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the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we were trying to get together with the wrong person.
The only people we can think of as satisfying are those we don’t yet know very well.
And that to survive, a relationship may need to accept that there will be certain no-go areas, that there will be zones of privacy and resignation.
The relationship should be a place where each person is conscious of how fragile their partner inevitably is on certain matters – and takes deliberate care to treat them delicately. This is an admired accomplishment and a real expression of love.
What actually causes panic is a difficulty that hasn’t been budgeted for or a demand that one has not been trained or prepared to meet. The road to calmer relationships therefore isn’t necessarily about removing points of contention. It’s rather about assuming that they are going to happen and that they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address.
Erotic excitement doesn’t take note of the standards that we’ve defined for ourselves in the rest of our life. It really is a very strange transition we have to make in company with another person: to go from making polite enquiries as to the merits of an entrée or advancing a critique of American electoral politics, to attempting to tie a person up and defile them. We need to be modest about how we can reconcile all aspects of ourselves in the company of one other unique individual.
the things that madden us turn out to be connected to the very qualities that were initially part of their appeal.
the principle of the Weakness of Strength. This states that any good quality a person has, will, in some situations, be revealed as accompanied by a corresponding weakness.
One of the most fundamental paths to calm is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does – and what they meant to do.
Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon: self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm.
It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children; it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.
Where do inner voices come from? An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others: a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the words of a schoolyard bully or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalise the unhelpful voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking.
Politeness does not prevent a person from feeling angry or upset or hurt. What it does is delay the expression of the feeling.
The periodic need to regress should be seen not as a sign of a failure of maturity but as an aspect of a wise adult acceptance of one’s own deep imperfection and ultimate inadequacy.
To love another person isn’t only to admire their strengths and see what’s great about them. It should also involve nursing and protecting them in their less impressive moments.
