There Are No Small Issues in Love

We are sometimes let down by an unhelpful idea about how big an issue needs to be in order to merit our sustained attention within a relationship. For example, we imagine that to warrant two hours of our time, a conversation would need to focus on something like the future of our finances, the ultimate purpose of our careers or (perhaps) the nature of God. 

But the best functioning couples know a rather different, more humble and more comedic truth. They know that the most serious upsets between people tend to have their origins in some very so-called ‘small places’. For instance, in the matter of how soon one should answer a text message, or who should touch whose hand first in the evening, or what should happen to an empty cup of tea. 

It is here that high-minded, so-called intelligent partners are especially at risk, for they may operate with hugely unhelpful (and ultimately unserious) notions of what deserves to be counted as serious. Why would they, of all people, get mired in a scratchy squabble about crockery? Why would they devote hours to a petty issue around text messaging? Their respect skews towards the intellectual and the political, and away from the intimate and the domestic; their pride prevents them from countenancing that their lives might be undone by apparently minor matters. They are therefore prone to uttering two particularly risky sentences – ‘This isn’t worth talking about,’ and ‘Surely there are more important things to discuss than this’ – thereby forgetting that divorces can be pretty serious matters too and often begin with the very sort of teacup tensions to whose meaning they have refused to devote a conjugal seminar.

In reality, it isn’t ever just an empty cup of tea that we’re complaining about; it’s attitudes of thoughtlessness and neglect that have temporarily come to rest within a misplaced household object. Just as it isn’t simply a missing text that has perturbed us; it’s a low-key but significant hint as to how our dependent needs are being handled by our partner. 

In certain areas, we accept readily enough that big themes can come to reside within small details. We don’t blame a painter for spending a couple of months adjusting the tone of the sky on their canvas. We don’t blame a musician for labouring for six months in order to perfect minute elements of a three minute pop song. Why then expect that love would require any less refinement and ‘work’? Why wouldn’t one spend two hours – even four or ten – over twenty seconds of dialogue or a towel in the wrong place?

In a better arranged world, couples would be advised to regularly go out for dinner to consider at length: A Very Small Thing That’s Happened Between Us That I Need to Talk To You About. They would be encouraged to dig out the most subtle-sounding matters in which one or other of them nevertheless felt that something consequential was entwined. Such laborious explorations of minutiae might not sound very Romantic; yet they would be so in the very truest sense of the term: namely, conducive and sustaining of love.

Once we enter a relationship, as truly grown up people understand, we have no option but to be as sensitive as very young children. We will fall into despair (and deep down want to burst into tears) because one ‘x’ was missing in an email – or a conversation ended without someone saying their customary ‘I love you’. We don’t need to compound our humiliation by insisting that it doesn’t exist. Imperturbability is not an option. The only way to prevent the largest problems is to focus exhaustively and with dark good humour on the very smallest ones.