In the course of any adult life, there will
be periods when we’ll end up involved in
that slightly odd, slightly unrepresentative
and invariably slightly challenging activity:
looking. Most people around us won’t be
any the wiser, but with greater or lesser
subtlety, we will be scanning: suggesting
coffees and lunches, accepting every invitation,
giving out our email addresses and thinking
with unusual care about where to sit on train
journeys. Sometimes the rigmarole will be
joyful; at times, a bore. But for a portion
of us, as many as one in four, it will count
as one of the hardest things we ever have
to do. Fun won’t remotely come into it.
This will be closer to trauma. And it will
be so for a reason that can feel more humiliating
still: because, a long time ago now, we had
a very bad childhood – one whose impact
and legacy we still haven’t yet wholly mastered.
It may not look like it, but babies are also
looking out for love. They’re not going
out in party smocks or slipping strangers’
their phone numbers. They are lying more or
less immobile in cribs and are capable of
little besides the occasional devastating
cute smile. But they too are looking out for
someone’s arms to feel safe in; for someone
who can soothe them, someone who can stroke
their head, tell them it will all be OK when
things feel desperate and lend them a breast
to suck on. They are looking – as the psychologists
call it – to get attached.
But unfortunately, for one in four of us,
the process goes spectacularly wrong. There
is no one on hand to care properly. The crying
goes unheeded, the hunger unassuaged. No one
smiles reliably or cuddles confidently. There
is no welcoming breast. In the eyes of the
care-giver, there is depression or anger where
there should have been delight and reassurance.
And as a result, a fear of existence takes
hold for the long term – and dating becomes
a very hard business indeed.
For those of us who experienced early let
downs, there is simply little in us that can
ever believe that a search for love will go
well – and we will therefore bring an unholy
commitment to bear on ensuring that it doesn’t.
The dating game becomes the royal occasion
when we can confirm our deepest suspicion:
that we are unworthy of love.
We may, for example, fixate on a candidate
who is – to more attuned eyes – obviously
not interested; their coldness and indifference,
their married-status or incompatible background
or age, far from putting us off, will be precisely
what feels familiar, necessary and sexually
thrilling. This is what is meant to happen
when we love: it should hurt atrociously and
go nowhere.
Or, in the presence of a potentially kind-hearted
and available candidate, we may become so
demanding and uncontained, so unreasonable
and urgent in our requests, that no sane soul
would remain in contention. We will spoil
any potentially good impression by bringing
a lifetime of self-doubt and loneliness onto
the shoulders of an innocent stranger.
Alternatively, unable to tolerate the appalling
anxiety of not yet quite knowing where we
stand, we may decide to settle the matter
by ourselves, preferring to crash the plane
than see how it might land. We’ll interpret
every ambiguous moment negatively, for sadness
is so much easier to bear than hope: the slightly
late reply must mean that they have found
somebody else. Their busy-ness must be a disguise
for sudden hatred. The missing x at the end
of their message is conclusive evidence that
they have seen through our sham facade. To
master the terror of another letdown, we go
cold, we respond sarcastically to sincere
compliments and insist with aggression that
they don’t really care for us at all, thereby
ensuring that they eventually won’t.
To escape these debilitating cycles, we need
to accept that we’re searching for someone
to love us while wrestling with the most fateful
of background suspicions: that we don’t
in any way deserve love.
It’s only by properly mastering what once
happened to us, the letdown we first experienced
as infants, that we can start to separate
out past trauma from present reality – and
therefore learn to navigate the ambiguities
and occasional risks of adult dating. It isn’t
that we have been told that we don’t deserve
to exist; they’re just busy tonight. They
don’t loathe us, they’re married to someone
else, as lots of people (who we carefully
have chosen not to look at) happen not to
be. They’re not peculiar, it’s just unfair
and overwhelming to ask someone you’ve known
for twelve hours to make up for a lifetime
of loneliness.
We need to see that this is not the first
time we have been ‘dating’. We have done
it before long ago and it was the ways in
which it went very wrong that holds the key
to our adult errors – our intensity, our
coldness and our lack of judgement. The catastrophe
we fear will happen has already happened.
The challenges we set up for ourselves are
attempts to get back in touch with a trauma
we haven’t either understood or mourned.
We can in time learn to ask people on a date
because we grasp that we’re not thereby
asking them what we think we’re asking:
do I deserve to exist? We’re asking something
far more innocent, and far more survivable
were the answer to be negative: might you
be free on Friday? And we can survive because,
even though we once got terribly hurt in the
nursery, we are now that most resilient of
things: an adult. So we have many other options,
we won’t (as we once feared) die of loneliness
if it doesn’t work. We can take our time,
we can allow things to emerge, we can tolerate
ambiguity. And with such security in mind,
we can begin to do that most momentous of
things: without risking our sanity, see if
someone we like might – after all -want
to go out tonight
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