Janet's Romantic Email (an Excerpt)

Joe,

Let me start off by saying you have every right not to read this email. You have every right to delete it and if you do, I won’t have any hard feelings. You have every reason to hate me. You have every reason not to forgive me for what I did to you.

If you choose to keep reading, I will tell you from the start that this is not a letter trying to elicit sympathy for me. I’m not writing this to try and convince you that you were wrong or that I’m somehow a normal person who isn’t any different to anyone else. I have no delusions about who I am. I am a clinically diagnosed psychopath. I am writing this letter for purely selfish reasons, reasons that will become apparent as you read on.

Since we last met, I’ve had some pretty decent career success. I’ve travelled the world and met lots of cool people. I’ve had the opportunity to do creative work I find interesting and helpful to my fans in different ways, yet I haven’t been happy through any of this. For a while, I thought the intensity with which I applied myself to my work would compensate for the feeling of emptiness that accompanied your departure from my life. It did not. As the years go by, I feel less and less like I can continue.

This last year has been particularly difficult. For the first time ever, my sadness actually stopped me from working at the pace I have become accustomed to. I’ve been struggling with mental health difficulties, I find it hard getting out of bed, I can’t stop crying throughout the day and I’m finding it hard not to harm myself. I’m not telling you this because I want you to rescue me from it; I know that won’t happen. I’m writing you because my thoughts are tinged with an unbearable guilt. I worry that I really damaged you the last time we spoke.

I bet you’re thinking, “It’s pretty obvious you fucking damaged me! You poked my eye out, you fucking bitch!”

If you are thinking this, I can’t say I blame you.

I was a horrible person that day. The act of violence I committed against you was pure evil. It was one of the worst things I have ever done in my life, an act so awful I struggle to comprehend how it came out of me. It was wrong, it was cruel and it was terrifying (for both of us). It would be a cop out for me to say, “It wasn’t really me that did that to you. Something took over me. My true self would never be capable of such an act!”

That, of course, is rubbish.

I take full responsibility for my actions. They were all me. What you saw that day was my worst self: a dark side I hid from you the moment I fell in love with you. I worry now that you think that side of me is the predominant one.

I’m also worried that my horrendous behaviour during our last conversation caused you to interpret the things I said in the wrong light. The things I said which were true, I said with such malice that I can’t blame you for writing them off as obvious falsehoods. Still, I’m in turmoil over the negative consequences for you that might happen if you did dismiss it all. You always had a habit of substituting ideological crusades for instances where you should instead be standing up for yourself.

I remember you telling me many times that your mum made you feel like her love for you was conditional, when you were a child. Then you became very passionate about the importance of unconditional love. You’d give sometimes beautiful speeches about it. We would wind up discussing unconditional love instead of talking about how you needed to stand up to your mother because of how she was treating you.

I remember she once left a phone message for us where she said the amount of money you made was evidence you didn’t have any potential when you were a kid. Instead of calling her back that night and telling her off, you had an argument with me about why you should just ignore that comment. You said you wanted to love her unconditionally and her comments gave you the opportunity to practice the art of forgiveness.

This was one of the few arguments we ever had, yet by the end of it, I could tell you were starting to see that your mother was actually being harmed by your forgiveness. I remember you calling her the next day and telling her, with confidence, how you didn’t approve of the way she spoke to you.

She started swearing at you, screaming that she wished she’d never had a son. That was typical of her. But this time you yelled back, “Start acting like my mother and not like such a horrid fucking cunt!”

I was so proud of you in that moment. You were actually giving her consequences for her bad behaviour. Throughout her life, no one ever did that. When you slammed down the phone, you looked at me and said, “That woman does not deserve my love. She deserves a fucking beating.” I smiled and hugged you for what seemed like ages. Up until that point, I never felt like I was able to help another human being the way I helped you. What made it even more special was you were also my lover.

During our last conversation, I’m afraid I undid all of that. I behaved coldly, with vindictiveness, making a virtual mockery of the importance of justice in any relationship. I made it seem as though anyone who values justice in a relationship is an unforgiving, self-righteous pedant.

Given what I know of you, I’m guessing you would see my behaviour as a vindication of the idea that unconditional love is the only healthy and humane way of loving another person. I can even see you taking on your ‘unconditional love crusade’ with renewed fervour. And yes, I can see you being a casualty of that crusade. I can see unconditional love being a way that people take advantage of you.

This may be paranoia on my part. Nonetheless, it’s paranoia I can’t get out of my mind. Maybe I don’t know you as well as I think I do. Maybe you are happy and self-confident in ways that have nothing to do with anything I said to you during our last meeting. However, I can’t bear the thought of you internalising a bad idea because my own inexcusable behaviour made it seem attractive.

