For most of human history,
relationships were relatively simple for a banal yet immovable reason: it was
extremely hard to meet anyone acceptable – and everyone knew it. There were
only a few people in the village, travel was expensive and social occasions
were few and far between. This had many draw backs: it encouraged people to
accept offers from suitors they were unconvinced by, it meant that characters
who would have delighted each other died lonely and unfulfilled because they
were a few mountains and or a river between them.
Our technologists have used their
genius to correct these historic obstacles and provide us with an unending
choice. Meeting someone new is now a constant possibility. But this
breakthrough at the level of introduction has obscured an on-going challenge at
the level of ultimate purpose: We may have become easier to meet but we are not
any easier to love. We remain – each one of us – highly challenging
propositions for anyone to take on.
All of us are riddled with
psychological quirks that serve to render an ongoing relationship extremely
problematic: we are impatient, prone to making unjust accusations, rife with
self-pity, and unused to expressing our needs in a way they can be understood
by others – just to start the list .. That we can meet so many people as
beautifully obscured our ugly sides, breeding in us the charming yet misleading
idea – which engulfs us any time we hit difficulties – that we are in trouble
because we have not until now met ‘the right person.’
The reason why there is friction
and longing has, we tell ourselves, nothing to do with certain stubborn
infelicities in our own natures or paradoxes in the human condition as a whole,
it is only a matter of needing to hunt further for a more reasonable candidate
who will at last see things our way. The promise of choice has drained us of
the patience and modesty necessary to grapple with the tensions that are prone
to come our way whomever we might be with. We forget that almost everyone is a
charming prospect so long as we know nothing about them.
Part of what it takes to be ready
for love is to imagine the difficulties that we cannot, as yet, know too much
about in detail; the bad moods that will lurk behind the energetic smiles, the
difficult pasts that lie beneath the lustrous eyes, the tangled psyches that
reside beneath a stated love of camping and the outdoors. Even though there are
hundreds of other people we might meet, there are not – in truth – so many
people we could really love.
Dating Apps may have made it
infinitely easier to connect but they haven’t helped us in any way to be more
patient, imaginative, forgiving or empathetic; that is any more adept at the
arts that make any one relationship viable. Most of the issues we experience
with a given candidate will therefore show up, in comparable guises, with
almost anyone we might stumble upon. The real work we should be doing isn’t –
once we have had a reasonable look around – to keep trying to meet new people; its
to get to the root of what makes it hard to live with any one person we could
alight upon.
We will be ready for love when we
surrender some of our excited sense of possibility and recognize that though we
might have many choices, we don’t – in reality – have so many options. It may
sound dark, but this will, in its own way, be a liberating realizing that can
help us redirect our energies away from the exhausting circuit of new
encounters towards a search for the kind of mutual emotional maturity on which
true love can one day be built.
