Ever had the feeling that you’re not getting what you want? Or, even worse, that your partner is giving you nothing? The more attentive, generous and loving you are, the more they ought to reciprocate and treat you right. Instead, all you get is zilch.
Giving and receiving are a part of every relationship. Yet, for many, these are difficult, if not impossible actions. Giving is especially sensitive, since it works at so many levels. We can give materially to our partner while depriving them emotionally, just as we can give emotionally while being unable to provide materially.
Newspapers and magazines take great delight in parading the goods lavished by celebrities on their partners — the cars, the clothes, the jewels — as if these were proof of love and value. However, everyone knows that material gifts are never a proof of love, since love cannot be proven by a price tag.
On the contrary, these gifts often indicate a problem in giving. Unable to give emotionally, we give materially, as if goods and products can fill the void of a disappointing love. Indeed, women are naturally suspicious of men who shower them with gifts. After the initial excitement, many women may decide to keep their distance.
If some people have problems in giving, what about the demand for love itself? How do we know how much to expect from those closest to us? It may be unclear what is reasonable and what isn’t.
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Sometimes we feel that we haven’t received enough, even if our partner does seem to care. We know this and don’t know it at the same time. We might react with an angry outburst or a slow-burning resentment. We just want more.
Despite this, we may be aware that our reproach to our partner for depriving us is irrational.
This is the story of many relationships. One person feels that they are getting nothing; the other feels that they are giving as much as they can. This shows a fundamental problem at the level of the demand for love itself.
Isn’t there something in the nature of our appeals to receive love that will always be disappointed? This is because the demand and the response are incommensurable. No empirical object or gesture can fulfil definitively the wish to be loved. We want to be responded to, even if the actual response always leaves something to be desired.
Many forms of love are actually disguised demands to be loved. The way we love our partner can be like an unconscious advertisement for the way we want to be loved ourselves. If a relationship is based on this, we will always feel deprived. Our wish to be loved and our partner’s proof of love can never quite balance each other out. There will be a remainder, a tension that is experienced as a sense of not getting enough.
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That’s why although we may marvel at the huge divorce settlements often reported in the press, the sum still seems like zilch to the recipient.
Millions of pounds can seem like zero, since the stakes are so much higher that what is quantifiable. Frustrated in love, nothing the ex gives is enough. Perhaps the only solution here would be to give everything, but then how can one ever know what everything is? Would it mean giving up life itself? When we experience a lack in our partner’s response to us, we should ask ourselves if it is their emotional parsimony or our own failure to realise that we are demanding too much. And that our demands can never be 100 per cent satisfied. If the latter, zilch really isn’t so bad.
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and author