有些人在追求爱情的路上总是坎坷不断，他们不是没有人爱，而是害怕爱，甚至排斥爱，他们太擅长于照顾自己，总是表现出独立、自主的倾向，害怕把自己的情感和需求完全暴露给另一个人。如果你是个害怕爱情的人，别担心，爱情不是人生的主要任务，真正的爱情不是向外寻找，而是通过自我反省和内在成长来实现。当我们清除了阻碍自己体验和给予爱的内在障碍时，爱情就会自然而然地出现。The idea of trying to avoid love sounds paradoxical in the extreme: why would anyone take steps to deny themselves an experience which seems so plainly positive and life-enhancing? Plenty of people are denied love by external forces; why would anyone take active measures to sabotage love if it lay before them?逃避爱情这个想法本身听起来就极端荒谬：人怎么会拒绝如此积极正面且能丰富生活的体验呢？很多人因为外界因素而无法得到爱情；如果爱情就摆在眼前，怎么会有人主动去破坏爱情呢？The answer can only be found by looking back in time. Though we all crave love in theory, our capacity to accept it in practice is critically dependent on the quality of our early emotional experiences. To abbreviate sharply, we can only willingly tolerate being loved if – as children – the process of loving and being loved felt sufficiently reliable, safe and kind. Some of us were not so blessed; some of us were stymied in our search for love in ways we have not yet recovered from or indeed fully understood.要找到答案，我们得回顾过去。虽然理论上我们都说想要爱情，但实际上我们能不能接受爱情，主要看我们童年时期情感经历的质量。简单来说，就是童年时期感受到的爱要是让人觉得靠谱、安心和温暖，我们长大后才会愿意被人爱。但不是每个人都有这样的好运，有些人在追求爱情的路上坎坷不断，到现在还没完全走出来，或者还未完全理解背后的真相。Perhaps the person we wanted to love fell ill or grew depressed. Or at the height of our dependence on them, they went away, or had a new family or turned their attention to a younger sibling. Or perhaps our parental figure was constantly at the office, or unavailable behind a locked study door. They might have had a violent unpredictable temper or left us somehow feeling that we were just never good enough for them.也许我们心里想爱的人生病了或者变得抑郁。或者在我们最依赖他们的时候，他们离开了，或者他们组建了新的家庭，或者把注意力转移到了更小的兄弟姐妹身上。又或许我们的父亲或母亲总是在办公室，或者总是把自己关在书房里，我们见不到他们。他们可能脾气暴躁、喜怒无常，或者让我们有种感觉，就是我们永远不够好，配不上他们的爱。As a result, to an extent we may not even have realised, we became experts at independence. We came to associate safety with a high degree of self-protective isolation; we might have become big readers, or fascinated by the animal world, or obsessed with music or computer games. Without quite knowing we had done so, we learnt never to trust a flesh and blood three-dimensional human again.结果呢，我们可能自己都没察觉，就变得特别擅长自己照顾自己。我们觉得安全就是高强度把自己保护得好好的，不跟别人走得太近；我们可能爱上了读书，或者对动物特别感兴趣，或者整天沉迷于音乐或者电子游戏。我们就这样，不知不觉地，再也不相信那些有血有肉、实实在在的人了。Our experiences may not have affected the strength of our longing for love; but they have heavily impacted our capacity to endure mutually satisfying relationships. We may now, as adults, tell ourselves that we want closeness and surrender. We will sob sincerely when we lose love, but we are continually taking steps to ensure we’ll never be at any sustained risk of finding it.过去的经历可能没有减少我们对爱情的向往，但确实严重影响了我们维持双方都感到满意的关系的能力。成年后，我们可能会自欺欺人地说我们渴望亲密和全身心投入。失去爱情时，我们确实会感到悲伤，痛哭流涕，但实际上我们一直在小心翼翼地避免让自己真正卷入爱情的风险之中。The true terror for us is not that love should fail but that it should by some oversight on our part succeed, for this would ask of us a level of defencelessness and exposure to another person and to a chance of happiness that has no precedent in our lives and poses immense, ego-shattering challenges to the armoured way our personalities have been structured.我们真正害怕的不是爱情会失败，而是因为我们自己的疏忽不小心让爱情成功了。因为爱情成功了的话，我们就得完全放下防备，把自己完全暴露给另一个人，去尝试一种我们从没经历过的幸福。这对一直保护自我、封闭自我的我们来说，是一种前所未有的挑战，可能会彻底击溃我们的自我。For the love-scared among us, we are constantly at work taking careful steps to ensure that any relationship we are in will flounder. We pick partners with an element of built-in obsolescence about them, some reason why in the end a relationship with them isn’t going to be able to work out: people who just happen to be living on another continent, or who are married to someone else, or are impossibly distant to us in age.