we regularly get into difficulties in love because we refuse to accept how much reassurance and stroking we need from the person we love. we imagine we’re grown-up; we don’t want to countenance how fragile and easily wounded we might be; we don’t want to see the always susceptible and sensitive child beneath the impressive adult. and so, in the face of so-called ‘small things’ that have undeniably hurt us (a missing warm comment here, a lack of touch there), we go numb instead, we silently and swiftly pull up the drawbridge, we unconsciously prepare to recriminate, we tell ourselves that we have a lot of work to do and should spend more time by ourselves.
the last thing we can acknowledge is that we might be sad, confused and secretly furious.
it would help a lot if we could recognise with grace – that, when it comes to relationships, we are all without a skin. we feel everything – whether we chose to register the fact or not. we’re alive to every nuance in our partner’s behaviour toward us; we notice and are pained by every piece of distance, every moment of incomprehension and every minor slight.
it is obviously profoundly tempting to deny such exposure. who wants to be constantly reminded that they have, in effect, forfeited their independence to the moods and inclinations of a wholly autonomous fellow human? how much more comforting to subsist under the illusion that we might be immune to minor slights and that our spirits remain substantially in our own hands.
and yet, it would be fairer and a good deal cleaner to accept that once we have are in love, we have no option but to feel everything that goes on between ourselves and a partner. we have to know on a daily, even hourly, basis, that we continue to matter to them. it is no use pretending to be made of rock – of attempting to be recklessly, and eventually angrily and coldly, brave. we need to put in place measures to preserve love in the face of our ongoing vulnerability. we need regularly to check in with one another and ask: have i hurt you? and then as regularly say: i do still love you.
it’s no sign of being infantile to approach love with immense, almost implausible sensitivity. it is a sign that we’ve at last accepted what a grown-up is and needs.
