The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well.

  The corrective to insufficient knowledge is experience. We need to mine the secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better than the incumbents we already understand.

  We should extrapolate what we already know of people and apply it to those we don’t yet.

  THE LAUNDRY

  In the history of Western literature, in hundreds of poems and novels, no Romantic hero or heroine has ever ironed their underpants. This might seem a trivial point, but it is crucial and personally urgent, because it signals that we’ve taken our cues about what belongs to love from a societal narrative that is radically incomplete and misleading in nature.

  Romantic culture takes no interest in the myriad challenges that fall within the realm of the ‘domestic’, a term that captures all the practicalities of living together, extending across a range of small but vital issues, including who one should visit at the weekend, when to empty the bins, who should clean the oven and how often to have friends over for dinner.

  From the Romantic point of view, these things cannot be serious or worth the attention of intelligent people. Relationships are made or broken over grand, dramatic matters: fidelity and betrayal, the courage to face society on one’s own terms or the tragedy of being ground down by the demands of convention. The day-to-day minutiae of the domestic sphere seem entirely unimpressive and humiliatingly insignificant by comparison.

  Partly as a result of this neglect, we don’t go into relationships ready to perceive domestic issues as important potential flashpoints to look out for and devote sustained attention to. We don’t acknowledge how much it may end up mattering whether we can maturely resolve issues around how to clean the kitchen floor or the conundrum of whether it is stylish or a touch pretentious to give a cocktail party.

  When a problem has high prestige, we are ready to expend energy and time trying to resolve it. This has often happened around large scientific questions. It was entirely understood that mapping the human genome would be enormously difficult, as is the puzzle of artificial intelligence. This respect leads to an unexpected but crucial consequence. We don’t panic around the challenges, because we understand the difficulty of what we are attempting to do. We are a lot calmer around prestigious problems. It’s problems that feel trivial or silly but nevertheless take up large sections of our lives that drive us to heightened states of agitation. Such agitation is precisely what the Romantic neglect of domestic life has unwittingly encouraged: its legacy is overhasty conversations about the temperature of the bedroom and curt remarks about which news programme to watch, matters which can – over many years – contribute to a critical erosion of our capacities to love.

  Pieter de Hooch, Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard, 1663.

  At certain points in history artists have attempted to correct the distribution of prestige. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch specialized in portraying high-status, interesting-looking people engaged in domestic chores. He wanted to show the relevance of such activities to having a good life and to convey that these were not in any way degrading or unworthy tasks. Organizing a linen cupboard was, de Hooch was proposing, no less a task than checking the accounts of a major corporation or making sure that a load-bearing wall was sufficiently strong to support the weight of an attic storey.

  Domestic preoccupation isn’t really a sign of the death of love. It’s what awaits us when love has succeeded. We will only be reconciled to the reality of love when we can accept without rancour the genuine dignity of the ironing board.

  IT WAS MEANT TO BE NICER

  Often, our partner isn’t necessarily being terrible in overt ways, but we feel a growing sadness about the character of our relationship: they’re not 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 offhand 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 much feel 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 the 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 happy coupledom taps into a fundamental picture of comfort, deep security, wordless communication and our needs being effortlessly understood that comes from early childhood. Some of the most popular pictures in the world show a mother very tenderly holding a small child, with an expression of complete devotion on her face. Officially, these are pictures of one specific and very unusual child and one very holy and good mother. But the religious background to the Mother and Child images isn’t the key to their appeal. We’re moved because we recognize a paradisiacal moment in our own personal story; because we’re being brought into semi-conscious contact with a delightful memory of how we were once cared for.

  At the best moments of childhood (if things went reasonably well) loving parents offered us extraordinary satisfaction. They knew when we were hungry or tired, even though we couldn’t explain. We did not 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 has planted itself in our deep minds as the ideal template of what love should be.

  As adults, without really noticing, we continue to be in thrall to this notion of being loved, projecting the best experiences of our early years into our present relationships and finding them sorely wanting as a result – a comparison that is profoundly corrosive and unfair.

