What Love Island doesn’t teach us about love

Not because she has her final English exam that day or because this marks the end of my parenting – I intend to go on annoying her for a long while yet – but because I’ve neglected to teach her about the one thing that truly matters in life.

Love.

I only realised my oversight when I noticed she was glued to Love Island Australia, surely the most shallow, selfish, ignorant, blatantly performative and – frankly – unloving show ever to grace our screens.

Could we not watch Jane Austen’s Emma again? After all it is one of her English set texts and a far more subtle and sophisticated examination of love.

No, she said emphatically. It was challenging enough having to write about Austen’s “distinctive narrative style” without having your mother invoke an 18th century literary heroine with weird hair as a role model for matters of the heart.

And so, as she studies upstairs – or more likely online shops for those bum-revealing bikinis so beloved by Love Island contestants – I’ve compiled a few thoughts on love.

I’ve long believed our kids should learn more about personal finance and relationships while they’re at school but this is hardly the year to shoulder teachers with anything more.

So while I may be a poor authority on the subject, here’s a few things I wish I’d known when I was 18:

■ All relationship experts say you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else and while I wholeheartedly agree, you can’t just wake up with self-love or pop it on like you might a new jumper. Like any love it has to be learned and finessed. Essentially, be the person you want to be with. As well as really enjoying your own company, it’s delighting in all that you – just you – finds delightful whether that’s clean sheets or dusk walks or ocean swims. Conversely, it’s accepting your less agreeable traits. Ideally, you’ll refine them but having self-awareness means you’re better placed to acknowledge rather than defend them to others.

■ Loving another person is a risk but time teaches you that hearts are as robust as they are tender. When your heart breaks – as it will – seek out Guy Winch’s wonderful TED talk. As he says, getting over heartbreak is not a journey, it’s a fight. It’s a “complex psychological injury” but there are weapons you can use which will ultimately lead you to heal.

■ There is a lot of talk about “deal breakers” in love, presumably behaviours or characteristics that you either insist upon or won’t accept. I’ve always felt that’s prescriptive but the longer I’ve loved the more I’ve realised there is one thing I appreciate more than anything else: playfulness. Whether it’s mucking about in a tinny or squirting one another with a hose, retaining a childlike sense of humour and wonder both sweetens and solders.

■ Long love is an intricate dance between unity and autonomy: how can you manage the need for togetherness with the need
to be separate? The best way I’ve come to understand the concept is to regard it like breath or a wave; love needs to draw inwards then ebb outwards. We stand back to appreciate art so it’s no surprise that we sometimes need that distance to
both see and admire the person we love.

■ Few activities we pursue are littered with more cliches than love and we’d do well to ignore most of them. There are no “soulmates”; no one is “the one”. When choosing to commit, I like renowned therapist Esther Perel’s suggestion of choosing a person you can imagine yourself writing a story with, with all the edits and revisions that will entail.

■ If you’re experiencing more arguments than harmony, you’re actually in an “entanglement” rather than a relationship. Experts say this often occurs because of expectations, past conditioning and unexpressed emotions, and you may need to get professional help to break patterns of behaviour. It’s staggering that so many resist seeing a psychologist yet they’ll take medication for high blood pressure or see a physiotherapist for a sore back.

■ Pauses are life’s overlooked gift. They give us time to marshal our thoughts; to respond rather than react. In a world that turns on clicks and swipes, slow consideration is more valuable than ever.

■ You don’t “find” a good relationship, you create one, and central to that is a willingness to raise issues. Time has taught me that harmony is not just an ability to “get on well”, it’s having the capacity to approach conflict with curiosity rather than criticism or defensiveness. Relationship guru Dr John Gottman regards the latter – along with contempt and stonewalling – as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the negative behaviours that spell disaster for relationships.

■Finally, few relationships survive if they are not underpinned with kindness. If I could impress on my daughter just one line from Austen’s Emma it is this: “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”

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