对于我们这些害怕爱情的人来说，我们总是处心积虑地采取步骤，确保我们的感情关系注定要失败。我们找的伴侣都是那种注定没结果的，一些最终无法与他们维持关系的原因：比如他们可能住在地球的另一端，或者已经结了婚，或者年龄差距大得离谱。We beg for love from people who – as we know in our unconscious – are guaranteed not to want or be able to give it to us. We complain repeatedly that people we’re involved with don’t love us properly; the real worry is that they might. To ward off such an eventuality, we keep finding flaws: we’ll point out that this one is often late, that one doesn’t exercise enough, that one doesn’t speak any foreign languages and this one isn’t sufficiently creative, robustly determined to find any conceivable reason why – alas – no one quite suits our needs.我们总是向那些-我们心里清楚-根本不会爱我们或者给不了我们爱的人索要爱情。我们总是抱怨身边的人没有正确地爱我们，但其实我们真正害怕的是他们真的爱上我们。为了防止他们真的爱上我们，我们总是挑他们的毛病：比如总是迟到，不爱运动，不会说任何一门外语，不够有创意，我们想方设法找各种理由，结果就是：唉，好像没人能满足我们的要求。If we find ourselves in a relationship, we will assiduously practise the arts of what psychologists call ‘distance management.’ When the chance of reaching a truly happy state appears, we’ll subtly discover ways to introduce a chasm: we’ll have an argument, spoil a birthday, ruin a holiday.如果我们不小心进入了恋爱关系，就会特别用心地学那些心理学家说的“距离管理”的技巧。只要出现让我们真的感受到幸福的可能性，我们就会偷偷地搞点破坏，比如找个借口吵吵架，把生日搞得不愉快，或者把假期弄得一团糟。We’ll find we have to do a lot of work for an upcoming exam or presentation, that our gang of friends need us to be somewhere else, that we ‘forgot’ to return the credit card or tax bill, that our appearance requires a lot of our attention or that we’d like to flirt with a stranger at a party who suddenly seems very attractive indeed: in both tiny and large ways, we’ll know just how to lower the mood, scupper a bond and destroy trust, perhaps not enough to end a relationship completely, but certainly enough to worry our partner sufficiently as to our solidity that we can be privately sure things will never truly fly.我们总是找各种借口来避免和伴侣太亲近。比如说，我们得忙考试或者准备演讲，或者朋友们叫我们去别的地方，我们“忘记”了还信用卡或者报税，或者我们得花好多时间打理自己，或者我们想在派对上和一个突然看起来很有魅力的陌生人调情：无论是大事小事，我们总能想办法让气氛变得尴尬，破坏关系，减少信任。虽然这些事不至于让关系完全破裂，但足以让伴侣对我们的可靠性感到怀疑，这样我们就能暗自确信，这段关系永远不会真正地顺利发展。Friends may commiserate with us on our so-called ‘bad luck.’ Psychologists will note our superlative skill at romantic sabotage.朋友们对我们感情上总是倒霉表示同情。但心理学家可能会看出来，我们真的很擅长搞砸自己的爱情。Were this to sound a bit like us, compassion is required. We should reflect back on our pasts and wonder at the connection between our fractured bonds with parental figures and our disrupted adult attachments. We aren’t like this because we are wicked, we’ve just been very badly hurt. Once we understand how our skill at independence was acquired, we’ll be in a better position to see that it has in reality outlived its rationale.如果这些听起来像我们自己，那我们得对自己温柔一点。我们应该回顾过去，想想为什么我们跟父母的关系不好，会影响到我们长大后的感情。我们之所以逃避爱情，并不是因为我们本性恶劣，而是因为我们曾经受到过严重的伤害。等我们想明白了我们是如何学会独立的，我们就能更好地认识到，这种独立性实际上已经不再有其存在的理由了。We may still feel immensely apprehensive at the prospect of contentment, but we may finally be able to admit that we are first and foremost acting out of fear. Rather than dismissing our partners, we may stick closer to a much more awkward truth: that we are tempted to draw away from them because we are immensely scared that they might finally be in a position to make us very happy – and that simply nothing so unutterably and boundlessly frightening has ever happened to us before.我们可能对幸福的生活还是感到非常害怕。但最后我们可能会承认，其实我们逃避主要是因为害怕。我们不是想推开伴侣，而是我们面对一个挺尴尬的事实：我们想躲开他们，因为我们太害怕他们真的能让我们幸福起来。而这样的事，我们以前从没遇到过，想想都觉得太吓人了。标题：The Lengths We Go To Avoid LoveBy The School of Life译：良哥