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna Litta, mid-1490s.

  The love we received 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. We needed to be washed, 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 it is necessary to see our aunt on Sunday or why it matters to us that the curtains harmonize with the sofa covers or bread must be cut with a proper bread knife. The parent knew absolutely what was required in relation to basic physical and emotional requirements. Our partner is stumbling in the dark around needs that are immensely subtle, far from obvious and very complicated to fulfil.

  Secondly, none of it was reciprocal. Our parents were intensely focused on caring for us, but they knew and wholly accepted that we wouldn’t engage with their needs. They didn’t for a minute 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 do 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 and didn’t have to love – a distinction between kinds of love which language normally artfully blurs, shielding us from the difference between being the privileged customer of love or its more exhausted and long-suffering
provider.

  Furthermore, 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 point the true toll of their efforts could be witnessed (but by then we were asleep). This was immensely kind, but did us one lasting disservice: it may unwittingly have created an expectation of what it would 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 tetchy 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, they simply saved it until their bedroom, when we were asleep and realized 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 or uniquely selfish. It’s rather that we’re judging our adult experiences against a very different kind of childhood love. We are sorrowful not because we have landed up with the wrong person but because we have – sadly – been forced to grow up.

  SECRETS

  Many relationships begin with a deeply misleading but beguiling sense that we can tell a partner everything. At last, there is no more need for the usual hypocrisies. We can come clean about so much that we had previously needed to keep to ourselves: our reservations about our friends, our irritation over small but wounding remarks by colleagues, our interest in less often-mentioned sexual practices. Love can seem founded on the idea of an absence of secrecy.

  Then, gradually, we become aware of so much we cannot say. It might be around sex: on a work trip, there was a flirtation; late one evening, we discovered a porn site that beautifully targeted a special quirk of our erotic imagination; we find their brother (or sister) very alluring. Or the secret thoughts can be more broad-ranging: the blog they wrote for work, about their experience in client care, was very boring to read; the dark green scarf they so love wearing is hideous; their best friend from school, to whom they are still very loyal, is excessively silly and dull; in the wedding photo of their parents (lovingly displayed in a silver frame in the living room) their mother looks unbearably smug.

  Love begins with a hope of – at last – being able to tell someone else everything about who we are and what we feel. The relief of honesty is at the heart of the feeling of being in love. But this sharing of secrets sets up in our minds, and in our collective culture, a powerful and potentially problematic ideal: that if two people love one another, then they must always tell each other the truth about everything.

  The idea of honesty is sublime. It presents a deeply moving vision of how two people can be together and it is a constant presence in the early months. But in order to be kind, and in order to sustain love, it ultimately becomes necessary to keep a great many thoughts out of sight.

  Keeping secrets can seem like a betrayal of the relationship. At the same time, the complete truth eventually appears to place the union in mortal danger.

  Much of what we’d ideally like to have recognized and confirmed is going to be genuinely disturbing even to someone who is fond of us. We face a choice between honesty and acceptability and – for reasons that deserve a great deal of sympathy – mostly we choose the latter.

  We are perhaps too conscious of the bad reasons for hiding something; we haven’t paid enough attention to the noble reasons why, from time to time, true loyalty may lead us to say very much less than the whole truth. We are so impressed by honesty, we have forgotten the virtues of politeness, this word defined not as a cynical withholding of important information for the sake of harm, but as a dedication to not rubbing someone else up against the true, hurtful aspects of our nature.

  It is ultimately no great sign of kindness to insist on showing someone our entire selves at all times. A dedication to maintaining boundaries and editing our pronouncements belongs to love as much as a capacity to show ourselves as we really are. The lover who does not tolerate secrets, who in the name of ‘being honest’ divulges information so wounding it cannot be forgotten, is no friend of love. Just as no parent should ever tell a child the whole truth, so we should accept the ongoing need to edit our full reality.

