A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships

It sounds odd to suggest that one of the things we may most long for, and in a sense even need, in a relationship is a chance ‘to be bad.’

We associate love with kindness, good behaviour and politeness. Anything less is liable to raise powerful suspicions; we have been highly sensitised to varieties of wickedness in intimate life.

Nevertheless, we might insist that a chance to be accepted in our less than edifying moments (when we are feeling scared, tired or defeated, when we can no longer bear to be reasonable or docile) also belongs to love – just as to be placed under an overly powerful and remorseless requirement to be ‘good’ can become an unkindness of its own. 

To understand the longing, it pays to look at the way parents handle their children. One of the things that sound parents know to do is accept that no child – indeed no human – can ever be angelic all the time and that to insist that they should be constitutes a denial of their basic reality. 

The good parent stays steady in the face of certain sorts of tricky behaviour; if the child says they don’t want to see granny or wants to burn down the school or absolutely hates their little brother or wants to be the cleverest or most beautiful person in the world. The child may fling themselves on the floor and say they hate everyone or that they will never ever do their homework and the parent will exhibit a distinct and noble maturity when they don’t panic, don’t rage and don’t lose their composure. When they simply say: ‘It sounds like poppet is having a pretty tough day’. Or: ‘shall we have a think about this again in the morning?’ Or: ‘Ok, that sounds like a fascinating plan, but I think it might be time for bed.’ Or when they just pretend they haven’t quite heard and move on.

To love is not to confront someone with the full might of moral judgement at all times, it is to be able to bear something less than ideal at points.

There is an irony here. The more we have been shown benevolence as children, the less we will still be craving for it in adulthood. The child who has had to be too good too early, who has always had to hold their tongue, who has had to be extremely sweet and ‘grown up’ so as not to offend a pedantic, fragile and ungrown up caregiver, will be left with an acute dilemma in adulthood.

They will know that sweetness can get them the interest of others, but they won’t just want to be loved for their admirable qualities. In order to feel properly cared for and in order to be capable of genuine affection back, they will want to be tolerated for the full scope of their true selves, which will necessarily include instances of difficulty.

They want to be able to say, when a feeling of despair descends: ‘I am so stifled in this relationship and want to get out’ – not because this is the last word on the subject, but because a deep commitment to someone has to be inseparable from passing claustrophobia.

Or: they might want to say: ‘Sometimes i feel so clingy I don’t want to let you have a single friend of your own’ – and this is obviously not the last word on the subject either, but it’s a necessary moment of all-consuming, infantile dependence that also needs an airing.

We might say, the journey to true maturity has to pass through the arch of immaturity, the road to true kindness and sweetness has to allow, at points, byways into fantasies of selfishness and meanness. Let’s be clear, we are talking fantasies rather than enactments, and trickiness rather than malevolence, but the proposal is that no one can feel spontaneously warm if they have not also been allowed to feel spontaneously very fed up.

It’s people who haven’t been able to say that they sometimes want to leave a relationship who will be at greater risk of one day silently packing their bags and doing so. It’s people who have never been allowed to speak in silly, extreme, or untrue ways who may one day buckle under the pressures of obedience and lose their moorings more substantially. The greatest defence against actual badness is to allow ideas of badness to circulate in the couple without unleashing disaster.

The good parent has an imperturbable side. And we do our lovers an immense favour when we can import this same quality into our encounters with the unfinished bits of their childhoods. The question ‘in what areas do you wish you had once been allowed to be bad in your early years?’ tells us a huge amount about where someone had to comply too soon and where we may be richly rewarded for our forbearance.

A degree of indulgence seems also – in the end – to belong near the core of love.