'Love is ... treating your partner's worst aspects kindly'

I trundled into the living room, consumed with triumphant victimhood. He had chosen the wrong moment to provoke me, and I would hold him to account for this appalling behaviour.

I clutched the kitchen bin in my arms as though tenderly cradling the lifeless body of a cat freshly smashed into the road by a van. My partner Jules was sitting on the couch reading his copy of Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society and wearing a reasonable expression. Standing before him with the all the dignified but wounded righteousness of a queen without a kingdom, I held the bin open so that he could see inside.

Making unbroken eye contact, and with a thudding heart, I declared, “I am 9 out of 10 angry with you right now”.

It was arguably the least articulate statement made since Donald Trump declared “I am like, a smart person”, but anger washed balmily over the certain knowledge that I was being an unremitting ass, and I stood firm. Jules looked up from his book. “Um . . . pardon?” he asked, politely.

"You threw away my leftover onion bhaji from last night! I had been looking forward to eating it and you just threw it away as though it wasn't important."

Edge of a shriek

Somewhere toward the back of my mind, I was conscious that my voice was grazing the sharp metallic edge of a shriek. I was acting as though Jules had casually thrown a beloved niece or nephew into the kitchen refuse, and then cheerfully sat down to read.

His was the best possible reaction that anyone could have to their partner acting like an insecure child. After laughing at me for about a minute straight (I wouldn’t begrudge him that, because I mean really), he responded with generosity, despite my objectively silly behaviour.

A shameful incident of this magnitude is normally unusual for me (and hopefully everyone else over the age of eight). Still, it prompted some interesting thoughts. That is, after I had apologised for behaving like a chimp whose fruit had been confiscated and agreed that the phrase “I am 9 out of 10 angry with you right now’ must enter common parlance in our household as an instant mood lightener. In a fit of shame remembering the incident while washing my face that night, I realised how frequently we all show our partners the worst sides of ourselves by acting like juveniles.

Jules isn’t without guilt, by the way. For example, he is prone to complaining petulantly that I’ve “overfilled” the cup of tea I will sometimes brave the morning freeze barefoot to make him before he gets up.

It really does seem that much of real, meaningful love is composed not of admiring the best aspects of your partner, but of treating their worst aspects kindly. Love is at least partially not acting on the impulse to call someone a douchebag when they act like a child.

Desire to dominate

This got me thinking of another person who is prone to a spot of overreaction: Augustine of Hippo. One of the most influential early Christian theologians and philosophers, Augustine is the one we have to thank for the concept of original sin. Not exactly an optimist, Augustine held that everything we as humans do is somewhat sullied. We are consumed by what he called libido dominandi – a desire to dominate, which leads us to be consumed by our appetitive natures.

We can’t help but treat others as less human than ourselves, we are too proud and self-involved to really love, and our understanding is too limited to really know ourselves. In essence, all attempts at happiness (except, of course, the sort of happiness that brings us closer to God) are futile.

It goes without saying that these ideas are, taken at face value, grindingly depressing. But they can also be comforting because they suggest that our capacity to become incensed over a discarded onion bhaji is a petulance that springs from human nature. Though Augustine suggests we are rather confined to these patterns by nature, I prefer to think that we can use his framework to better understand how pathetic we can be, and still try to do better.

After all, I really was 9 out of 10 sorry afterwards.