Self-Knowledge • Fear & Insecurity
Why We Can so Quickly End up Feeling Hated
Some of the darkest moments of our lives are those in which we make the sudden discovery that someone whom we had believed loved us actually hates us profoundly. Though we had trusted that they were on our side, when we stumble on the journal that they left on the sofa in the living room, we read to our dismay that they apparently find our habits pretentious and our way of speaking ‘fake’. Or at a party, we overhear them saying something very unflattering and mean-spirited about our clothes or our job prospects. Or we find out that they sent a flirtatious text to a colleague while they were lying next to us in bed.
And from these instances, there seems only one conclusion to be drawn: the friend or partner can’t bear us. Nothing they say from here, however eloquent or impassioned, can persuade us otherwise. They may try to make it up to us with honeyed words. But we know the truth; which is why we are sobbing in our room and will never, ever be able to forgive them.
At such painful moments, we would do well to summon up an idea which we may have a very hard time holding on to but which promises to transform or at the very least nuance our desperate certainties: the idea that it is possible to harbour all kinds of extremely negative and critical things about a person – and yet still fundamentally and sincerely adore them.
For evidence of this thesis, we need only consult one highly reputable souce: our own minds. When we dare to examine ourselves honestly, we find that we’re constantly entertaining some distinctly unfaithful thoughts about others without these in any fundamental way imperilling our affection for them. We can deeply revere a family member, while noting that they are really rather unpleasant looking (especially their nose and, more recently, their hair). We can hugely respect a friend, and yet experience them as irritatingly self-important in public. We can feel very close to a loved one and yet not want to invite them to a party because there are things about them that embarrass us. And we can enjoy flirting with a colleague and yet remain wholly committed to our partner.
In other words, from the evidence of our own minds, we know (or at least have the wherewithal to know) that love and kindness can easily exist alongside judgmentalness, deceit, cowardice, cattiness and treachery.
Yet however much we understand this in theory about ourselves, we appear largely unable to allow for a comparable complexity in others. They – unlike us – are either with us or against us. They must entirely love us or else have to be assumed to hate us They must be fundamentally on our side or can be counted as deep enemies. We can’t permit them to entertain any of the scrutiny, disapproval or pettiness that continually run through our consciousness. And as a result, we are far more prone to upset – and distrust – than we might be.
The explanation for this moral asymmetry may have its roots in a tender place: in the way our parents and caregivers behaved around us in childhood. From the best of motives, these adults may have hidden their blunter thoughts from us and suggested a purity of feeling which gave us a distorted picture of what reliable love must involve. They may have assiduously disguised that they didn’t always like our appearance or thought us a bit whiny or were sometimes bored by our conversation or in some ways preferred hanging out with our sibling – truths that might have been both very painful and wholly compatible with love.
Had we known that our early caregivers were not in fact always ‘kind’ in every way (and might have quietly celebrated when we finally went to bed or when school restarted), then we would not have needed to place our own bar of loyalty so high – or grown so cross and offended when others failed to reach it.
When we next learn that a partner thinks we should lose some weight or prefers someone else’s company in a museum, we may hold on to an initially painful yet ultimately redemptive truth: they may still love us very much indeed. We have just been operating with a false picture of what love entails. We may be far more loved than we thought – once we remember, by the evidence of our own minds, the scale of the reservations that true love can encompass.
