Offering Love to Someone Who Is Not Convinced of Their Loveability

There are distinct challenges around trying to offer love to someone who isn’t convinced that they are, deep down, worthy of such a thing.

Imagine a relationship between Sarah and Dan. It began three months ago and things are flourishing: two weekends ago, they went on a romantic break to Paris, last weekend, she took him to meet her parents, and this weekend, they are going to see a group of his friends in the city he went to university in. All the signs are that they like each other very much and that the relationship may flourish.

But let’s also imagine that when Dan was a little boy, his mother was offhand and uninterested in him, preferring to devote herself to his older sister. Though this was many years ago, and Dan is now accomplished in his profession and his life more broadly, he carries just below the surface a wound with the power to cause substantial difficulties in any love story in the here and now.

It’s when Sarah starts to offer him intense affection that the problems start. It’s not that her love is undesired. It’s just that it is – at an unconscious level – deeply difficult to accept. In order to protect himself from hurt, young Dan had to build his character to withstand isolation and endure loneliness and a meagre emotional diet. He had to make his peace with deprivation and to doubt the sincerity of anyone who would wish to treat him well (not coincidentally, he might previously have gone out with a number of women who were unavailable or offhand. It was horrible, but it felt like home).

We might suppose that accepting a gift that has once been denied will be especially easy – but this isn’t the way our minds work. At the arrival of exactly what they have always wanted, those who are deprived tend to become extremely fussy and difficult, sceptical and argumentative. They cause a scene. They ruin the atmosphere. They try to bring down the temperature. They want to get away from what is experienced as, secretly, unbearable in its beauty, plenitude and hopefulness.

So over dinner, from the blue, Dan accuses Sarah of being sarcastic and disrespectful towards his tastes in books. She is puzzled, but Dan digs in. ‘You aren’t taking me seriously,’ he argues. ‘I do, I’m sorry if you’ve got that impression but it’s not anything I feel,’ Sarah counters with maturity. But Dan won’t be appeased. He crashes the entire evening. What had started so well ends in misery. The fancy Italian restaurant can’t rescue the mood, the couple go home in a sulk, Dan sleeps on the sofa and the plans for the next day are cancelled. All for apparently ‘nothing’ or rather for something both entirely lamentable and psychologically compelling: Dan’s need to ensure that love cannot threaten his defensive isolation.

Dan is in effect crying out: ‘You can’t really love me’, not because his partner doesn’t, but because his mother didn’t. The scepticism, created by one person, is deposited decades later on the unwitting head of another. He is also implicitly saying: ‘You don’t love me enough – or at least not in the right way.’ There is in this a fatefully demanding note. Dan can’t seem to accept that Sarah is merely good enough, rather than perfect – as no human can be. He uses her ordinary characteristics as a weapon against her.

If we think of it in terms of food, someone who was left to be very hungry may be especially tricky once a meal is offered to them. They may become excessively idealistic rather than realistic about what is good enough. Deprived people become more extreme in their fantasy of what they need to keep them alive: they picture the perfect meal, their fantasy has so much more work to do to tide them over.

Dan should learn to understand that he is picking a fight because of a terror around trusting in something that might yet turn out to be false. He would rather crash the relationship himself than be surprised – yet again – by the treachery of another person. Dan and Sarah won’t be able to make it without the fundamental insight of modern psychotherapy: that the way we love now has to pass through the gate of the way we loved then. And that if there were distortions originally there will be distortions in the present. It seems we have no option but to understand our histories to liberate ourselves from their sad strictures.