If what you believe about love has nothing to do with what I said to you that day, feel free to not read any further. However, if you feel what I said negatively impacted your life in any way, give me a chance to explain what I was trying to say in a better way. I want to say it to you again, but this time clearly in a calm state of mind. If you disagree, you disagree and that’s absolutely fine. Nonetheless, I want you to see what I was trying to express in a way where my words aren’t coming out of a person behaving like a psychopath. This is the only way I can deal with my guilt and try to turn it into something positive.
So here goes:

Every human being has faults. Any kind of relationship with an adult requires a lot of slack cutting from both parties. People can indeed be grumpy and unsociable on many days when the best response to such a mood is patience. However, there are limits to the amount of patience one displays before the patience becomes a way of normalising abuse. This is why constant forgiveness is bad for any relationship. If you have to constantly forgive, that means your partner is constantly doing something you have to forgive.

If that’s the main dynamic in your relationship, the relationship isn’t fair to you. It’s not fair to you whether it’s your spouse, your friend, your parent, or your child. If the forgiveness in any relationship consistently goes one way, that means someone is giving way more to the relationship than they are getting in return. When that happens, the relationship instantiates a kind of injustice. The injustice becomes abusive when there are no boundaries in place to stop the forgiven behaviour from becoming cruel behaviour that is also forgiven.

The biggest threat to the boundary which keeps a relationship just, is the idea that adult relationships are grounded in unconditional love. When you love someone unconditionally, you love them irrespective of who they are or what they do; you love them whether they treat you fairly or whether they abuse you. This is why I believe unconditional love is the lowest form of love. It’s a love necessary for infants and small children because they need to be forgiven for consistently bad behaviour. This constant forgiveness is necessary for them in their journey towards goodness.

The same is not true of adults.

Unconditional love reduces adults back into the infantile state. It teaches adults that they don’t need to bring things to a relationship that are proportionate to what their partners bring.

Worse still, unconditional love teaches adults that it’s okay to treat everyone’s pathology equally. This is another hallmark of abuse. When someone’s messy bedroom is treated as the equivalent of someone else’s punches, the relationship is actually harmful to the parties involved. Nonetheless, this abuse gets normalised because the person with the messy bedroom wants to love their partner without expecting anything in return. The outcome of this pathological desire is enabling.

Enablers use disturbing language that reflects their particular insanity. They will say things like “We need to treat each other better” when referring to an unclean kitchen which had prompted a blow to the head with a hammer. The enabled abuser will say things like, “Your hyper-sensitivity isn’t good for us” when referring to the enabler’s meek complaints about the blow. What’s often unnoticed is that physical violence isn’t the only context in which this dynamic is present. The enabler may also complain about being hurt by emotional sadism on the part of the enabled abuser. The enabled abuser will respond that the enabler is being emotionally sadistic, merely in complaining about it.

Whenever the enabler complains about the abuse, the abuser will reframe the issue as though the enabler is at fault. The abuser may even demand that the enabler should choose to interpret the abuser as someone who gives the enabler “tough love.” When the enabler expresses reluctance to accept this interpretation, the abuser will accuse the enabler of placing conditions on their love. The enabler, wanting to love unconditionally, will do anything to remove the appearance of these conditions. Thus, the abuse cycle will continue, often getting worse and worse.

When there are no conditions placed on love, neither partner has any incentive to treat the other as an equal. In any relationship, these incentives are necessary. There also needs to be additional incentives to motivate both parties to treat their partners with kindness. These kindness incentives must be juxtaposed against still further incentives that motivate dignity and self-respect for and from both parties. Unconditional love removes all of these incentives in one fell swoop. For adults, it is toxic and dangerous. Something for nothing is nothing indeed.

I suspect the reason why unconditional love remains a popular delusion among the adult population is that adults have a romanticised view of infants and children. Adults talk about infants and children as though they are more valuable or precious than other adults. They use words like ‘innocence’ to describe behaviours in children that would more accurately be described as naïve and immature. Temper tantrums in toddlers may be something we find cute for evolutionary reasons, but temper tantrums in adults are the source of everything that’s wrong with the world. Like children, adults need boundaries. Unlike children, adults are better at undermining those boundaries by exploiting the compassion of those whose job it is to reinforce them.

As an adult, when you can be loved for having met certain conditions, you know you deserve that love. You know that love has been given to you because you’ve helped someone, touched someone, entertained someone, amused someone, impressed someone, cared for someone, sacrificed for someone, inspired someone, or simply loved someone.

If you’re a bad human being and you get love anyway, that love is tragic and pedestrian – a love for infants and dogs.

It is a love for what you are, not a love for who you are. Conditional love is love for the individuality of autonomous adults. Unconditional love for adults is a de-humanising form of pity. This is because when unconditional love is given to an adult, pity rather than affection is the reason it’s given. No one wants to love a serial killer because they feel warm towards the killer, nor do they love the killer because they appreciate the killer’s inner qualities. The killer’s individuality expresses itself in a way which is destructive. Unconditional love is given to the killer as a way of saying, “I hate how horribly you behave. Let me reward you with what you don’t deserve so that I can change your behaviour. Let me help you be nice to me. Let me lick your arse to stop you from shitting in my mouth.”

Because of the ludicrous condescension of this gesture, it rewards the killer rather than stops the killing. Even more importantly, the unconditional love is given begrudgingly. It’s given for the purpose of stopping behaviour which is hated. It’s given as a tool to achieve something else. It’s the furthest thing from a spontaneous affirmation of a person’s individuality. It’s a Pavlovian manipulation and an ugly one at that.

