The new book discusses a range of issues that can have an impact on couples, including alcoholism and affairs. Photo / 123rf
Psychotherapist Stephen Grosz explores everything he’s learnt about love during his 40 years of experience.
It’s more than 10 years since Stephen Grosz’s book, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, topped the bestseller lists. A collection of case histories based on the psychotherapist’s years of sessions with clients, it endeavoured to reveal the truth of the human condition.
Now, he’s back with another book, Love’s Labour, which focuses on one of the topics that cropped up time and again in his original tome: love. In it, Grosz aims to distil everything he’s learned about love after four decades practising psychotherapy.
There are stories about warring couples, scandalous affairs, a woman who can’t bring herself to post her wedding invites despite deeply loving her fiancé, a man obsessed by fears his wife is cheating but won’t seek real evidence, the boyfriend left forlorn when his partner falls from a rooftop while high on drugs.
“I wanted to share the hard-won truths that I wouldn’t have known when I was younger, the things that me and my patients had to work out between us,” says the softly spoken 72-year-old.
Today, we’re in the same Hampstead office where Grosz started practising in his thirties and still works now, with its bed by the window and an enviable library of books which takes in everything – from Stephen King to Sally Rooney to Anton Chekhov – all fastidiously arranged in alphabetical order.
Grosz has come to the conclusion that at the heart of love is pain. Longing for someone is the pain of being without them. Then there is the anxiety of the first date, the grief of separation, the fear that love will fade. As much as love is joyful, fun and profound, it’s pain that makes it real. “If you don’t suffer, you don’t know what you want. If you can understand that hurt you’ll love better, choose better, and be able to say to your partner that you need something in that relationship,” he says.
To that end, honesty is a big part of what makes a relationship work. So, what does he make of our most common relationship dilemmas? We asked Grosz a series of common problems to find out his solutions.
It can actually be a real breakthrough. My belief is that most marriages begin in a kind of idealisation. Slowly, over time, we begin seeing the other person: we get annoyed or angry, they get annoyed or angry with us. At that point there’s an explosion from the affair (it doesn’t have to be an affair, you can get to the point where these two people hate each other) and that can be the point where you get rid of the idealisation, the false narratives, and you can start seeing each other properly.
It takes real commitment on both parts. If you start seeing each other as real people, then you can break through to being really good, really honest friends with each other.
You grow up, accept reality, look at yourself and see that you have those faults, she has these faults, then try to really love each other despite those faults. An affair can be a real reminder that you’re not just husband and wife but two separate people who probably started as friends, and if you really care about each other that’s what you need to get back to.
I see this all the time in couples. I call it “the ecstasy of sanctimony”: where someone clearly gets a kind of pleasure from being indignant or exasperated with their partner.
What they’re doing is creating a fiction around themselves: ‘I’m good but my partner is neglectful, they’re terrible, they’re incapable.’ By getting stuck in that mindset they can’t see their partner for who they really are.
It’s hard to give up because it’s a position of grandiosity. Whereby we feel like we’re right, we’re good, they’re terrible. Unpicking that is difficult. If you notice it in yourself, the best thing to do is to try to think in opposites: ask yourself at every turn ‘What is their point of view here?’
The ecstasy of sanctimony is also about concealing your messiness from your partner. You’re telling yourself you’re so good, rather than admitting you have flaws too. It’s just as much about being able to recognise your flaws and learn to apologise for them. As the saying goes: a good marriage is the marriage of two good apologisers.
The worst thing you can do is paper over these things and pretend they didn’t happen. Importantly, you can’t fix trauma. Whether it’s something like the death of a family member or cumulative trauma which has built up from years of hurtful treatment; the subtle favouring of one child over another, a family who has shamed their gay son and so on.
You can’t pretend that it isn’t going on, but you can simply be with that person. Trauma often makes people difficult to be with. Often, they are on edge, sensitive, stressed out, but they can also have really lovable qualities like sensitivity, empathy and compassion.
Both of you must be honest with each other and look out for each other. I love to see couples where one asks the other: ‘Is there anything you need? How can I help you?’ Love isn’t about saying ‘I love you’, it’s saying ‘did you have lunch today?’ You can never fix someone’s trauma, but you can be there for them through it.
If you can’t be honest or express your feelings, you’re not really capable of love. My book deeply links love with honesty. I think people do have the capacity for that and if they don’t, they need to go to couples counselling.
Even if you need to have bits of yourself you cannot share, you can be honest about that. If a patient comes in and says “there’s something I can’t talk about”, I would reply: “I accept that, but talk about the feelings you would have if you did tell me this thing.” That way you can start getting into what’s so frightening about being honest. Try to understand why what they have is so terrible to say and why they’re so anxious about expressing their feelings.
It’s tricky. Both people turn off their receivers and go into broadcast mode while arguing. Still, if you’re arguing then you’re passionate, there’s something that matters to both of you. At least you’re not indifferent to each other. It’s about turning those receivers on so you can hear what each other is saying.
Sometimes, as a therapist, I feel like a traffic warden – “you stop, you go, now you stop, now you go” – then you ask: “Did you hear what he said? Tell me what you think she’s saying.” Usually they completely mishear or misunderstand each other.
When you get so angry that you refuse to back down, even when you know you’re in the wrong, the only thing you’re winning is first place in the queue to apologise.
If you don’t feel you’ve screwed up, calmly tell them: “I believe in what I’m saying and you believe in what you’re saying, this isn’t going to be easy, but we have to try to work this out together.”
One of the lessons I learned as a psychoanalyst is that people can be legally married, but psychologically or emotionally, they’re married to something else. In Love’s Labour, I write about a patient who had a wife, but he was psychologically married to alcohol. It’s the alcohol he turned to for consolation, soothing, to be looked after when anxious. You see a lot of that.
On some level, loss is a part of love. We leave the womb to have the breast, we go to nursery and leave our mother. At each developmental step we give something up. I write in the book about a woman who can’t bring herself to send her wedding invites because she fears her marriage will cause her to lose her mother and father forever.
Some people get married, but don’t make the step up to actually being married and properly part of a couple. It’s a hard-won thing. You have to psychologically commit to your marriage and accept that to have certain things you have to give up others.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t have other aspects to your life. The people who are really successful in life, I find, are the people who have lots going on. If something goes wrong in one part of their lives, they don’t keep banging at it. If work isn’t going well, they invest more time in their hobbies, and when they go back to work things usually get better.
Sometimes I’ll sit in my chair and notice that a patient never dates any financial, intellectual or ethical peers. I often wonder if it’s possible to be intimate if you’re not equal.
In the book, I discuss a doctor who was afraid of feeling dependent on people. He doesn’t want to feel his own neediness so he busies himself looking after the neediness of others, always helping them and trying to turn every situation into exactly that.
Part of that can be a defence against other things. Someone who is always dating damaged people with broken wings is trying to avoid damage in themselves. It can also be about feeling more powerful, in control and safer. It’s less safe dating an equal.
Finally, they might have an attachment to suffering. When people grow up in a difficult family, that becomes their normal. Being unhappy is more familiar and therefore safer than when things start getting better. That attachment to suffering isn’t uncommon. It is basically impossible to extract someone from that relationship until they are ready to leave it themselves. All you can do is be there for them.
There’s never total equality in a relationship, but it behoves us all to think about the inequality and how we address it.
Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz (Penguin) is available now.