The One Question We Forget to Ask Ourselves in Love – And Why

There’s one question that people who are deeply enmeshed in love – who might have been pursuing someone in vain for years or trying immensely hard to make a relationship work or pining for a partner who left them five years ago – seldom find the occasion to ask themselves.

Despite a certainty that they are in love, the question they rarely pause to ask themselves is this: is the person I love nice to me?

A lot of other things seem not to be in any doubt: that the person is amazing, that their name makes them jump, that they would give anything to be with them, that they think of them almost every minute of every day.

But what remains astonishingly unexplored is something more banal: are these people actually kind? Or, to expand, does this angel leave them feeling heard and seen? Does this amazing loved one have time for their sorrows and joys? Does this paragon of passion make them feel calm and safe? Are they happy in their presence?

And here, despite all the extraordinary devotion, the answer is liable to be rather confusing. It seems that this loved one – the recipient of so much care and passion, so much longing and devotion – isn’t necessarily especially kind back.

They may be grumpy, they may be unfaithful, they might not have been in touch for months or years. They may take ages to reply to a text message. They may prefer to go out with their friends and fail to invite their partner on holidays abroad.

This brings us to the ostensible paradox: why on earth does this flawed and cruel being elicit such care? 

And the answer is melancholy: the person is loved not despite their lack of kindness and reciprocity, but precisely because of it.

Why do some of us end up associating the word love with a lack of calm, an absence of generosity, a strong degree of disdain or disregard – and what’s more, not even notice that we do so? 

The answer – as ever – lies in the difficulties of the past. There is a whole category of us who faced the following dilemma in childhood:

1. We had parents who should have loved us.

2. But they didn’t.

And the clever way out of this dilemma was for us to reconfigure our assumptions and expectations. We dealt with a lack of affection from people who should have adored us by creating an association between love and absence; love and suffering; love and needing to do better; love and never knowing where one stands; love and hoping in vain for a better outcome.

We learnt to blame ourselves for others’ disregard of us. We learnt to be endlessly patient in the face of neglect. We learnt not to name hardness of heart. We learnt not to notice unfairness. We learnt to hope endlessly for a change of mind in the other person. We learnt to take blows on the chin.

And now, in adulthood, it therefore doesn’t occur to us to call out bad behaviour as soon as it arises. We don’t register that we haven’t been happy in six months or ten years – or that the partner’s behaviour is mocking us grossly. Our response to someone ignoring us is to beg. Our impulse when a lover isn’t sure about us is to redouble our efforts to show them that we deserve to exist. 

Our own satisfaction doesn’t get a look in. We’re no more able now to ask, ‘Is the person I love nice to me?’ than we were at the age of five – and the answer in both cases would, of course, be ‘no’.

What we should do instead needs – for some of us – to be stated very bluntly. However beautiful someone may be, however charming they might have been at the start, however theoretically clever they are, the only – and truly the only – basis on which we should be with anyone is if they are kind. That is if they are deeply thrilled to be with us, if they are extremely careful with our feelings, if they listen to our anxieties, if they respond without defensiveness to our complaints and if they are available to us when we need them. 

Otherwise, what we have on our hands is not a loved one, not someone who deserves our care, but simply someone who mirrors the same kind of intolerable and sadistic character we had to put up with as children.

If they aren’t sure they can commit, we shouldn’t be there. If they were once tender but no longer are, we shouldn’t be there. If they’d rather spend time with their friends than with us, we shouldn’t be there. If they don’t respond to our messages fairly fast, we shouldn’t be there. If they see us as an open wound and suggest we are ‘too much’, we shouldn’t be there. These things only seem very obvious to those of us who were loved properly at the start.

Let’s state this as a very basic mantra: we should only love kind people. People who listen to us, are there for us and are committed to our welfare. Anyone else is not a candidate for love. They are a residue of trauma.