I’ve Been a Therapist for 40 Years. Here’s What I Can Tell You about Love

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This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Stephen Grosz

Before sitting down in my consulting room, Matt A. stepped forward and shook my hand. He was an athletic and handsome forty-seven-year-old man. He wore a white cashmere sweater, black Chelsea boots, and tortoiseshell glasses. His red watchband matched his socks.

Typically, people who come to see me for a consultation begin by describing a problem; Matt began by describing himself. He told me that he worked in Downing Street as a political strategist and consultant for then British prime minister Tony Blair. This was 1999. He had been married for twenty years and had three teenage children. He described his family—his wife, Jemima, a barrister, and his two sons and daughter—with tenderness and detail. He had a season ticket to Tottenham Hotspur football club and loved to take his children to watch Spurs on the weekend and then come home and cook for them. He especially enjoyed it when the children joined him in the kitchen, put on a CD, and bopped around.

He gave me vivid, affectionate portraits of his parents—his mother was a professor of German language and literature, and his father was a linguist now working as a civil servant at Government Communications Headquarters. Matt was part of a close, extended family, sixteen in all: his parents, their three children, their spouses, and eight grandchildren. This group celebrated Christmases together and spent two weeks every summer in St. Ives at his parents’ summer house. Matt was proud of his children’s close, loving relationship with their cousins and family.

Matt was successful and happy at work. The picture of his life was buoyant.

“Tell me why you’re here,” I said.

I have been a psychoanalyst for forty years. What I’ve learned in my work is that we deceive ourselves about love—the who, what, and why. But we also have the power to undo self-deception. Love’s labour is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and our loved ones. It is our attempt to join the world as it is.

“Love,” Iris Murdoch writes, “is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” She goes on: “Love is the discovery of reality.”

Penetrating the familiar is hard work. The greatest obstacle to learning