Tanya Sweeney: ‘Choose to be with someone who is kind to you’

A while ago, I met an old friend and our respective partners and babies in a hotel for lunch. It was barely-controlled chaos, as you might expect with two kids under two. At one point, her partner took her son off to explore the plants in the lobby, while mine took our daughter for a nappy change. For the first time in a very long time, it was just us two.

“We did good,” she said quietly, watching her partner patiently explain cacti to a toddler. In that moment I knew exactly what she meant. We both ended up with kind men. Decent, considerate guys. Good skins.

If it sounds like a bout of smug self-congratulating, it wasn’t. Right behind those three words were almost two decades of disappointment, ghosting, heartbreak, romantic bloopers and dating disasters. We have commiserated each other over stinging rejection; nursed our bruised egos together. We’ve fallen out after one of us said the words, “he’s not good enough for you”. We’ve called each other at 10am on the walk of shame/glory. We have both held our shivering hearts out in front of men who smashed them underfoot with nary an afterthought. It’s not that we deserved good men – no-one actually deserves a person, that isn’t really how it works – but we were tired, defeated, humbled and sore. We at least deserved a break.

I’m not one to offer advice, but “choose to be with someone kind to you” is absolutely the best thing that anyone can do for themselves. I’m not talking about lavishing someone with gifts, or footing the bill. I live with a man who is almost definitely a nicer person than me. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a single bad word to say about anyone. He talks with genuine respect and admiration of the women he knows. He calls his parents. He remembers when someone is not doing so well in life, and keeps an eye on them. He is utterly without agenda. He’s not perfect – he’d be a multiple gold medallist in the procrastination Olympics, if such a thing existed – but goodness seeps from him.

‘I’m in a long-distance relationship and now dread our phone call every night’

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It's only later that you realise these aren't the raw materials for lasting happiness

It wasn’t so long ago that I thought that niceness in a partner was synonymous with boring. I liked men with a spiky sense of humour, were headily charming and who were passionate about the same music and films that I was. It’s only later that you realise these aren’t the raw materials for lasting happiness.

I was mad for The Spark, and would only countenance a romance if there was chemistry involved. I wasn’t going to settle for anything less than fire-alarm passion. I called it chemistry, but in retrospect it was really the hum of low-level anxiety when things were romantically uncertain or borderline toxic. The spark was in fact the flip-flopping of my stomach whenever a new boyfriend would call or text. When someone you know is emotionally unavailable is deigning to contact you, it’s a strange, awful sort of thrill. Why we do this to ourselves, I’ll never know. Ego, perhaps.

It’s only now that I understand that these were not necessarily bad men, but just not the right ones for me. No doubt when they met someone they clicked with more sufficiently, they were charm and loveliness personified. Some of these guys just weren’t eager enough about me to pursue me meaningfully, and that’s fine. It’s not a personal fault, though I took it very much to be at the time. “He’s a complete a**hole,” I’d spit, fully convinced of their overall awfulness. No, they just weren’t that into me to make a sufficient effort.

I have friends who still think of someone who is a romantic sure thing as something that’s a little off-putting, like a house that’s been on the market too long. “There’s no spark,” they’ll sigh. We’ve been sold a pup with this spark, love-at-first-sight nonsense.

What is wrong with him that he's jumping in so readily with both feet here?

When I first met my current partner, I was curious. Intrigued. He was attractive, and interesting. He texted me Garda information after my bike got stolen the morning after our first date. But he wasn’t darkly dangerous, or wickedly witty like the men I usually dated. He looked at me with such emotional openness that it frankly unnerved me. “What is wrong with him that he’s jumping in so readily with both feet here?” I wondered. You realise then, that it’s exactly what you’ve been doing in all those other relationships. He was holding his own heart out in front of me, and hoping I wouldn’t crush it in my fist.

I relayed the earliest days of our romance to a friend. He was lovely, I told her, but I’m not sure where this is going. “Just give it time,” she advised. She knew in that moment what I didn’t: that I was approaching contentment. We can never see contentment for what it is when we’re there, living it in that moment. And really, when you think about it, isn’t that the greatest shame of all?