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  • A dark and frightening way to predict what might happen in your relationship with a new person is to ask them what happened to them in their childhood. Often, we stand to hear a sad and sombre tale in which our partner was cast in the role of a victim, as children typically are. For example, at a young age, their parents turned against your partner and diverted their attention to a younger sibling. They became deaf to their calls for attention and treated them unreliably, and then denied that they had done so, scrambling the poor child's sense of reality. Or their parents didn't give them warmth and care and left them feeling that there was something wrong with them for wanting love. Or their parents humiliated them for not being good enough, perhaps not sufficiently cultured or sporty, sociable or tidy. In the early days of a relationship, we are liable to be extremely sympathetic to these stories. Our heart reaches out to the younger version of our companion, whom we would have wanted to hug tightly and reassure. However, it can be a long time – as many as three to four years – before something more alarming comes into view, which we very often aren't able to analyse or interpret, let alone prevent.

  • Our partner may, unconsciously, start to enact in our relationship the very same dynamic as they experienced in their childhood, but with one key difference. This time, they are in the role of the perpetrator and we, unwittingly, are cast in the role of their victim. So, for example, our partner may mysteriously cool on us and begin to get highly attached to a friend or colleague. When we complain and ask for their love back, they pretend that we are imagining that they are being distant or unreliable, leaving us puzzled as to what might be unfolding. Or our partner may withdraw from us emotionally and sexually, leaving us knocking at the castle door, hoping to be let back in. Or our partner may start to become snide and mocking about our apparent insufficiencies, calling us uncreative or uncultured, which had never appeared to bother them before. What on earth is going on? The explanation may run like this. In the deep minds of our partner, it appears that there really are only two positions that one can adopt in a relationship. Either one is the perpetrator or one is the victim – that is, after all, exactly what their childhood taught them. And in the choice between these two, rather naturally, our partner has decided to adopt the exclusively safe stance that their parents once enjoyed, the perpetrator role, and then cast us as their victim. We must suffer in the way they did, for only then can they feel, in the recesses of their psyches, that they are not going to be tormented all over again. Their behaviour is letting us know what they had to go through – and are dementedly keen never to have to endure again.

  • The way out of this horrific possibility is to become hugely aware of it, to bring it into circulation in the couple and to search for evidence of it in oneself and the other.

  • More profoundly, the task is to start to see that, unlike what childhood may have taught, there is in fact very much one central and redeeming alternative available to being a victim or a perpetrator. There is a role that, tragically, no one showed a child as their mind was forming, but that is the true goal of all genuine loving relationships – that of being the nurturer, the one who heals, who offers, who comforts and who cares, the one we are all craving to have – and, in our healthier moments, are all longing to be.

A dark and frightening way to predict what might happen in your relationship with a new person is to ask them what happened to them in their childhood. Often, we stand to hear a sad and sombre tale in which our partner was cast in the role of a victim, as children typically are. For example, at a young age, their parents turned against your partner and diverted their attention to a younger sibling. They became deaf to their calls for attention and treated them unreliably, and then denied that they had done so, scrambling the poor child's sense of reality. Or their parents didn't give them warmth and care and left them feeling that there was something wrong with them for wanting love. Or their parents humiliated them for not being good enough, perhaps not sufficiently cultured or sporty, sociable or tidy. In the early days of a relationship, we are liable to be extremely sympathetic to these stories. Our heart reaches out to the younger version of our companion, whom we would have wanted to hug tightly and reassure. However, it can be a long time – as many as three to four years – before something more alarming comes into view, which we very often aren't able to analyse or interpret, let alone prevent.

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