  And if one suspects (and one should, rather regularly, if the relationship is a good one) that one’s partner might be lying too (about what they are thinking about, about how they judge one’s work, about where they were last night …), it is perhaps best not to take up arms and lay into them like a sharp, relentless inquisitor, however intensely one yearns to do just that. It may be kinder, wiser and perhaps more in the true spirit of love to pretend one simply didn’t notice.

  THE WISDOM OF COMPROMISE

  We reserve some of our deepest scorn for couples who stay together out of compromise; those who are making a show of unanimity, but who we know are, deep down, not fully happy. Maybe they’re primarily together because of the children; maybe they’re sticking around because they’re scared of being lonely; or maybe they’re just worried that anyone else they found wouldn’t be much better.

  These seem like disgraceful motives to be with anyone – disgraceful on account of a background belief that circulates powerfully through the collective modern psyche: the idea that anyone who puts their mind and will sufficiently to it doesn’t have to compromise in love; that there are pain-free, profoundly fulfilling options available for all of us – and the only things that could stand in the way of discovering them would be laziness and cowardice, flaws of character that deserve no particular sympathy or forgiveness. Our high romantic expectations have made us notably impatient around and censorious about those who can’t attain them.

  But imagine if we were to tweak the premise of the argument a little and for a moment explore the notion that there really might be a pain-free and entirely fulfilling option available for all of us at all times. What if our choices were, in many contexts, in fact often rather more limited than Romanticism proposes? Maybe there aren’t as many admirable unattached people in our vicinity as there might be. Maybe we lack the charm, the personality, the career, the confidence or the looks ever to attract the ones who do exist. Maybe time is running out. Or maybe our children really would take it extremely badly if we abandoned the family for the sake of better sex and greater cheer elsewhere.

  At the same time, maybe the current situation – while clearly a compromise – is not without its virtues. A partner may be only half-right, quite often maddening and properly disappointing in certain areas, but – humblingly – still more satisfying than being alone. Having children to bring up together may be worth it even with a co-parent about whom one has a long, only semi-private list of reservations. A few cuddles and occasional moments of cosiness may retain a small but decisive edge over a life alone interspersed with humiliating dates.

  The capacity to compromise is not always the weakness it is described as being. It can involve a mature, realistic admission that there may – in certain situations – simply be no ideal options. And, conversely, an inability to compromise does not always have to be the courageous and visionary position it is held to be by our impatient and perfectionist ideology. It may just be a slightly rigid, proud and cruel delusion.

  Mocking people who compromise is, of course, emotionally very handy. It localizes a problem that it’s normal to want to disavow. It pins to a few scapegoat couples what we are all terrified about in our relationships: that a degree of sadness may just be an intrinsic and unavoidable part of them.

  Wiser societies would be careful never to stigmatize the act of compromise. It is painful enough to have to do it; it is even more painful to have to hate oneself for having done so. We should rehabilitate and honour the ability to put up with a flawed fellow human being, to nurse our sadness without falling into rage or despair, to reconcile ourselves to our
damaged appearance and character and to accept that there may be no better way for us to live but partly in pain and longing, given who we are and what the world can provide. Couples who compromise may in reality not be the enemies of love; they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand.

  THE CONSOLATIONS OF FRIENDSHIP

  One of the most subtly hurtful and quietly damning of all remarks, perhaps softly and sweetly delivered on the doorstep at the end of a long evening, with the taxi still hovering somewhere just out of sight, is the suggestion that we should in the end probably remain ‘just good friends’.

  We know exactly what to understand by this. The path towards a tender future is being gently but firmly closed off. We are, with a smile, being shunted into the category of the failed, the ignored and the lightly despised. The other must in some way have worked out the despicable truths about us – all the ones that we tried so hard to disguise and even to believe didn’t exist – and has logically decided to take their leave. We return crushed to an apartment which we had left with butterflies and elevated hopes only a few hours before.

  We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous with insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.

  Though this seems like unsurprising common sense, what should detain us and encourage us to probe a little at the claims made on love’s behalf is one basic source of evidence: the behaviour, level of satisfaction and state of mind of those who engage in it.