or are up in the north on a course or went  on a hiking trip with their friends - is such  

an unpleasant emotion, it feels peculiar to  suggest that it is also, at a profound level,  

an extraordinary achievement and an important  marker of emotional maturity. It is in no way  

simple for a prototypical adult to be  able to miss anyone and we are often,  

almost without knowing it, engaged in complex  manoeuvres to ensure that we resolutely won’t.

Small children - for better and for worse  - miss people a lot. They show us - without  

compunction or defences - what missing looks  like in its rawest, most unbounded state,  

and it is not always a pretty or relaxing  sight. The wails can be heard across the  

street. ‘Don’t leave me,’ a small child  will scream with heart-rending intensity,  

as we implore them to understand that we just  need to pop out to the shops and will be back  

in ten minutes. ‘Why do you need to go?’  they beg, as they hold onto our sleeve,  

their face streaked with tears, and we watch our  plans disintegrate in contact with their despair.

Eventually, a child grows up to feel ashamed of  their early hysterics. Somewhere along the line,  

they give in to the many lectures they receive  about the need to be reasonable and let others  

get on with their lives; something in  them can no longer deny the logic that,  

yes, it probably does make some sense  that the people we cherish have to be  

allowed to abandon us, perhaps for long  stretches, like quarter of an hour,  

or god forbid, a day, even a month  or sometimes (heavens above) years.

It sounds like progress - but it should not  obscure the dangers involved in growing up to  

be a very good little man or woman who everyone  can be so proud of for the quiet way they now  

play with their toys when those they cherish  vanish from sight. The risk is not merely that  

we become a bit more forebearing but that, in  the name of reason, we cease to be able to feel  

anything much at all; that, in the process  of growing up, we lose our capacity to love.

We may grow so allergic to the pain that belongs  to genuine attachment, we barricade ourselves  

behind a range of defensive manoeuvres. We may  - for example - reconfigure who any person who  

leaves us can possibly be - in order that their  absence might perturb us a little less. On the  

eve of a departure, we may abruptly realise that  - whatever we had once assumed - the absconder  

is in reality horribly disorganised, they chew  their food in a maddening way and they never  

have anything too interesting to say about  the latest novels or scientific discoveries.  

It doesn’t appear that we really have any  particular cause to miss them very much,  

for why would we lament the absence of someone  who was not especially worthwhile to begin with?

Or we may go through the outward rituals of  absence while privately not fully registering  

that anyone has actually really gone. When they  call us from another continent in the late hours,  

we may find that we’ve just remembered that  there’s a crack in the ceiling we need to get  

on to in the morning - or an email we have  to send to a supplier at work. We may find  

that it’s impossible to accord them too much  thought given how angry we have become about  

a dispute with a neighbour or how worried we  are about an odd new twinge in our left knee.

It’s an immense achievement to be able both  to care for someone and endure their absence,  

to feel a wound without resorting to numbness,  rage or an affair, to miss someone without  

reinventing what the missing person means to us.  We’ll have begun to accede to genuine emotional  

maturity when we rediscover the courage to be  hurt by those we love - when we can acknowledge,  

with some of the honesty of our younger selves,  just how much it hurts when someone we adore  

crosses an ocean - or has the impudence to go off  to the shops for an afternoon with their friends.