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Relationships suffer from a fundamental tension between the desire to be honest and the fear of being abandoned. We go into relationships in order to be ourselves, but if we were to be completely honest, there is a high risk that we would be left alone. Silence often seems to be the price we pay for companionship. However much we may claim to be open-minded, very few of us genuinely make room for another person’s complexity. We may say that they can tell us anything, but in practice, the topics we are really prepared to listen to are limited, and lovers unconsciously know this.
If one were to say “I love you, but sometimes I’d like to have an affair” or “sometimes I catch you from a certain angle and I despise you” or “sometimes for a while I wish you weren’t in my life” or “sometimes you bore me” or “your flaws have been driving me to despair”, how quickly most relationships would end. Yet, while saying something like this puts a relationship at risk, saying nothing is not unproblematic either. We can’t go through love being simply polite. Our entire emotional system goes numb when we have to keep a lid on a gigantic lie. Emotions that haven’t been expressed tend to end up simply being acted out.
It seems we can’t easily either say nothing or something. It would help hugely if society were to give us a better picture of love that prepared us at a collective level way before this or that lover was in question for the legitimacy of ambivalent feelings, including anger, disappointment, and disloyalty, and reassured us that we didn’t need to panic at such feelings’ occasional emergence; that they were likely to pass and would generally just be a sign of two people getting very close.
The greatest favor we can pay our lovers is to allow them (so long as there is never contempt or violence in the mix) to hate us a lot sometimes. The people who are the experts at this are parents of three-year-olds. When a small child says “Mommy or Daddy, I hate you a lot today”, parents do what we should all generally do: they manage not to take it personally. They understand instinctively that love is very complicated. They don’t hold honesty against a person whom they know is fundamentally good and kind. They know the mood will alter, and most importantly, they remember how often they have felt exactly the same way.