A Crucial Sign That Someone Is Worth Going Out With

There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person to go out with: that they are prepared to go to therapy.

We should immediately be clear. Not all therapy is very successful and (dare we say it) not all therapists are very good.

But this is not the point. The issue isn’t so much that someone should have benefited from therapy in every possible way or even that they should actually have gone there – as that they should be prepared to accept that they might need therapy in the first place.

This matters so much because it indicates that at a fundamental level, a person has realised that they are are not entirely normal and are indeed, in a variety of ways, probably slightly unhinged and troublesome and these elements – far from posing a problem – are in fact what help to guarantee the sanity, peace, good humour and politeness of a relationship. 

A suitable partner isn’t someone entirely balanced and mature (there are none of those), it’s someone who no longer insists on their lucidity and stability and has come to terms with the limits of their self-understanding and their abilities to cope unaided. They have somewhere along the line recognised that life is far more complicated than they had envisaged and that it would be no affront to seek the help of someone else to make sense of the more uncomfortable parts of themselves. They have cast aside ideas of their own perfection – and therefore know how to laugh and to forgive. 

The most calming and intelligent people aren’t ever too far from being able to accept that they might be fools, that it might well be their fault and that they might not know what on earth is going on. This kind of scepticism isn’t only funnier and more modest, it is of incalculable benefit when there is a storm between two people, when it’s late at night and one’s lost in the wrong part of town in a rental car, or when sex has become difficult or when there’s a fraught family meal on the horizon.

The great enemy of love is self-righteousness – and the willingness to go to therapy is in its way the most significant sign that one has outgrown it. The worthiest people do not always think that it has to be someone else’s fault, they are prepared to acknowledge that they are doing strange things, they know that they probably need to change – just as the enemies of good relationships are those who know that you’re invariably blame and that they are OK just as they are. 

The willingness to go to therapy is therefore less about the specific benefits of therapy than about what happens when there’s a fight and someone can bear to break the deadlock by saying ‘maybe I need to go and think about that’ or ‘perhaps I’m bringing something complicated to the table too.’ And this, far more than expensive gifts and holidays, are the truly romantic ingredients of a relationship in the sense of the ingredients that can help love to flourish.

Maybe our partner will go to therapy and be helped; or maybe they won’t. That matters far less than what their openness to the idea of therapy tells us: that this is someone who can stand to imagine that it might be their fault, that this is someone who knows they still have much to learn, in other words, that this is someone who may richly deserve our sympathy, tenderness and very precious time.