Name: 愛を避けるために私たちがすること (The Lengths We Go To Avoid Love)
Uploaded: 2025-07-25T18:04:24.000Z
Duration: 6 min 18 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

転換語

The idea of trying to avoid love sounds paradoxical in the extreme. Why would anyone take steps to deny themselves an experience which seems so plainly positive and life-enhancing? Plenty of people are denied love by external forces. Why would anyone take active measures to sabotage love if it lay before them? The answer can only be found by looking back in time. Though we all crave love in theory, our capacity to accept it in practice is critically dependent on the quality of our early emotional experiences. To abbreviate sharply, we can only willingly tolerate being loved if, as children, the process of loving and being loved felt sufficiently reliable, safe and kind. Some of us were not so blessed. Some of us were stymied in our search for love in ways we have not yet recovered from or fully understood. Perhaps the person we wanted to love fell ill or grew depressed. Or at the height of our dependence on them, they went away or had a new family or turned their attention to a younger sibling.

愛を避けようとする考えは、極端に逆説的に聞こえる。これほどまでにポジティブで人生を豊かにしてくれそうな経験を、なぜ自ら否定しようとするのだろうか？外的な力によって愛を否定される人はたくさんいる。愛が目の前にあるのなら、それを妨害するような積極的な手段を取る人がいるのだろうか？その答えは、過去を振り返ることでしか見つからない。理論的には誰もが愛を切望しているが、実際にそれを受け入れることができるかどうかは、初期の感情体験の質に決定的に左右される。簡潔に言えば、私たちは子供の頃、愛し愛される過程が十分に信頼で

再帰代名詞

Or perhaps our parental figure was constantly at the office or unavailable behind a locked study door. They might have had a violent, unpredictable temper or left us somehow feeling that we were just never good enough for them. As a result, to an extent we may not even have realised, we became experts at independence. We came to associate safety with a high degree of self-protective isolation. We might have become big readers or fascinated by the animal world or obsessed with music or computer games. Without quite knowing we had done so, we learnt never to trust a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional human again. Our experiences may not have affected the strength of our longing for love, but they have heavily impacted our capacity to endure mutually satisfying relationships. We may now, as adults, tell ourselves that we want closeness and surrender. We will sob sincerely when we lose love, but we are continually taking steps to ensure we will never be at any sustained risk of finding it. The true terror for us is not that love should fail, but that it should, by some oversight on our part, succeed. For this would ask of us a level of defencelessness and exposure to another person and to a chance of happiness that has no precedent in our lives and poses immense, ego-shattering challenges to the armoured way our personalities have been structured.

あるいは、私たちの親はいつも職場にいるか、鍵のかかった書斎のドアの向こうにいて連絡がつかないのかもしれない。暴力的で予測不可能な気性の持ち主であったかもしれないし、「自分は親にふさわしくない」と感じていたかもしれない。その結果、自分でも気づかないうちに、私たちは自立のエキスパートになった。安全とは、高度に自己防衛的な孤立であると考えるようになったのだ。読書家になったり、動物の世界に夢中になったり、音楽やコンピューターゲームに夢中になったりした。そうとは知らずに、私たちは生身の三次元の人間を二度と信用しない

基礎受動態

For the love-scared among us, we are constantly at work taking careful steps to ensure that any relationship we are in will flounder. We pick partners with an element of built-in obsolescence about them, some reason why in the end a relationship with them isn't going to be able to work out, people who just happen to be living on another continent or who are married to someone else or are impossibly distant to us in age. We beg for love from people who, as we know in our unconscious, are guaranteed not to want or be able to give it to us. We complain repeatedly that people we are involved with don't love us properly.

愛に怯える私たちは、どんな関係でもうまくいかないように、常に慎重に行動している。たまたま別の大陸に住んでいたり、別の人と結婚していたり、年齢がどうしようもなく離れていたりするような、陳腐化する要素を組み込んだ相手を選ぶ。私たちは、無意識のうちに、愛を求めても与えてくれるはずがないとわかっている人たちに愛を乞う。付き合っている人が自分をちゃんと愛してくれないと何度も不平を言う。

The real worry is that they might. To ward off such an eventuality, we keep finding flaws.

本当に心配なのは、そうなるかもしれないということだ。そのような事態を避けるために、私たちは欠点を見つけ続ける。

We'll point out that this one is often late, that one doesn't exercise enough, that one doesn't speak any foreign languages and this one isn't sufficiently creative. Robustly determined to find any conceivable reason why, alas, no one quite suits our needs.

この人はよく遅刻する、この人は運動不足だ、この人は外国語が話せない、この人は創造性が足りない、と指摘する。しかし、残念なことに、私たちのニーズにぴったり合う人はいない。

If we find ourselves in a relationship, we will assiduously practice the arts of what psychologists call distance management. When the chance of reaching a truly happy state appears, we'll subtly discover ways to introduce a chasm. We'll have an argument, spoil a birthday, ruin a holiday. We'll find we have to do a lot of work for an upcoming exam or presentation, that our gang of friends needs us to be somewhere else, that we forgot to return the credit card or tax bill, that our appearance requires a lot of our attention or that we like to flirt with a stranger at a party who suddenly seems very attractive indeed. In both tiny and large ways, we'll know just how to lower the mood, scupper a bond and destroy trust. Perhaps not enough to end a relationship completely, but certainly enough to worry our partner sufficiently as to our solidity that we can be privately sure things will never truly fly. Friends may commiserate with us on our so-called bad luck. Psychologists will note our superlative skill at romantic sabotage. With this to sound a bit like us, compassion is required. We should reflect back on our pasts and wonder at the connection between our fractured bonds with parental figures and our disrupted adult attachments. We aren't like this because we're wicked, we've just been very badly hurt. Once we understand how our skill at independence was acquired, we'll be in a better position to see that it has in reality outlived its rationale. We may still feel immensely apprehensive at the prospect of contentment, but we may finally be able to admit that we are, first and foremost, acting out of fear. Rather than dismissing our partners, we may stick closer to a much more awkward truth – that we're tempted to draw away from them because we're immensely scared that they might finally be in a position to make us very happy – and that simply nothing so unutterably and boundlessly frightening has ever happened to us before.

もし私たちが恋愛関係にあることに気づけば、心理学者が「距離の管理」と呼ぶ術を熱心に実践するだろう。本当に幸せな状態に到達するチャンスが現れたら、私たちはさりげなく亀裂を生じさせる方法を発見する。口論をし、誕生日を台無しにし、休日を台無しにする。今度の試験やプレゼンのためにたくさん仕事をしなければならないことに気づいたり、友人たちが私たちを別の場所に呼び出したり、クレジットカードや税金の請求書を返し忘れたり、自分の外見に多くの注意を払わなければならないことに気づいたり、パーティーで突然とても魅力的に見えた見