Maturity : the ever-elusive goal
Many of our arguments had this quality of unfairness, in the sense that they were excuses for expressing feelings that did not belong to the present moment or indeed to either of us. I might get furious with Chloe not for the surface reason that she was emptying the dishwasher very noisily when I was trying to watch the news, but because I was feeling anxious and guilty about not answering a difficult business call earlier in the day. Chloe might in turn have been deliberately making lots of noise in an effort to symbolize an anger she had not communicated to me that morning.
We could perhaps define maturity – that ever-elusive goal – as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.
From Essays in Love, a novel by Alain de Botton.
