There are many things that might disrupt the mood of a promising early date: a sudden discovery of a maddening political opinion, a grating laugh, poor dental hygiene, an unfortunate choice of top.
But there is a far more perplexing and, superficially at least, paradoxical kind of distaste that might abruptly arise.
One might want to take leave of a companion — and even rush outdoors to vomit — not because they are crude, dim or nasty but because they have revealed themselves to be undeniably and conspicuously nice.
Why might kindness be so hard to bear?
Why should warmth prove — on occasion — comprehensively repulsive?
Why might nausea descend in the face of emotional maturity?
Perhaps because, through no fault of our own, our whole character may have been built up around the need to cope well with not being given what we want; with not finding intimate satisfaction, with not being the recipient of anyone's reliable kindness, with being foiled in our search for tenderness and sympathy.
As people with an allergic response to warmheartedness, somewhere in our past, we are liable to have experienced severe letdown, against which we had to insulate ourselves with a plethora of clever defensive strategies.
We learnt to always reject before we were rejected; we learnt not to get taken in by anyone's honeyed words, we firmly exchanged hope for cynicism and vulnerability for impregnability.
No wonder then that a kind soul might come across as extremely threatening.
