The Game of Blame and Love

You and your partner are at a hotel, waiting for your booking to be authorised. You see other couples and families in a jolly mood picking up their keys and trotting away. Soon, you are the only ones left standing by the lobby as you see in your peripheral vision, a tense concierge clumsily typing on the keypad to find your Booking ID. Gradually, an unfortunate eventuality becomes clear: your booking hasn't gone through, That's right! A booking YOU have made. This is going to mean lots of calls to nearby hotels, explanations, forms, hanging around uncertainty and eagerly waiting for the holiday season's unlikely miracle. The already dreadful day has turned for the worse. At this point, your partner says something about how strange it is that bookings he/she makes usually get through, given the number of people traveling around the world, especially during the holidays. The tone perhaps has an air of curiosity, the sort one might conclude to be condescending when having a particularly rough day. It is followed by silence. And, suddenly, you realise in your heart that you are completely furious with them, furious that they could be so carefree and indifferent and implying their perfectionism upon you, when something like this has happened to you out of sheer coincidence, or even, as some might say, out of bad luck.

However, an important piece of logic falls into place: somehow, all the waiting around, the humiliation, the hassle, this begging for a last minute resort you’re going to have to deal with, is all their fault. They are to blame for everything – even the headache that is right now gnawing on your temples like a rat. You turn away from them and mumble, ‘I knew all along that I should never have gone along with your selfish suggestion of this stupid, boring hotel’ – which seems a sad, and rather unfair way, to conclude what could otherwise be a pleasant and romantic long weekend. Not everyone views, or pities, the conclusions you just drew. After all, your partner just wanted to spend some quality time, to which you gave your mutual consent.

What we witness here is one of the most superficially irrational, but most common of all presumptions of love: that the person to whom one has pledged oneself is not just the centre of one’s emotional existence, they are also, as a result, in an objectively insane and profoundly unjust sense, responsible for simply everything that happens to you, for good and for the absolute worse. The world gets unsettling, disappointing, frustrating and hurtful in multiple ways at every turn. It rejects our passionate endeavours, it overlooks us in deserving promotions, it rewards absolute idiots, it neglects our prowess, it delays our plans, loses our keys and makes us wait for hours in an unwelcome hotel lobby. And, almost all of the time, we mustn't complain.

The one person to whom we can expose the multiple grievances we bottle up is the person who is closest to us: the one we love. This blessed person becomes the recipient of all of our accumulated rage at the injustice and imperfections of our lives, it is absurd but we still choose them. But this is to misinterpret the lines under which love traces. We hence don’t usually get angry with the people who are truly to blame for hurting us. Rather, we get angry with those whom we are sure will endure us for blaming them. So we get angry with the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in our niche, the ones actually least likely to have caused us any harm, but still stick around while we blame them for having done everything wrong. The words we exclaim to our lovers undoubtedly sound awful. But let’s at least remember that we almost instinctively tell them, we don't dare say to anyone else.

To some extent, we get outraged with our partners because we designate them to such a deep role in our lives. We have faith that a person who understands these arcane parts of us, whose mere existence solves so many of our despair, couldn’t realistically also be someone who would be unable to fix every one of our issues in life. We accuse this effect of being confusedly interpreted as a sadistic lack of affection, care and love and we want to make them as unhappy as it seems they have made us. We amplify our partners’ ability, a magnification that is an echo – heard in adult life down the decades – of a child’s awe at their parents. When we blame our partners, we are remembering what it felt like when we loved a parent who knew us to our core, who could effortlessly swing us up to the sky, who could find our pet bunny toy when it got lost, who ensured there was habitual food in the fridge, who were just perfect... The partner, when loved dearly, inherits a little of that beautiful, romantic, but also dangerously unfair trust, we as children once had in our parents. On one level, the lover becomes a reassurance to the anxious child in us – that’s why we love them so blindly. But this source of strength also brings with it some very serious problems, for the primitive part of us insists on trusting them a little too much, believing that they actually control far more in existence than they ever possibly could.

This Irrational game of Blame & Love, is at heart just a symptom of the intensity of dependency in another person. We attack so fiercely because we have so deeply entangled our hopes and anxieties with our lover. It is because we are so very close to them that they draw us into unknown places of discomfort and distress – from which absolutely everyone else is excluded. That is one of the more obscure and yet from a very innocent angle, a facet of love.

by Deepika Manjunath