Our Longing to Avoid Love

We won’t really have begun to properly understand human nature until we absorb a hugely awkward and strange sounding fact: we collectively seem to spend as much time avoiding love as we do pursuing it. We devote inordinate energy to skirting the possibility of successful relationships in which there might be a chance of mutual tenderness, recognition, kindness and intimacy. And instead, we throw ourselves into a variety of unfulfilling situations marked by isolation, frustration, and distance – terrible in a sense but with the advantage of sparing us the challenges that (deep down, in the underground parts of the mind) we associate with emotional fulfilment.

The sheer ingenuity with which we strategise to refuse love is impressive. Here’s a person who falls in love only with married people. Here’s another who, the moment a relationship gets serious, has to cool and find a way to exit. Here’s someone else who limits their passion to passers-by they will never speak to. Here’s someone who obsesses about an ex they had in high school and for whom they turn down everybody they meet for the subsequent sixty years. Here’s someone who, the moment they find someone who seems to like them, succeeds in alienating them through aggression or mood swings. Here’s someone who sabotages relationships by becoming highly concerned (for no reason) with their health or career. Here’s someone who is compelled to betray every partner who promises to be loyal to them. 

The behaviours may be varied but the very same thing holds them together. The reason why we turn down love is as fundamental as it is – from some angles – humiliating, cliched and boring. We do so because love failed for us in childhood. We’re avoiding love now because somewhere in the past, it proved intolerably distressing in a way that we have not understood – and therefore cannot overcome.

There might have been a parent or caregiver who couldn’t tolerate our vulnerability; or who bullied us, or blew hot and cold, or died on us, or seduced us, or preferred a sibling, or made us feel they only cared for our achievements, or was threatened by our achievements, or couldn’t tolerate our gender or our intelligence or our sportiness or our hesitation. 

We know so much about our longing for love. We talk so little about the terrors love holds for a good portion of the population (it might be as much as forty percent). We haven’t found an easy way to discuss how frightening it can be that someone might finally want to cuddle us and believe in us – after we have suffered for so long in loneliness, after our whole personalities have been shaped by an imperative to adapt to frustration, after we have had to kill trust in the face of constant betrayal, after we have been miserably confused by the mixture of cruelty and kindness served up by those closest to us. How sickening that someone might now promise us life-long commitment or tell us unadulteratedly sweet and gentle things. What relief we find from our dread of intimacy when we can manage to engineer an impasse: when we can safely fall in love with someone who is dead or lives three continents away or has another family or whom we can drive away through anger and unreliability.

To be helpful, and to warn ourselves, we might need to hazard a prediction: if love didn’t go well for us as children, we will almost certainly have problems tolerating love as adults. However much we may tell ourselves that we are just freely seeking happy love, a part of us will be furiously devising clever and disguised ways in which we won’t find it after all. At social occasions, it will steer us – as if by magic – always to the ones who don’t care. At moments of opportunity, it will render us argumentative or mute, self-hating or restless. 

We say this not to depress us but to help us see a danger that will otherwise reside simply in the unconscious parts of the mind. Our childhoods have taught us overwhelmingly yet silently that love was not safe. It is open to us to realise what we have imbibed until now and to make sure that we can henceforth – via a lot of reflection and courage – gradually learn to bear the tension, unfamiliarity and terrifying beauty of genuine love.