Stay Away From All but the Most Enthusiastic

It can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic-sounding realisation: we should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us. From the start. Without the need for persuasion. Without any call for begging or chasing or strategic withholding of affection or visits to therapy. Just plainly and simply keen, open and ready – from the get-go.

This can sound extremely odd and, deep down, surprising, because so much in our culture and in our pasts fosters an altogether different kind of philosophy, to an extent that we may never quite have noticed.

In many cases, what we call love is really – upon examination – the business of overcoming obstacles and resistances to love. It’s precisely not about meeting up with someone who is already smiling at us and already on board. What we have understood by a ‘love story’ for the last two thousand years is essentially a study of one person – as keen as mustard – trying their very hardest to persuade another – disengaged and elsewhere – to look their way. The beloved is beautiful or dashing, brilliant and beguiling but there must always, according to the literary canon, be some substantial problem or another: they are married to someone else, they are devoted to God, they are too proud and defended to acknowledge their need for tenderness. What we call a plot is then the retelling of all the arduous steps that had to be taken in order that – a few pages from the end of the book or epic poem – the couple could finally be united and wedding vows exchanged. Love isn’t really love at all; it’s the delineation of the colourful obstacles to its realisation and enactment.

There is a more intimate counterpart to these epic tales of frustration in many of our psychological histories. Growing up, we may have first learnt about love from parental figures who were, in their way, every bit as unreliable, distracted and unfulfilling as any literary romantic paragon. These parental figures will not have been especially impressed by us, they might have kept their feelings guarded, they could have been addicted or depressed, they might have been living abroad or in love with someone else (perhaps one of our siblings, or a new spouse). And from this we will have derived a powerful impression that love – when it is real – must essentially be about unfulfillment and frustration, delay and resistance, about being made to feel unworthy and about being put on hold while someone we yearn for explores other options. Our most powerful experiences of love in childhood would have been about hoping against hope that someone we adored might eventually turn our way and think we were – after all, despite everything wrong with us – good enough.

The legacy of these two approaches to love can follow us – unconsciously – into the dating game. Here, we may notice nothing amiss in a prospective partner who tells us that they like us a lot but that they will only be available to see us again in a month, or someone who casually mentions they are presently trying to decide between us and three other suitors or a compelling career abroad. Or someone who can never bring themselves to initiate sex or hold our hand in public. A bit deeper into our relationships, we may similarly not spot that it might be less than ideal to be trying to convince someone that they should go to therapy so that they’ll (finally) see that they want us or that we are – in fact – just as much ‘fun’ to spend Saturday evenings with as their friends.

To cut through the nonsense, we may be in need of a robust awakening. So complicated and multiple are the requirements of a good life with someone (childcare, finances, sexual intimacy, friendship, etc.), the only person we should for a moment ever contemplate being with is someone who, at the start of the journey, can already be at the table with a conviction to match our own. 

We can be forgiven for being – for a long time – deeply charmed by all the others: those who are coy and troubled, those who don’t reply to our messages, and those whose difficult childhoods render them enchantingly off-kilter. But this is a game we can, in the end, ill afford. We aren’t living in a novel, and we shouldn’t be trying to repeat our miserable childhoods or forgiving those of others. It isn’t love if you need to keep messaging and their phone is apparently always out of battery. It isn’t love if they are evasive or surreptitiously liking someone else’s posts. It isn’t love if they get defensive or describe our legitimate requirements for attention as ‘intense’. We need to get the wavering, defended ones out of our lives immediately; that will mean ejecting the majority of people we meet. All the more reason to focus on the very few with native enthusiasm. We need to hone our skills at recognising the keen ones and clear everyone else out of the way. If they don’t get back immediately, give up on them immediately. Stop imagining that they might be ‘shy’ or that you haven’t made your intentions clear enough. 

Let’s say it again for good measure: the only worthwhile lovers are those who don’t need persuading, those who like us a lot already, those who never leave us wondering where they might be or when they might reply, those whose commitment to us flows easily so that all the focus can be on the difficulties of day-to-day living. The others may be fascinating, lovely looking, about to change their minds in fifteen-and-a-half years after a trip to India, capable of generating lots of late-night arguments and ideal for a movie or psychoanalytic case study; they’re also just a plain waste of our precious time.