The lover who furiously told us they never wanted to see us again may, in the hidden recesses of their soul, have actually been thinking: ‘I’m so sad this didn’t work out; I wish I could find a way to make this work; you are so lovely in many ways, but there’s something desperate in me that’s turning away from your offer of love.’ The person who coldly texts us, ‘That’s it, I’m out’ may, behind the scenes, be weeping at their own sense of loss and failure rather than (as we imagine) gleefully celebrating the end of their over-extended encounter with us. The person who says, ‘I wish this could
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