On Not Being Very Good at Love

There are some things we eventually become experts at gracefully admitting we’re not very good at. After an initial period of shame and furtiveness, we might come out and say that we’re in truth terrible at sport – and so be it. We’re never going to master tennis, we’re hopeless at swimming and we loathe jogging – but we conclude that life as a more or less dignified human being may be possible any way. A similar sanguine spirit might be present when we own up to being catastrophic at maths, or no good at business, or hopeless at culture. We might even – on a very brave day – get ahead of our meanest critics by admitting that we’re never going to win a modelling contract, our hair is thinning badly and we walk like a crab.

But one area stands out among the list of things we are generally not so ready to admit to failing at: love. Here, despite the greatest courage and good humour, we hold back. Our hopes are too intense, our pride too fragile. We cannot, truly cannot, bring ourselves to accept a fiasco in an area of such importance and so keep striving and holding out for eventual victory with sombre determination. There might have been two marriages already, and a complicated relationship since, but still we refuse to give up on our belief in our fundamental competence and ability to secure decent outcomes.

Until, one day, perhaps on a walk in the park in late middle age after receiving a curt message from someone telling us that – after all – they don’t think we’re a good idea for them, we might finally concede to the facts with tragic comic bravery: we may in truth just be no good at this.  

We might assume that such a recognition would be a prelude to limitless despair and self-condemnation but far from it. We might laugh heartily and kindly. For a very long time. Once we frankly acknowledge that we may not be good at something, we are liberated from shame at not being so. We don’t have to be humiliated every time we stumble on more evidence of our mishaps; we can shrug this off as belonging to a historic handicap we take in our stride.

Without discounting our responsibility entirely, we could learn to attribute some of our handicap to forces that exceed our intelligence and strength in the here and now. We aren’t any good in this area not just because we are stupid (though we are that too, of course), but because of some uncommonly complex dynamics in our early years over which we have limited agency. Why do we keep expecting ourselves to succeed at love, given the insanities that transpired around our mother or our father decades ago? Why insist on assuming that it might all unfold smoothly, after the cruelty and the drama?

The pain can lessen and compassion increase. We remain hopeless, but the hopelessness doesn’t have to be experienced as only crushing. It doesn’t have to get in the way of a recognition of our remaining stamina and creativity. Our romantic fiascos can get a little less arduous the more we can bring ourselves to shrug our shoulders and confess with a very dark smile: I really can’t do this thing called love.