There are things about love that are difficult to learn alone.
You can think about relationships.
You can watch other people have them.
You can become very good at explaining attachment, communication, boundaries and all the different ways people manage to hurt one another.
Then someone matters to you.
The problem changes.
Now there are consequences.
You can misunderstand someone you genuinely don't want to misunderstand. You can say something badly and watch it land. You can become angry, frightened, jealous or embarrassed and discover that knowing why you're reacting doesn't make the reaction disappear.
You also get access to things that aren't available from outside.
Someone can see you having a terrible day and not become frightened by it.
You can make a mistake, apologize and discover that the relationship survives.
You can tell someone something you've been carefully managing alone and watch them remain basically the same person after hearing it.
Sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all.
That's useful information too.
I've had moments when another person's response changed my understanding of what was happening.
I was expecting judgment.
They asked a question.
I was preparing an explanation.
They already understood.
I thought I needed to get myself under control before returning to the conversation.
They were willing to talk while I was still figuring out what I felt.
Experiences like that can revise assumptions we didn't know we were carrying.
Not immediately.
One good relationship doesn't erase everything that came before it. Someone who learned to expect abandonment doesn't stop expecting it because another person stayed once.
They may not even trust the staying at first.
That's part of the problem.
We don't enter relationships as blank people.
We arrive having already learned things.
Some of those lessons came from people who loved us well. Others came from people who loved us badly. Some came from relationships that had nothing to do with love at all.
Then another person encounters the accumulated result.
Over time, something interesting can happen.
An expectation meets a different outcome often enough that the expectation starts to loosen.
You expect anger and get curiosity.
You expect silence and get conversation.
You expect someone to solve the problem and discover that what you wanted was company while you solved it yourself.
You expect someone to stay and learn that sometimes they won't.
That last one belongs here too.
Love doesn't teach us only that people remain.
Sometimes it teaches us that we can survive their leaving.
Sometimes a person who loves us refuses something we desperately want from them.
Sometimes they tell us we're wrong.
Sometimes they see us clearly enough not to participate in something we're doing to ourselves.
Being accepted isn't the same as having everything about us accepted.
That distinction matters because otherwise love becomes another word for reassurance.
I think it can do something more useful than that.
A close relationship gives another person enough access to affect our model of ourselves.
That's dangerous.
It's also part of what makes the relationship capable of teaching us anything.
Someone else notices what happens when we're tired.
They see capacities we regard as ordinary.
They encounter our explanations and occasionally don't believe them.
They remember what we said six months ago.
And we do the same for them.
Neither person becomes an objective observer.
If anything, love makes objectivity harder.
We have preferences about what happens to people we love. We want certain interpretations to be true. We can protect them when we shouldn't, judge them unfairly because we're hurt, or mistake our familiarity with them for complete understanding.
Love doesn't make us accurate.
It gives us another place from which information can arrive.
That information can travel.
Someone who experienced conflict as dangerous may eventu