Looking after ourselves requires a rare skill: a capacity to disappoint another person in the name of our own protection. 

To remain sane, we may have to decline a friend’s suggestion – and in love, upset someone else substantially. 

To someone who doesn’t possess a full tank of inner love, how dare one turn down the love of another, even if it comes wrapped in tricky or poisonous elements? 

Children who grow up in the company of difficult adults settle on doing one thing extremely well: hoping against hope that these adults will magically change and learn to be kind. 

This kind of 'patience' is then transferred into their adult relationships, with similarly negligible results.

Our willingness to quit a bad relationship is to some extent a measure of our confidence that being on our own will be tolerable and that we'll be able to manage it. 

How much better to watch our best hopes crash helplessly against the shores of our current partner’s obdurate and quietly or even unconsciously sadistic personality?

We find nice people instinctively boring and unsexy. This usually has its roots in a troubled past, which makes us unusually unforgiving towards genuine kindness.

If we knew ourselves better, we would find out that some of our potential partners feel wrong because we know they will be unable to deliver the sort of suffering that we’ve grown up to feel is essential to our sense of feeling loved.