"He told me that he worked in Downing Street as a political strategist and consultant for then British prime minister Tony Blair. This was 1999. He had been married for twenty years and had three teenage children. He described his family-his wife, Jemima, a barrister, and his two sons and daughter-with tenderness and detail. He had a season ticket to Tottenham Hotspur football club and loved to take his children to watch Spurs on the weekend and then come home and cook for them."
"He gave me vivid, affectionate portraits of his parents-his mother was a professor of German language and literature, and his father was a linguist now working as a civil servant at Government Communications Headquarters. Matt was part of a close, extended family, sixteen in all: his parents, their three children, their spouses, and eight grandchildren. This group celebrated Christmases together and spent two weeks every summer in St. Ives at his parents' summer house."
Matt A. is a forty-seven-year-old political strategist and consultant, married for twenty years with three teenage children. He presents as athletic, well-dressed, and successful at work, with affectionate, vivid memories of parents and an active, close extended family that spends holidays and summers together. He enjoys taking his children to Tottenham matches and cooking with them. Clinical experience indicates that people often deceive themselves about who and what they love and why. Self-deception about love can be undone through disciplined inner work. Love's labour consists of the effort required to recognize that someone other than oneself is real and to see clearly.
Read at The Walrus
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