Sublime

Susan pointed out a useful contradiction in love: if you lose a sense of yourself as an individual it can damage a relationship, but if you can’t accept that your needs and wants are not the only story, then it will be difficult to understand your partner’s perspective.

This is the first line of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker: My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realised my father hated the legal profession. And this is the opening of Martin Amis’s The Information: Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing.

There is a trade-off here, because your family provide you with the only really secure source of long-term support – they are the only ones who will stand by you through thick and thin, no matter what. But when you come home in tears after you have been jilted, they are invariably less than helpful.

Donna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but also inevitably miserable.

Therapists know the human heart, not primarily through books, but by being courageous about exploring their own nature. They may not share our fantasies exactly, but they accept that their own are as colourful and as complex. They don’t have our precise anxieties, but they know well enough the powerful and peculiar fears that hold us all hostage.

As children, after we experience some of life’s disappointments, we attempt to ward off future pain by making certain generalizations about life, forming conclusions based on our particular experience and our specific interactions with our unique parents.