Intimate terrorism
« Disappointment is another of those emotions that blends both love and hate, and it can be a particularly fruitful one. It has the potential to create a new mood between people if they can find an ironical stance toward it, which prevents it from curdling into disillusionment. Disappointment combines sorrow and anger, and it reaches with a kind of yearning toward the other person. At the same time, it keeps the other at bay by treating him or her as a diminished figure, one that failed to live up to expectations. In therapy, when you talk openly with a fighting couple about each antagonist’s disappointment, it helps soften the rigid idealizations each of them continues to cling to through holding on to feelings of betrayal. Unlike jealousy, cruelty, or boredom, disappointment constains secret hints of mutuality. It can interrupt what New Yorker drama critic John Lahr, reviewing an Arthur Miller play about a tortured marriage, called « the cycle of blame that has infected and seems to have stalemated modern life… with an irrational, often righteous fury that is at once a mask and an admission of fear ». It is not such a long stretch from disappointment to empathy. »
From Intimate Terrorism, The crisis of love in an age of disillusion, by Michael Vincent Miller.
