I guess people prefer complaining to praising, and it is easier to criticise than to pick out what's good. Why is that, though?
What I'm especially thinking about is love (or, at least, relationships). What does it mean when your friend is always telling you negative things about his girlfriend? Not even just silly little things, but things that actually seem like kind of major character flaws. I think I have to accept the strange truth that it doesn't mean he doesn't love her. And even if you asked him to tell you, instead, all the wonderful and great things about his girlfriend, and he couldn't do it (or was just really vague, for example), it still doesn't mean he doesn't love her.
That's why you can't ever ask, "What does she have that I don't have?" You know it doesn't work like that. And I guess you don't even really want it to work like that. After all, there's always someone who "has" more than you "have". We need the inscrutable blind chance aspect of love. It is our saving grace. Yeah, it can work against us too, and that is very hard. But maybe we can take some sort of comfort - joy? - from seeing that blind chance working, even right then when it feels like our worst enemy, because we can still hope, then, that it will work in our favour in the end.
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