Is this not what every one of us is looking for? To be understood and accepted for what we actually are. Not admired, which is easier to obtain and worth considerably less. Not liked, which can usually be arranged with a little effort. Understood, by somebody who has seen the whole of it and did not go anywhere afterwards.
This longing can be watched in oneself for years and it still cannot properly be accounted for. Why should it matter so much? People live perfectly well without it and most of them live without it for most of their lives without any obvious damage. And yet it is the one thing that keeps being wanted long after almost everything else has stopped being wanted.
People go to remarkable lengths for it. They write to strangers. They stay in arrangements that do not suit them because of one person in it who knows them. They will accept a great deal of difficulty from somebody who understands them and almost none at all from somebody who does not, which says something about the exchange rate.
Why understanding and not affection
Affection can be given to a version of somebody, and that is exactly what makes it insufficient. A person can be extremely fond of somebody who is largely their own construction, and their fondness is entirely real and costs them something. It simply does not reach, and both of them know it does not, and there is nothing to be done about that from either side.
Understanding cannot be given to a version, because understanding requires that the actual thing has been seen. So it is the only form of regard that constitutes evidence. It proves that somebody was in the room with a person rather than in a room with an idea of them assembled some years ago and maintained ever since.
And there is something else in it, which is relief. To be understood is to be relieved, for a moment, of the work of explaining. Most of us are explaining continuously, in every exchange, adjusting in advance for what will be misread and softening what will be taken badly. With one person, occasionally, the adjusting stops entirely, and the amount of energy that comes back is genuinely startling.
Would a copy satisfy it?
Here is a question that tests whether anybody understands their own longing, and almost everybody fails it. Imagine meeting an exact double. The same history, the same mind, the same way of seeing everything. Complete understanding, guaranteed, permanently, with no effort required from anybody.
Almost nobody would be happy. Sat with properly, the answer comes back consistently negative, and it cannot be fully explained. Something in the arrangement is wrong. Perhaps because understanding from somebody identical costs nothing and therefore proves nothing. Perhaps because what is actually wanted is not agreement but to be reached across a distance, and with no distance there is no reaching and nothing has happened.
Which suggests that the longing is not for similarity at all, even though similarity is precisely what everybody goes looking for and what every friendship seems to begin with. It may be for something considerably more difficult, which is to be met by somebody genuinely different who took the trouble.
What it costs to want it
The cost is that it makes ordinary company harder. Once anybody has had it, even briefly, even once, the surface conversations that make up most of life become more difficult to sit inside. They become the sort of person who finds gatherings exhausting for reasons nobody else in the room can see or would believe.
There is also the fact that it cannot be arranged. Nobody can go out and get it, however deliberately they set about it. It happens or it does not, usually to people who were not looking for it at the time, and all the searching anybody has ever done produces almost nothing while the one or two genuine instances arrive entirely unannounced.
Perhaps the whole longing is a mistake, something to be grown out of, an immaturity that expects one human being to supply what no human being can. Some days that seems exactly right. Other days it seems the truest thing in a person and everything else decoration built around it. It does not settle, and at some point most people stop trying to settle it.
