Why People Who Were Never Chosen Will Have a Hard Time Choosing You

We may be far into a relationship before a somewhat puzzling and difficult realisation starts to dawn on us: we’re not in love with a single person.

They may from the outside – of course – look perfectly unitary. They answer to one name, have one passport, and their body forms a coherent boundary.

But inside, things may be far more multiple. Our partner may house a confederacy of selves rather than a unitary executive. Sitting around the board table of their identity might be a wide variety of characters, each waiting to take the microphone at different times of the week – or hour:

— a good child who wants to please everyone 

— a furious child who resents their submission

— someone who wants to obey their father

— someone who wants to kill their father

— someone who really loves you

— someone who wonders if you’re any good

— someone who thinks they’re tolerable

— someone who thinks they are hateful

— someone who only listens to their friends

— someone who chiefly listens to social media

— someone who wants whatever their sibling has

— someone totally satisfied with you

— someone who wants admiration from a rotating cast of random strangers

And so on.

Though it might seem that they are our partner, in truth, we lay claim to about one-twentieth of their true identity. Which is not nothing, but not quite enough for a tolerable existence.

People don’t become confederacies by accident. They do so because, at a formative moment, they couldn’t trust any one person to be a source of safety. Perhaps their mother wasn’t reliable. Their father wasn’t focused. Their friends weren’t solidly there for them. Their sibling was deceitful. From this, they learnt a basic lesson: never commit. It’s not that no care came from any direction; it’s just that it never did so in a sustained or secure way. And so, they learnt to respond by congenitally hedging their bets.

Everything developed a question mark: lover? Friend? Lawyer? Intellectual? Athlete? Red or blue? Up or down? Black or grey? They became inherently plural (also often late – because how can someone who wants to be everywhere guarantee the specificity required by punctuality?). ‘Maybe’, ‘perhaps’, ‘hang on,’ ‘let me get back to you…’ became favourite rhetorical survival phrases. They decided to listen to everyone with the same hovering charm and surface politeness in an attempt to delay the costs of commitment. They would diversify the perceived emotional risks of connection by distributing them widely among friends, trends, parents, images. That way, no single betrayal, no single letdown, could ever, ever, break them again. 

This might be a clever strategy for survival; it’s a difficult one for love. Because love, to flourish, needs someone who can finally decide – who can say, in an anchored, clear and brave voice: ‘I choose you above the others. I’ll silence the other voices, enough to make our love real’. It requires someone who has developed an internal executive – someone who is inwardly solid enough to unify their cabinet around a single target of affection.

At the origins of our partner’s prevarication lies the uncertainty of others towards them. They don’t know what they want because no one has ever been clear that they were the object of particular desire and care. They can’t choose because they were never chosen. They can’t make you feel special because they were never made to feel special. They can’t say who they are because they didn’t exist solidly in anyone else’s imagination. They can’t ever say ‘I really, really want you’ because no one ever – long ago – said that they really, really wanted them.

They may – one twentieth of the time – be the loveliest people in the world. The rest of the relationship, they will drive us close to madness with an elusiveness we deserve to name and finally see clearly.