Love's Hardest Work: Seeing Someone Else as Real
Few pieces of writing cut through the noise of self-help culture as cleanly as this one. What makes The Walrus's account remarkable is its refusal to flinch. Two case studies, forty years of clinical practice, one deceptively simple premise: the most difficult thing a person can do is recognize that someone other than themselves actually exists.
The Walrus opens with Matt, a forty-seven-year-old political strategist who once worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair. He arrives for a consultation and immediately begins describing his life — the wife, the three children, the weekend trips to Tottenham Hotspur matches, the family Christmases in St. Ives. It is a portrait of a man who has everything arranged. And then, within minutes, he reveals that for twenty years he has been sleeping with men while remaining married to a woman who, despite knowing he has sex with other people, does not know he prefers men.
The Walrus writes, "I feel slightly unreal." Those four words carry the entire weight of a life divided into compartments. Matt has constructed an existence where he is never fully present in any one of his most intimate relationships. He loves his wife. He loves the men he sleeps with. He cannot bring those loves into the same room.
Freud's famous formulation echoes throughout: where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love. Matt's response is to split the world — marriage and sex, affection and disinhibition, honesty and omission. He tells himself he has never lied because he has never spoken an untruth. The Walrus notes that this is a distinction most people recognize as meaningless.
"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." — Iris Murdoch
The Anger We Cannot Feel
Something else stands out about Matt. In years of therapy, he never loses his temper. Not once. He comes from "a long line of people who don't do anger." In his childhood home, feeling hatred was treated as a kind of temporary insanity — a failure of bodily control that caused his mother panic and self-recrimination.
The Walrus writes, "It must be exhausting being nice all the time." Matt laughs. It is. And it is one of the sharpest observations in the piece. A man who has spent decades surgically removing his own capacity for anger has also, inadvertently, removed his capacity for full presence. You cannot selectively numb.
As The Walrus puts it, "Our sex lives can be thought of as a solution to the problems given to us by our earliest fears, longings, and animosities." Matt's sexual behavior is not organized by orientation but by emotion. The men he sleeps with are not simply sexual partners — they are the only relationships where he permits himself to be uninhibited. The women in his life — his wife, his mother, his daughters — exist in a world where anger is forbidden, so intimacy becomes a performance of niceness.
The turning point arrives in an email. Matt writes to his therapist: "You don't like me. I don't like you. Your psychoanalytic silences make me feel boorish... You hate me. I hate me." He had accidentally hit send. The Walrus notes that this accidental honesty is more therapeutic than two years of deliberate sessions. Matt finally feels something real enough to risk the consequences of saying it.
The Antidote
Abigail is a different case but the same disease — a life built around compensating for a love that was withheld. Her father, cold and distant, tells her mother after Abigail's birth: "You wanted her, you deal with her." She grows up clever, driven, isolated, and — during her PhD years in Chicago — a sex worker at a brothel.
Not because she was desperate. Because she was good at it. Clients chose her because she looked like someone they would want to date: young, bookish, wholesome. The Walrus writes, "Watching it literally pile up was so gratifying; for the first time in my life, way more was coming in than going out." Money was part of it. But the real currency was being chosen. Every client who selected her was a small act of revenge against a father who never did.
Abigail eventually realizes this on her own. "Sex work cured me of my father," she says. The Walrus gently corrects her: it didn't cure anything. He still fills her mind. They discuss him more than anyone else. The revenge drama is still running. The Walrus writes, "I'm talking to him in my head all the time." She lets out a long breath. The realization is not liberating — it is devastating.
The Case Against Psychoanalytic Certainty
Critics might note that both case studies present a worldview in which psychoanalysis holds the keys to every lock. The Walrus does not entertain the possibility that Matt's arrangement — unconventional as it is — might be a consensual equilibrium that works for both parties, even if imperfectly. Not every life needs to be solved. Some people live in contradictions and manage. The Walrus also leaves unanswered whether Iris Murdoch's definition of love — noble as it sounds — is actually achievable for most humans, or whether it sets an impossibly high bar that pathologizes ordinary imperfection.
Bottom Line
The Walrus makes a difficult case: that love is not a feeling but a discipline, and most people fail it not from malice but from fear. Matt and Abigail are not broken — they are brilliantly adapted to childhoods that taught them certain emotions were too dangerous to feel. The piece does not offer comfort. It offers something better: the suggestion that seeing clearly, even when it hurts, is the only thing worth doing.