has become intensely troubling. As ever, we can look to childhood for answers. We are likely to have experienced moments when adults around us seemed very unable to take bad news, be it from us or others in their lives. They slammed doors, screamed, threatened to kill themselves, threw things at us…. There was no room for us to bring our problems to the table. The parents seemed agitated and unhappy enough as it was. ‘Do you want to kill me or something?’ a parent might have shouted, the day we got caught stealing a ball or had a nosebleed over the carpet. We took care never to do that, or anything much else like it, again. Perhaps the reality was not as bad as it seemed to a five-year-old child, but that is the point: children are unable to sense the difference between catastrophe and an-evening-of-deep-but-passing-upset in an easily agitated adult. The two merge into one another and create a confusion, which can survive deep into adulthood, between unhappiness and suicidal grief. A traumatic encounter with fragility may leave us feeling that we must never, at any cost, be the bearers of terrible news. We strive to be people-pleasers, except that here – in love – mere politeness ruins lives.The truth is that our lingering childhood fears are likely to be fantasms. Certainly there will be a momentary drama. The news will be very shocking indeed. There will be tears. There could be screaming. Something might be thrown and broken. But humans can well survive a night of hysterical crying. It won’t be the end of the story. The novel of the rejected partner’s life, which on the night of the break up will look as if it had ground to an appalling end amidst the damp tissues and vows never ever to love again, will, of course, carry on. The sun will rise again. The next chapter might read something like this: ‘After Nabil told her it was over, Mel cried for a month. She could barely get out of bed. She ate almost nothing. She told friends that her life was over and that she would never, ever get through this. Once she called up Nabil to beg him to come back. He was very accommodating and embarrassed – but didn’t. Then, as spring came around, work got busier and Mel started to feel better. A few weeks into April, she had a drink with Nick, a friend of a colleague at work. He was lovely and invited her to the cinema the following weekend…’We are inclined to forget, too, that there are many forms of harm. We don’t only harm by being brutal with others, we can as easily – and perhaps more deeply – harm someone by seeming very nice to them, while wasting their years in a union to which we know all along we don’t feel committed. Part of properly growing up is knowing the difference between seeming nice and being so – the latter often requiring one to do things to a lover that will for a time enrage and devastate them. For real kindness, we need to have the courage to allow ourselves to be hated. The psychological imperative to appear nice at all costs will guarantee that we’ll be nothing other than quietly, exceptionally cruel. We owe it to those we no longer love to kill all hope and allow them to hate us, confident that we can withstand their anger. That is – in the end – true kindness.