being terrible in any overt way

but we feel a growing sadness

about the character of our relationship.

The partner isn't as focused on us as we'd hoped.

There are often times when

they don't understand us properly.

They're often busy and preoccupied.

They can be a bit off-hand, or abrupt.

They're not hugely interested

in the details of our day.

They call their friends rather than talk with us.

We feel disenchanted and let down.

Love, was supposed to be lovely.

But without any one huge thing having gone wrong,

it doesn't feel much that way, day to day.

This sorrow has a paradoxical source.

We're upset now because

at some point in the past,

we were really rather fortunate.

We're sad, because we've been lucky.

To explain this seeming paradox,

we need to have a look at the intimate origins of love.

Our idea of what a good, loving relationship

should be like

and what it feels like to be loved,

doesn't ever come from what we've seen

in adulthood.

It arises from a stranger, more powerful source.

The idea of a happy couplehood

taps into a fundamental picture of

comfort, deep security, wordless communication,

and of our needs being effortlessly understood

that comes from early childhood.

At the best moments of childhood,

if things went reasonably well,

a loving parent offered us extraordinary satisfaction.

They knew when we were hungry or tired.

Even though we couldn't usually explain.

We didn't need to strive.

They made us feel completely safe.

We were held peacefully.

We were entertained, and indulged.

And even if we don't recall the explicit details,

the experience of being cherished

has made a profound impression on us.

It's planted itself in our deep minds

as the ideal template of what love should be.

As adults, without really noticing,

we continue to be enthralled to this notion

of being loved.

Projecting the best experience of our early years

into our present relationships.

And finding them sorely wanting as a result.

A comparison, that is profoundly corrosive,

and unfair.

The love we receive from a parent

can't ever be a workable model

for our later adult experience of love.

The reason is fundamental,

we were a baby then

we are an adult now.

A dichotomy with several key ramifications.

For a start, our needs were so much simpler.

Back then, we needed to be washed and amused,

put to bed..

But we didn't need someone to trawl

intelligently through the troubled corners of our minds.

We didn't need a caregiver to understand

why we prefer the first series of a television show

to the second.

Why its necessary to see our aunt on Sunday.

Or why it matters so much to us that the curtains

harmonize with the sofa covers.

Or that bread must be cut with a proper bread knife.

The parent knew absolutely what was required

in relation to certain basic physical and emotional

requirements.

Our partner on the other hand,

is stumbling in the dark

around needs that are immensely subtle,

far from obvious, and very complicated

to deliver upon.

Secondly, none of it was reciprocal back then.

The parent was intensely focused on caring for us

but they knew and totally accepted that we

wouldn't engage with their needs.

They didn't for a second imagine

that they could take their troubles to us,

or expect us to nurture them.

They didn't need us to ask them about their day.

Our responsibility was blissfully simple.

All we had to please them, was to exist.

Our most ordinary actions, rolling over on our tummy,

grasping a biscuit in our tiny hand,

enchanted them with ease.

We were loved, we didn't have, to love.

A distinction between kinds of love

which language normally artfully blurs,

shielding us in the difference between

being the privileged customer of love,

or its more exhausted and long suffering provider.

Futhermore, our parents were probably kind enough

to shield us from the burden

that looking after us imposed on them.

They maintained a reasonably sunny facade,

until they retired to their own bedroom.

At which, the true toll of their efforts could be witnessed

but, by then, we were asleep.

They did us the honor of not quite showing us

what looking after us cost them.

Which was immensely kind,

but did us one lasting disservice,

It may have unwittingly created an expectation

of what it could mean for someone to love us

which was never true in the first place.

We might in later life,

end up with lovers who are techy with us

who are too tired to talk at the end of the day,

who don't marvel at our every antic,

who can't even be bothered to listen to what we're saying

and we might feel, with some bitterness

that this is not how our parents were

The irony which has its redeeming side,

is that in truth, this is exactly how our parents were,

just up in their bedroom, when we were asleep,

and realize nothing.

The source of our present sorrow

is not, therefore, a special failing

on the part of our adult lovers.

They are not tragically inept nor uniquely selfish.

Its rather that we're judging our adult experiences

in the light of a very different kind of childhood love.

We are sorrowful not because

we have landed with the wrong person,

but because, we have sadly

been forced to grow up.