Agatha Christie gives this line to Margot Bence, who was adopted at five and sent away at nine when her adoptive mother fell pregnant with her own child. The fury in it sounds like it should be about loss and a child who was loved and then abandoned. But when you read it again, the fury is pointed somewhere else. She’s angry about the years she spent being certain she was wanted, and what that certainty cost her once it turned out to be wrong.
And then at some point you realised your investment in the relationship was bigger than theirs.
We all know some version of this. You trusted someone. A parent or friend, someone you’d have said was safe. And then at some point you realised your investment in the relationship was bigger than theirs. You were organising your emotional life around someone who was keeping you in a drawer. And the feeling that stays longest, much longer than the sadness, is embarrassment. You feel foolish, replay conversations and see them differently now, and you think, how did I miss that? What was so wrong with my judgement that I didn’t see it?
Children who discover that love depends on their performance
Donald Winnicott wrote about what happens to children who discover that love depends on their performance. They build what he called a false self, a version of themselves designed to secure the attachment and to be whatever the other person seems to need. And the trouble is that this self works. It’s good at reading rooms and at keeping things even. It can take decades to notice you’re still running the same programme and still being the accommodating version of yourself that you developed at eight or nine when you figured out that the love wasn’t guaranteed. By the time most of us see this in ourselves we’re well into middle age and have built entire relationships on it, friendships and partnerships and even the way we mother, all of it shaped by a self that was designed to keep someone else happy.
The worst thing anyone can do is to let you believe
That’s what Christie is really writing about, even inside a murder mystery. Margot says the worst thing anyone can do is to let you believe. And we feel the truth of that because the believing is where the cost is. You gave someone your full confidence, your reading of who they were and what was between you, and that reading turned out to be wrong. And then it follows you into every relationship afterwards, this question of whether you might be getting it wrong again. Whether the friend who seems close actually is and whether the person who says they love you means it the way you think they mean it. The original betrayal was one person’s cruelty or carelessness but the ongoing damage is to your own judgement, and that doesn’t heal on its own timetable.
We almost never see other people clearly, that what we call love is usually a fantasy we’ve built around the other person to serve our own needs
Iris Murdoch would have complicated this, though, and she’d have been right to. Murdoch spent most of her philosophical life arguing that we almost never see other people clearly, that what we call love is usually a fantasy we’ve built around the other person to serve our own needs. Marina loved Margot for four years, and maybe that love was genuine while it lasted. Maybe what makes it a sham in retrospect isn’t that Marina was lying but that she was loving a version of Margot that served a purpose, the adopted child who filled the gap, and when the gap was filled another way the love became unnecessary. Murdoch would say this is a more extreme version of something we all do. We love people partly for what they give us and partly because they fit a shape in our lives, and when the shape changes, sometimes the love changes too. Which is a thought many of us find hard to look at directly, because it means the line between Marina’s sham and our own ordinary way of loving is thinner than we’d like.
Most of us have been on both sides. We’ve been the one who discovered the love was less than we thought. But we’ve also been the one who pulled away
And if we’re being honest about it, most of us have been on both sides. We’ve been the one who discovered the love was less than we thought. But we’ve also been the one who pulled away. We’ve had friends we were close to and then let go of when our lives moved on. We’ve had relationships where we were fully present for a while and then simply weren’t, and we told ourselves the distance was mutual when it probably wasn’t. And the people on the receiving end of that might not use the word sham. But they might recognise something of what Margot is describing. They believed, because we let them, and we didn’t think much about what that belief was going to cost them once we’d moved on.
This kind of anger doesn’t go anywhere
Christie understood that this kind of anger doesn’t go anywhere. It’s the kind that doesn’t resolve into forgiveness or acceptance because the injury refreshes itself every time you trust someone new. You think you’ve dealt with it and had enough time, or enough therapy and then something small happens, someone cancels on you or changes their mind about something they’d promised, and there it is again, the old question of whether you’re reading this right or whether you’re being a fool again. Margot was nine when she found out. Most of us were older. I don’t think the age makes much difference in the end.
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Thank you for sharing💛✨️🙏