One of the great reliefs of being with someone for a long time is the freedom to say: what would you like for Christmas?
Don’t get me wrong: if either of us feel a burst of inspiration, we have been known to go for it. Sometimes it has worked. Sometimes my presents have been received with a slightly puzzled look: like I’ve mixed her up with another person. The gift is then placed somewhere out of the way until we are ready to have a conversation about how I got it so dramatically wrong.
This year was more straightforward. She requested a coat: a stylish but rather complicated thing that she has already worn a few times. I asked for a day alone.
I am fond of shopping for records and CDs, but it’s one of those activities that you can only do alone. Walk into a music shop and you can never be sure if you’re going to be there for five minutes or two hours. So, my present this year was a day in London, criss-crossing the city and digging through bargain bins.
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As I sat in Dublin Airport, it occurred to me that, apart from paying for items, I wouldn’t interact with another human being until I got home that night. It felt like taking a deep breath and swimming underwater until I reached the other side. (Yes, a terrible simile. The water would ruin the records.)
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A day alone is no great hardship and I can be quite happy in my own company, yet I will regularly feel the need for the company of people who I care about and who care about me. It is a basic need, as crucial as oxygen and clean underwear. And this is something most of us learn from a young age through friendships: the ability to share, to negotiate and, most importantly, to help others and not expect anything in return.
To grow up without that knowledge must be profoundly damaging. It always makes me think of Donald Trump.
Twenty-eight years ago, the New Yorker writer Mark Singer wrote a profile of Trump. He had, Singer observed, “an existence unmolested by the rumblings of a soul”, but he also concluded that Trump had no friends.
Much has been written about the dysfunction of the Trump family: a cruel, bullying father and a mother so distant she was almost nonexistent in his life. And one could speculate that in such a setting, where he didn’t receive affection and didn’t witness any, he failed to learn what friendship was. Instead, all he could do was adapt the idea of a friend to the cut-throat business model he learned from his father: a friend is someone who suits your purposes. Until they don’t.
[ My wife speaks to me from other parts of the house, for reasons that puzzle meOpens in new window ]
Trump isn’t what you’d call an introspective person, but occasionally, even he has shown glimpses of insight. In 2014 he told an interviewer: “I don’t like to analyse myself because I might not like what I see.”
What he might see is a profound loneliness. The more he has tried to flee from it by the pursuit of success, the more the loneliness has grown: to the point that now, through his own design, he is surrounded by people who only want to get something out of him; people who he will inevitably betray. Or they will betray him. It’s the only kind of relationship he understands.
Donald Trump could well be the loneliest man in the world.
This is not an attempt to generate sympathy for him, or to justify any of his actions or utterances. And admittedly, this is pop psychology.
It’s just that in Ireland, and many other developed countries, there is a loneliness epidemic among adults, while social media is robbing children of the chance to learn how friendship works, to occasionally subordinate their needs to those of others. Little Trumps can grow up to be big ones.
