You Were Let Go Because You Were Too Good

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]It's one of the harder ideas to take on board if we're modest and kind people, which of course we are. It feels sentimental and saccharine, something that someone brings out to lighten our mood. Not because it's true, but because they want to cheer us up. We were let go not because we're odd, not because we're unsavory, not because we didn't earn enough, or don't have the right sort of hair, or skin, or a bad in bed, or snored, or a bit stupid, or have questionable taste in clothes and music, but magically because we were, of all things, too good.

[00:00:37]Too kind, too thoughtful, too loyal, too marvelous. Something about us was too amazing to bear. We were like a resplendent sun that can't bear to be looked at.

[00:00:48]This kind of thing doesn't make much sense, especially in the middle of a typical night at the moment. Can a restaurant be too tasty, a hotel too beautiful, a coat too well cut?

[00:00:59]We're just weird and have probably been since the start. No one really likes us, we're ugly, especially looked at from side on. Our career is on the slide, there are bags under our eyes. We're objects of pity. That's more or less how the ruminations can go until 6:00 when we finally get up and start another bleary day.

[00:01:16]But let us, without sentimentality, with all our faculties, now return to the original supposition. Not to try to charm or support, but to do justice to reality. When every caveat has been explored, when all our faults have been taken into account, we may have to accept an odd thought. There can sometimes really be such a thing as too nice.

[00:01:41]We won't understand the psychology of love unless we leave room for this peculiar sounding concept. We won't be able to make sense of behavior. We won't have an accurate account of why certain relationships can't work unless we have to hand a theory of the repulsive nature for some of goodness and tenderness.

[00:02:01]The paradox goes like this.

[00:02:03]If we starve a child of affection, if we force them to subsist on a meager emotional diet, if we give them love and then brutally take it away again, if we keep comparing them unfavorably to a sibling, if we beat them up or humiliate them, there will be consequences. One of these sounds especially perverse. They will lose any appetite for kindness.

[00:02:26]They'll take fright at its approach.

[00:02:28]They'll turn away goodness. They'll feel nauseated by a gentle manner and sympathetic words. When many years later, someone comes along and calls them on time, makes them their lunch, repeats for them that they will never leave them, listens to their sorrows, sits with them through their pain, they will register that something theoretically positive is taking place.

[00:02:50]They may even sense, as though through a pane of glass, that love has arrived.

[00:02:55]But they won't be in a mood for it. The situation will be deeply unstable. We should, as good psychologists of suffering, be on our guard.

[00:03:04]They will in time come to feel that they've been given a gift they don't deserve. The love will start to feel cloying, hot, uncomfortable. They may not be able to put a finger on the discomfort and the paradox. They may not be able to say to their partner, "I hate you for your loyalty. I'm resentful of your kindness. You nauseate me with your constant thoughtfulness." But that is, below the surface, beyond language, what might be at play.

[00:03:30]Why should any of this matter when we're alone in the apartment, the shelves emptied of their books, looking out across the kitchen table where we had so many breakfasts together?

[00:03:39]Because we don't need to add self-hatred to the weight of rejection. We don't have to suffer twice from being abandoned and then from the sense that being so indicates a fundamentally broken nature.

[00:03:54]We perhaps really were turned down for reasons not of our awfulness, but because the gift we were bringing couldn't be digested by our partner.

[00:04:04]Where are they now? Not necessarily with someone more wonderful, cleverer, kinder, gentler, more tender, as we're terrified to find out. They may have headed in a ghastly but predictable way towards someone who loves them less steadily, less kindly, with less focus, because that is in the end far more manageable for them. It fits. It seems like home. It's what they've always known.

[00:04:29]So yes, we are allowed at times in the dark stretches to hold on quite firmly to a strange-sounding idea.

[00:04:37]We were left, perhaps, because we were too good. This doesn't have to be a sop or a denial or a bromide.

[00:04:45]It can be at points an entirely peculiar and yet entirely necessary truth.