Red Flags for Everyone: How Therapy Has Made Love Harder

One of the most conspicuous features of the modern attitude to relationships is the ever greater detail with which we are now able to specify what’s wrong with people. In the past, we had to make do with broad brush complaints: we’d describe the maddening people in our lives as argumentative, sulky, weird or just deeply annoying. Now they are – with far greater authority and sober technical rigour – toxic, avoidant, borderline, co-dependent, trauma-bonded, paranoid-adjacent and (of course) narcissistic.

Central to this increase in specificity has been the discipline of psychotherapy. Therapy has devoted itself to the task of helping clients trace – with immense forensic skill – the pathologies of those they are closely involved with. It has democratised a dense vocabulary with which to turn unstructured unhappiness into an array of clinical symptoms.

The approach has a degree of real merit. It can be highly salutary to get a firmer grip on the troubling dynamics of our romantic lives. There can be relief and new dignity in understanding that our partner has a maladaptive attachment style rather than just being a nag; or suffers from affect dysregulation rather than just being messy.

The difficulty is what happens next. There is – behind the therapeutic focus – a central unspoken assumption: that there are alternatives. And this is where the premise starts to show its weakness, for on closer examination, after an assiduous scouring of the landmasses of the globe, it emerges that more or less the entire human race, not just this or that admittedly profoundly pathological character we have been forced to deal with, partakes in what we may as well, without regard to professional decorum, call madness. Once we are done with rightfully expelling every last demented and unworthy partner from our domain, we may be extremely proud of how well we have followed the principles of emotional maturity; we may also be entirely alone.

Therapy operates with a consoling ideology which for a heady moment seems to point us to liberation: it teaches us how to fathom and then expel ill people from our affections. But health turns out to be far rarer than we are being prompted to think. We are at risk of misconstruing as a normal condition a degree of emotional evolution that is in fact, in statistical terms, a momentous exception. We are implicitly being taught to interpret as anomalies behaviours that in fact belong squarely and unbudgeably to the tragic norm. 

We have collectively been so busy charting what is wrong with people, we have forgotten to try to make a tenable life among those that in fact exist. Our critical powers have outstripped our educative ones; our skills at pathologising have surpassed our talents at managing.

A priority of responsible therapy should therefore no longer be to inflame clients against the miscreants who cross their paths, but rather to guide them towards ways of generating a more less tolerable mindset with which to handle the imperfect beings who appear to be, after all, an indelible feature of planetary existence. 

We are at present encouraged to believe that the prime explanation for why we put up with less than ideal treatment is because we have been the victims of early neglect that has trained us to expect far less of others than we naturally deserve. Though the logic is impeccable, it ignores an awkward dimension: that people go from one scratchy relationship to another not simply because they are unwell and traumatised (though they may be this too), but because there aren’t in fact very many wholly sound alternatives. In so far as one is going to have a relationship at all, it will – statistically speaking – almost by definition be with someone to whom one will be able to associate a fair number of the ‘red flags’ righteously discussed within therapeutic discourse. 

We would know at once that there wasn’t much point in educating people in precisely how physically unattractive most humans are. We’d understand that it wasn’t useful or kind to guide them to better or more quickly identify asymmetries between the eyes or collapses of folds of skin under the chin. We’d know it wasn’t wise to sensitise ourselves to what cannot easily be altered; to problems that belong to reality. No less of a generosity of spirit should be mandatory in relation to our psychological shortcomings.

The real task of therapy should be to help us to develop a wry, calm regard for our partner’s follies and our own, to nurture a way of greeting the mess of the human animal without too much stunned alarm or incensed agitation. 

Our chances of meeting a partner who is normal are – in truth – close to zero, and therefore the focus on abnormalities can only ever prove so useful. If we can accept that madness is the rule, then dating and relationships would need to be spoken of in very different terms. Therapy would become about the management of imperfection, not (implicitly) about the quest for an ideal. 

Our relationships would still be troubled, but we would greet our crises with a host of tools that would – paradoxically – lighten our burdens substantially. We would learn to laugh, to divert ourselves, to be patient, to set turmoils in context, to sleep on problems, to confess to mutual folly; we would meet our fellow broken creatures with increased tolerance and a livelier sense of the cruelty and impossibility of self-righteousness. We would learn how to love by knowing that very few of us ever properly deserve love – but all of us stand in desperate need of it anyway.