Read an Excerpt
The Psychology of Our Exes
In the immediate circumstances of a break-up, we are likely to be focused on what happened in the last few weeks or months to explain the end of a relationship.
But the clue to the failure often has nothing to do with us, and indeed little to do with the actions and feelings of the ex in the present moment. The reason why it all collapsed may lie in their childhood and in the long and typically unexplored path of their psyche towards emotional maturity.
Frustratingly, the way people love as adults sits on top of experiences of love in their early years – and the capacity to be a reliable and contented partner is in part due to things having gone well with parental figures at the start of their lives.
Unfortunately for relationships, at least half the population is walking around with, and falling in love while beset by, a host of uncharted psychological issues that will make it hugely difficult for them to be predictable and well-attached in relationships. Often, what they ostensibly seek in love is exactly what, in the long run, they cannot accept, for it feels unfamiliar, threatening to their defences and unearned. There is a conflict – of which we end up the unwitting victims – between what they say they seek in a partner, and what they are in fact psychologically capable of accepting.
Perhaps a beloved parent was rather aloof or often absent in their childhood. When they grew up and began seeking love, the ex may have been drawn to the warmth we offered them, but at the same time, our tenderness would have felt unfamiliar and been perceived as extremely threatening to parts of their personality. They may have struggled to understand what was going on inside themselves when they went cold and had to take their distance from us, but they lacked the tools. It may in the end have felt easier for them to blame us for being ‘needy’ rather than explore the complicated reasons why their own need was frightening to them. They were replicating a past, doomed and painful version of love, without either of us quite knowing.
Or maybe our ex had a parent who was rather fragile or depressed, or who was impatient or easily irritated. As a result, they learned to be exceedingly cautious around them, always pleasing and putting others’ interests first – and never quite letting on what was happening in their hearts, growing isolated and resentful instead. They gravitated towards us, hoping that we would allow them to be themselves. But, while we did our best, dynamics kicked in which meant that they never dared to explain their desires to us properly. They hid what really worried them, they buried away their hurts, they didn’t complain as and when they should have done – and eventually, they lost the capacity to feel alive in the relationship.
These thoughts chip away at our worst, most self-punishing interpretations of what happens in our relationships that fail. It is not, as we so quickly fear, that we are invariably revealed as defective; but rather that we have been co-opted into another’s fateful private love-dramas, which had their beginnings long before they met us. They didn’t manage to love us, but they probably couldn’t, at this stage in their emotional evolution, love anyone that well, given the burden bequeathed by their unexplored past.