a slightly too regular basis is: ‘Why are other people so awful? How come they are so

unreliable, aggressive, deceitful, mean, two-faced or cowardly?’ As we search for answers,

we tend quite naturally to fall back on a standard, compact and tempting explanation:

because they are terrible people. They are appalling, crooked, deformed or ‘bad’;

that’s simply how some types are. The conclusion may be grim, but it also feels very true and

fundamentally unbudgeable. However, when things feel especially clear cut, we may be goaded

to try out an unusual thought experiment, which stands to challenge a great many of

our certainties and render the world usefully more complicated: we can try to look at our

fellow humans through the eyes of love. The experiment requires particular stamina and

is best attempted at quieter, less agitated times of day. When we manage it, it may count

as one of our highest ethical achievements. We are normally resolutely on our side, deeply

invested in our own point of view and prone to trade in settled and moralising certainties.

Yet, very occasionally, we have the strength to look at other people through a different

lens: we notice that their reality is likely to be far more complicated and nuanced than

we first expected – and that, contrary to our impulses, they may be deserving of more

sympathy and consideration than we thought, even though they have hurt and frustrated

us, even though their behaviour runs contrary to what we expect – and even though the

temptation is to call them idiots and numbskulls and move on.

Looking at another person through the eyes

of love involves some of the following: – Imagination Moralistic-thinking identifies people closely

with their worst moments. Love-thinking pushes us in another direction, it bids us to use

our imaginations to picture why someone might have done a regrettable deed and yet could

remain a fitting target for a degree of understanding and sympathy. Perhaps they got very frightened,

maybe they were under pressure of extreme anxiety and despair.

Those who look

with love guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings or

a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They intimate

that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They

will remember that the person before them was once a baby too. The loving interpreter

holds on to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface – along with the possibility

of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances; to any bits of

the truth that could cast a less catastrophic light on folly and ‘nastiness’.

To consider others with love means forever remembering the child within them.

Our wrong do'er may be fully grown but their actions will always be connected up with their early years.

We overlook the need occasionally to ignore the outward adult sides of others in order to perceive

and sympathise with the angry confused infant lurking inside. When we are around small children

who frustrate us, we don’t don’t declare them evil, we don’t bear down on them to

show them how misguided they are. We find less alarming ways of grasping how they have

come to say or do certain things. We don’t readily assign a negative motive or mean intention

to a small person; we reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We probably

think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore or they are upset by the

arrival of a younger sibling. We’ve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations

ready in our heads. This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults; here we

imagine that others have deliberately got us in their sights. But if we employed the

infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different. Given

how immature every adult necessarily remains, some of the moves we execute with relative

ease around children must forever continue to be relevant when we’re dealing with another

grown-up.

Moralistic thinkers reach their certainties swiftly; love thinkers take their time. They

remain serene in the face of obviously unimpressive behaviour: a sudden loss of temper, a wild

accusation, a very mean remark. They reach instinctively for reasonable explanations

and have clearly in their minds the better moments of a currently frantic but essentially

loveable person.

Love-thinkers interpret everyone as having strengths alongside

their obvious weaknesses. When they encounter

these weaknesses, they do not conclude that this is all there is, they know that almost

everything on the negative side of a ledger could be connected up with something on the

positive. They search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a

maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic

and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and

honesty. We may know so much about a person’s messiness, we forget their uncommon degree

of creative enthusiasm. There is no such thing as a person with only strengths, but nor is

there someone with only weaknesses. The consolation comes in refusing to view defects in isolation.

Love is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free

people do not exist. – We Are Sinners Too The single greatest spur towards a loving

perspective on others is a live awareness that we are also deeply imperfect and at points

quite plainly mad. The enemy of generosity is the sense that we might be beyond fault

– whereas love begins when we can acknowledge that we are in equal measures idiotic, mentally

wobbly and flawed. It’s an implicit faith in their own perfection that turns some people

into such harsh judges Looking at the world through the eyes of love, we are forced to

conclude that there is no such thing as a simply bad person, and no such thing as a

monster. There is only ever pain, anxiety and suffering that have coalesced into unfortunate

action. We are not just being kind in this notion; this isn’t merely an exercise in

being nice, it’s an exercise in getting to the truth of things, which may – when

we get down to the details of human psychology – be roughly and almost coincidentally the

same thing.

To learn more about love and how to find love, which explains why we have the types we do and how our earlier experiences shape how and whom we love.