One of the most important capacities for our relationships — and for the way we see ourselves and the world — is the ability to hold two contradictory truths at the same time.
To be able, that is, to recognise that a person can hurt us at certain moments and at the same time be important to us. That a relationship can be difficult for us and at the same time help us grow. That we can love and choose someone without liking every side of them all the time.
This capacity is a marker of emotional maturity and psychological flexibility. It is not about denying difficulties, nor about tolerating abusive behaviour. It is about being able to see the complexity of human experience without collapsing into disappointment or rushing to absolute conclusions.
An emotionally less mature organism tends to categorise people, relationships and experiences as absolutely “good” or absolutely “bad”. When it feels safe, it idealises. When it is hurt or disappointed, it devalues or rejects wholesale.
In reality, though, psychological development is connected with the ability to bear the fact that people are not one-dimensional. That within every relationship, connection and disappointment coexist, closeness and frustration, love and anger. And that intimacy is not built through perfection, but through the capacity to bear this complexity.
This is visible from childhood development onwards. Developmentally, small children find it hard to see a person whole, with all their contradictory sides. Mother or father is either “perfect” and beloved or “bad” and to be rejected. So a child may say “I love you” one moment and “I hate you” shortly afterwards.
Many parents are hurt when they hear these phrases and fear that the child is really rejecting them. In reality, though, the child has not yet fully developed the capacity to hold both experiences together emotionally: that they love a person and are angry with them at the same time.
As we grow up, this difficulty often continues to appear in adult relationships too. Our partner may trigger us with something they do, and in that moment the impulse arises to devalue them, to reject them, or to believe that they are not right for us after all.
When we are inside distress, anger or frustration, we find it hard to remember what connects us to the other person. Emotional intensity temporarily narrows our view. So a moment of disappointment can be experienced as proof that the whole relationship is wrong.
But in healthy relationships, we do not love the other person because they never disappoint us. We love them while knowing that at times they will make things difficult, will anger us, or will let us down. We can love someone and at the same time dislike their behaviour at certain moments. And this does not necessarily mean that the relationship is wrong or unsuitable for us.
Often, when the reality of a relationship collides with what we imagined or expected, a sense quickly arises that something is wrong. That perhaps the other person is not the right one, or that the relationship is not good enough and not what we really want and need.
Frequently, however, it is not the existence of difficulties that determines the quality of a relationship, but the way we handle them. Meaningful relationships do not come about by magic, nor are they built on the absence of conflict. They are built through the capacity of two people to bear disappointment, to communicate what hurts, and to return to one another after a rupture.
If every disappointment automatically means the other person is bad, unsuitable or wrong, then intimacy becomes almost impossible. Because real intimacy requires being able to say: “What happened hurt me. I am struggling. I am angry. But I want to understand what happened between us and whether we can work on it together.”
This is where the deep significance of repair lies — an extremely important concept in human relationships and particularly in psychotherapy. Repair means being able to return to what hurt, to acknowledge the difficulty, the pain or the rupture that was created, and to try to rebuild the connection, rather than pretending nothing happened and that we will forget it.
Secure relationships are not relationships without ruptures. They are relationships in which return, acknowledgement and reconnection are possible.
The ability to see a person whole, and not through absolute categories, is a deeply human and mature stance towards relationships. It means being able to see the mistakes, the failures and the weaknesses, without erasing everything else that makes up the person in front of us.
And perhaps, in the end, this is one of the hardest but most essential parts of psychological maturation: to bear the fact that the people we love will never be only what we need, but neither only what hurt us.
Just as we ourselves are not.