So for me, conditional love is an end in itself. It is given to reward rather than manipulate. The reward is not given to ensure future good behaviour. The reward is given out of awe and respect. Awe and respect are the main ingredients of a healthy companionship. Companionship, to put it bluntly, is roughly symmetrical mutually self-satisfying behaviour. Companionship would be totally symmetrical were it not for the flawed nature of human beings. Yet the behaviour must be roughly symmetrical in order for the companionship not to degenerate into an instance of one person treating another like a beggar waiting to be pissed on by a drunken rich man. This is why the term ‘self-satisfying’ is so important. You can’t be in a relationship for the sake of your partner. You both have to be in the relationship for yourself.

In my view, love is not a favour or an obligation: it’s a gift. And like any gift, what matters is that (a) the gift is given so that it can be reciprocated and (b) the reciprocal exchange is roughly equivalent. If someone buys you plastic turds and you buy them a mansion, this makes for an awkward Christmas.

I hate how people pretend that Christmas is about giving. It’s obvious Christmas is never fun when the gifts aren’t roughly equal. Giving only feels good if you know you are giving in proportion to what you are getting. This is the true meaning of Christmas – a lesson society would gain from acknowledging rather than denying in shame. If you want proof of this, imagine Christmas had a different set of rules. Imagine Christmas gift giving involved half of the participants being givers and the other half being only receivers. Would people still do Christmas if these were the rules? Of course not! Unfortunately, most people celebrate Christmas in a way which is far worse. A typical Christmas has become a ritual where adults wilfully harm children.

Think about what happens at a typical Christmas when the older members of the family give gifts to the children without expecting anything in return. They are spoiling an entire generation! They are teaching the extraordinarily harmful lesson that the children are entitled to receiving without giving. The older generation isn’t simply selling themselves short here. They are enablers, creating a generation of privileged and self-absorbed arseholes, arseholes who deserve pain instead of material items.

The reason why good parents force their children to give presents is so that their children can experience Christmas with the asset of likability. Without likability, Christmas is psychologically painful for a child. This pain is good. It’s the means by which the child learns to be more likeable next year. In a healthy Christmas, children experience shame and humiliation when they don’t give the equivalent of whatever they receive. Father Christmas punishes greedy children, in much the same way that the law would punish bankers and thieves. It’s not a coincidence that Father Christmas is red. Father Christmas is justice, or to put it another way, a rebuke to consumerism and unregulated capitalism.

This is why I think a healthy Christmas is a good model for judging when relationships are healthy and unhealthy. The justice of the healthy Christmas is in its expected proportionality. The achievement of justice is through the recognition that giving is inherently about receiving. Receiving works when everyone is aware of what is in their interests and can communicate that with partners who they have affection for. The affection arises because the partners are likeable to each other. This likability arises from each partner displaying qualities that are themselves presents for the other partner.

It doesn’t work if one partner is intelligent and kind, while the other is a fucking moron. Moronic attitudes can’t and shouldn’t delight a good person. In any relationship, a good person needs a partner with qualities that are equal to their own. Otherwise, the relationship is like an imbalanced scale. When a relationship attains balance, everyone in it can be happy in a way where no one is deluding themselves. The best strategy for never deluding yourself is to recognise that for 99% of the things that matter in life, acting in your self-interest is what makes you a good person. Self-interest is what makes you happy, healthy, successful and likeable.

The other 1% is where altruism comes in. Altruism is what happens when people are too flawed to do what is in their self-interest. They can still do the right thing, but in a way which is crippled and half-hearted. The soldier who fights the Nazis is too flawed to find pleasure in blowing up Germans who clearly deserve to die. So the soldier has to rely on an altruistic desire to die for his country. He is motivated not by his own pleasure at enacting justice, but by the thought of democracy defeating a racist totalitarian regime.

Although the soldier takes the life of another human being, he is too weak to experience it in the fullest way. He can’t see that his execution should be cruel, that the violence should be joyous, that his own heart should delight at the crimson blood spilling out of his enemy and that he should swoon at the screams and sobs of the wife, the mother and even the children of the Nazi scum he’s just vanquished from the earth. But of course, he can’t. Mimicking a coward, the altruistic soldier can think only of helping others when he pulls the trigger.

A similar thing happens when couples who are victims of terrorists are forced to choose between their own lives or those of their partners. Individual members of the couples sacrifice themselves not because they gain pleasure out of it, but purely for the sake of their partner’s continued existence. Here, they are too weak to enjoy their own death, a death responsible for the continued life of their beloved. Because they are weak, they can only think of the beloved when they die. They aren’t strong enough to think of the fortunate violence ensuring their beloved’s continued existence.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, mind you.

However, it’s only in these exceptional circumstances that humans actually draw upon genuine altruism. These occasions are so rare that altruism has nothing to do with whether or not anyone is a good or bad person.

From my novel 'Love Before Covid' (2021)