What years of heartbreak actually teach us

It can be easy to feel, as we look back

on our lives, that we have been

singularly inept in our choices and

behaviors.

Why did we waste so long here? Why

didn't we see what they were doing

there? Why didn't we speak up sooner or

hold our nerve? In such

self-recriminatory moods, it can be more

than merely sentimental to remind

ourselves of a fundamental fact about

relationships that we miss when we

despair of our conduct. They sit in an

area of exceptional importance in which

we are granted astonishingly few chances

to practice before having to make vastly

consequential decisions.

Imagine if we were asked to become great

violinists and were given all of six

lessons to perfect our craft. Or if we

were expected to master the javelin

after four perfunctory throws.

We'd know the odds were stacked against

us. We'd have compassion for our often

miserable performances. We'd understand

what we were up against.

Without us being aware, much the same

level of unpreparedness holds true of

relationships.

Even a highly experienced lover might

have only eight partners before getting

married. Most of us have two or three.

Someone might have shared a home with

just one other person before deciding to

place a new human being on the earth.

None of us has ever been asked to pass

an examination in love before going on a

date.

From the other side of failure, we

chastise ourselves for how little we've

understood. We don't appreciate how much

there is to understand, how infinitely

more complicated relationships are than

any musical instrument. It's entirely to

be expected that the sounds we make are

frequently terrifying.

Let's imagine that there are some 30 key

lessons to learn about relationships, 30

things we might have to get the hang of

before having any real chance at

managing our lives successfully.

We might begin to summarize these

lessons as follows. Always speak up when

you're feeling undervalued. Complain

with clarity and kindness, not despair

or rage. Never try to persuade anyone to

love you. Don't set out to fix anyone's

childhood. An absence of attraction is

fateful, but then attraction isn't

enough.

They should be like a best friend, but

this isn't just a friendship.

Resentment at a mother or father has a

very long tail.

Someone who hates therapy doesn't just

hate therapy, they're liable to hate

introspection and dialogue, too.

Flee from anyone defensive. Never get

together with someone just because they

are right on paper.

If something breaks down once, the

chances of it ever working a second time

are beyond minimal.

And so on and so forth.

The challenge is that though we might

state these lessons simply enough to get

the hang of each one properly, requires

at least 8 months and more usually

several years or even decades. We need

to experience the finer nuances of the

issues through summers and winters,

through journeys and work crises, in the

slow despair of quiet Sunday afternoons.

We need time, encouragement, and the

right to fail without tragedy.

We wouldn't be any less generous after

telling a trumpet player to support

their notes from the diaphragm.

In a depressed moment in middle age, we

might try to categorize phases of our

love lives according to the slow lessons

that we've taken away from each one of

them. For example, don't keep making an

effort if they're not. Caitlin, 4 and

1/2 years.

Beware of people who can't articulate

their emotions. Jonathan, 6 months.

Don't wait around hoping they'll explain

why they acted as they did. Róisín, 3

years.

Don't have children before the bond is

properly formed. Wei Wei, 20 years.

We would need to live to at least 500

years old to stand any realistic chance

of picking up our craft. Instead, we're

rushed on stage and have to work out the

right way to hold the bow before a live

audience. Those who haven't generated

disaster and mutiny are luckier than

they are talented.

We aren't miserable because we're

stupid, but because we weren't ever

trained, because we exist in a culture

morbidly and mysteriously resistant to

emotional education. We leave things to

chance out of a feeling that it might be

cold or unromantic to apply some of the

same basic discipline and foresight that

we would resort to before operating a

lawn mower or floor polisher.

We teach people to become brain surgeons

and pilots, yet leave the roles of

partner and parent to intuition.

A better arranged culture would itemize

the key lessons of love for people in

their last year of school and then

impose a universal intensive training

program with some of the rigor of an

architecture or accountancy

qualification.

We would think of novels and films not

as entertainment, but as chances to hone

the lessons of love we'd learned in an

analytical form elsewhere. We'd use

video games to place us in digitized

scenarios before we had to face them in

reality.

We'd ask ourselves for patience and be

aware, without humiliation, of how blind

we necessarily were. We've made a mess,

no doubt. We don't, on top of everything

else, need to be surprised that we did

so. This is a game with at least 30

traps in it, and we began to play long

before we'd ever realized that the

instruction manual had been tossed

aside.