Let's try to understand one of the oddest, most painful, most widespread phenomena in love. It's going on right this moment between a couple. Let's say he a dentist, she a nutritionist in Rio de Janeiro. Two teenagers are at it in Canbor. There's a pair involved in the rigarole in downtown Dhar, another infalad, another still in Winnipeg. If every time it happened a light went on, most of the earth would be a glow from space. We can refer to the phenomenon as pushpull or stop start or sometimes distance management. The structure is identical and fairly predictable. Growing intimacy, then retreat, altitude, then a drop. Two good days, then a fight. Five warm messages, then silence. A weekend away, then a call for

time alone. It can seem like a horrible but ultimately mysterious curse. It is in fact an almost logical phenomenon with a singular purpose. To protect one or both of the parties from a generally unconscious but violent fear that love might work out, that happiness might become real, that a true partnership could build, that vulnerability might be created, and then when the shield was lowered, when one had grown to depend on someone completely, that everything might go catastrophically wrong. The other party could change their mind. They might abscond. They could die. To prevent such worries, the mind of the stop start lover looks around for ingenious solutions and finds one in a

committedly dispiriting game. Older than chess, more harmful than poker, this game would have been played in ancient Egypt. The Aztecs were at it. The rules state that love can happen, but that it must never pick up velocity. There can be intimacy, but always within bounds. The exits must remain forever open. There can't be too much security that would paradoxically generate an untenable impression of danger. In practice, the game requires a vigilant monitoring of every exchange and repeated quiet injections of disappointment. If last night was beautiful, this morning has to be moody. Tuesday was good, Wednesday must be awful. If the dialogue's getting very cozy, there has to be some disappearance. What cannot be allowed to

occur was what almost certainly once occurred a very long time ago, an unprocessed, unexplored letdown in which coziness was achieved and then torn away. Mommy was the best mommy in the world before the doctor said she wasn't well. Daddy was the sweetest. Then Jill came on the scene. The holidays were nice, except for when the drinking began. Let's believe that someone interested in stop start love isn't doing it on purpose. The lover who keeps needing to pause isn't aware as they put down the phone and decides not to answer a message for 4 hours that they are interrupting the flow of affection in the name of self-p protection and along the way devastating a fellow human

being. The most potent players of this stop start game have no real insight into their tactics. They just register an overwhelming need not to type anything back, not to be free tonight, and not to say I love you too at the end of a call or evening in bed. What can we, the victims of stop, start do for a start, feel extremely sorry for ourselves in our misery? We don't need to compound our pain by making light of it or indeed hoping it can ever easily end. It would be hard to explain all this to a group of six-year-olds. When you're older, you're going to form something called relationships. You'll meet a nice

person, a special friend. Some days, your special friend will call you, and on others, they'll just vanish. One might not want to make it to adulthood after a class like that. The sole effective weapon we have against stopst start game playing is knowledge. to describe the phenomenon accurately the moment it appears, to provide a succinct explanation as to why it might be doing so, to give the other party a few chances at reform, and then to walk away because we know what we're up against. And we recognize that lonely calm truly is better than continually agitated togetherness.