Why do we want to help those we love? We often forget that it is almost always the wrong thing to do. I’m not talking about diving into a burning aeroplane, I’m talking about the little things, like giving advice on how to boil an egg, or offering to teach your girlfriend how to play pool.
Why do we want to help those we love? When I ask people, most say it is the right thing to do. Bollocks; we often forget that it is almost always the wrong thing to do. I’m not talking about diving into a burning aeroplane to wrench your grandmother from the desperate clutches of a trapped and handsome bandit. Heroism is all very well. I’m talking about the little things, like giving advice on how to boil an egg, or offering to teach your girlfriend how to play pool so she can join you at the Smoky Armpit.
After years of gory mishap, I still try to help, and I still get helped. Why, why this madness? I’ve answered countless rhetorical questions about clothing, offered driving advice, and tried to teach a girlfriend how to stop in ice skates. I have learned that nothing dents a relationship more convincingly than one person helping another to eat less, exercise more, clean their office, choose from a menu, or talk to their parents. And yet, every day thousands of relationships run aground because someone tried to help. I call it ‘assistive dysfunction’ or, in lay terms, the helping problem. Assistive dysfunction often begins with the irresistible urge to ‘be there’ for someone.
Parents and children suffer from particularly nasty forms of assistive dysfunction. For the first eleven years of a child’s life assistive dysfunction works in the opposite way. Every time you are not able to help, your child is left helpless and cross and miserable. From about age eleven this reverses, and, with increasing intensity, helping is the last thing you should offer to do till their early twenties, when they realise they’ve ignored ten years of valuable advice, only to discover that there’s very little left for you to teach them.
Anyone who has been in a relationship long enough to have the egg-boiling conversation will know that the trick to being there for someone is not to know what they are thinking at any given moment, although it is tempting to try this. The trick is to be strong enough to watch them struggle in misery and grim determination until they figure things out for themselves. And then, importantly, never let on that you could have helped in the first place. This stoicism is far harder to bear. It takes great strength of character. And there is no certainty that it will ever be recognised. Very few reach these heights, and most are unfairly labelled ‘mean humbugs’ along the way.
Recognising assistive dysfunction in your own life is the first step to truly overcoming it. Unfortunately there is no second or third step. And if there was, I couldn’t possibly tell you.