The first time I invited the man, who would five years later become my husband, to dinner one chill November evening, he, upon arrival, did an unusual thing. I opened the door to greet him but my two dogs, who were my companions, and first line of defense, rushed to check him out. Without giving me the merest glance, he knelt down, went still and waited for them to decide, which they did, fast. It helped that he spoke quietly to them with his ‘hard to resist’ deep but resonant voice that had just the right amount of Southern accent as to be charming, without falling into the cliqued soap opera daytime TV category.
They were won over in very short order, and being kindly sorts with a goodly degree of manners, they stepped aside to allow him entrance. Watching this, I too was also utterly won over. He stood up, looked my way with warm kind eyes of quiet delight. It was this kneeling to them, the most vital aspects of what made up my home, it was this kneeling that told me something more essential about him than the spiritual book he had brought for me or the firm ideas he held so fiercely, at that time of his life. He entered my home, my heart, and never left.
Our first three years were rocky with lots of uncertainty and complex untangling from our previous lives, until eventually, we forged from our separate paths, a way to blend and weave the two into what we both most wanted, a shared life, together.
32 years later, 26 plus married, I marvel at our journey, but even more, I marvel at long term relationships in general. What on earth allows them to occur, endure, flourish, or not?
Even through the subject warrants a book, or several, and indeed countless dozens have been written on this very subject, I decided that I would use these few pages to turn into this inquiry. Instead of interviewing the few really stellar long-term relationships that I have seen flourish and survive, I would dig deep into my own sense of how, why and why not.
Intimate long-term partnerships are not easy, not for the faint of heart but are particularly hard for the overly romantic who dream of happily ever after. It is also true that not everyone seeks intimate partnership. Many are deeply content with a practical partnership, or one that is friendly, or friendly enough, one that offers perks that are regarded as worthy, be it financial security, companionship, status, good parenting partners etc.
Many these days are more than content with not being partnered at all, or being partnered with self as a primary, all others being adjunct to this, thus maintaining huge degrees of freedom from any form of accommodations to the requirements of the other.
But for those who seek depth and intimacy with another, this essay being tilted towards that population, they are bound, no matter how stellar the journey, to end in heartbreak, since all relationships, even the best, terminate in ‘one’ leaving the other.
They are, in my estimation a profound humbling as well as a source of unspeakable nurture and unique goodness. But, you have to be willing to be seen, to be known, to be called out on your shit, your blind spots, you have to be willing to be loved, supported, to know that there is someone who has your back, someone who is in this journey with you, for the duration. You also have to be willing to see your partner for the ‘other’ that they are, not only the extension of yourself and your needs and conveniences. You have to be willing to recognize, understand and often negotiate the specific needs and requirements that that ‘other’ brings with them, as you bring your specific and unique sets of needs and expectations, in the great hopes that they will be seen, acknowledged and taken into account.
Beyond even that, you have to be willing to tolerate and even appreciate ordinary life. There is a lot of ordinary life in long-term partnership.
For myself, as well as the many couples I sat with over years of being a couple’s therapist, true partnership usually begins after the great disillusionment. After the honeymoon is over, after you get your first glimpse of all the unworkability that you have not chosen, or had to face during the ‘in love’ phase of raging hormones, massive positive projections and whatever other fantasy you have build-up in your own little mind that would have that person be your perfect person. The one who will make up for the lacks that life dealt you. The one who would be the compensation for all that your parents were not. Only then do things start to get really interesting.
After the honeymoon two things tend to happen: you either start blaming the other for not being the person you have projected them to be, blaming them for your great disillusionment, or you start grieving the death of some idealized fantasy which can open you both to further discovery. The former relationships are the ones which end within a few months or years. The latter have the potential to go a long way, maybe the whole way, while the wind whips you hither and thither, during the pits and falls of a lifetime, chuckling at times, bewildered at others.
We were lucky. Long before the opening vignette that I laid out to you, I knew my-to-be-husband through other social contexts but I didn’t like him. He also knew me and didn’t much like me. That was, unbeknown to either of us at the time, a great help. I had no positive projections on him. The opposite was true. At our first ‘arranged dinner’ I had no wish to impress or be impressed. I fell in love reluctantly, by getting to know him over some time, and like the dogs, doing my own slow assessment before I opened that door to let him in.
What enables some of us to choose, and to endure life after honeymoon stage? The Alchemical Jungians, of which I count myself a fringe member, postulate that there are three marriages one can experience in a lifetime.
The first is the marriage within oneself. In this context, it refers to becoming intimate with one’s own self, beyond appearances, even beyond our overt competences, but coming to know our fragilities, our complexes, our fears and all the ways we hide, duck, defend and pretend. Each of us approach this differently. For me it was a lot of therapy, of somatic and dream therapy. The two avenues that do not lie, which cannot fake it, because they both bypass the clever rational mind. But people come to know themselves, come to honest reckoning with themselves in different and unique ways.
The second marriage is union with that which is outside of yourself. This includes others, of all stripes and shapes, the creatures and critters of the world, the nature of the planet, the stuff of life, and it includes our intimate relationships too. Often the health of the second union is based on the depth of the first. If we really know ourselves well, we know how and where we are scared, vulnerable, strong, confident, insecure and we are willing to be honest with those drivers within ourselves, then we are more likely to meet the world outside of ourselves without as much defensiveness, fewer walls, or posturing than is usual, if we are not at ease with the full packet of who we are.
The third marriage pertains to the Sacred Marriage, one in which we experience union with the ‘all’, which some call the divine. It is those glimpses or those moments when we realize that we are not separate, that we are an interdependent part of the fabric of the entirety of life. Or as Mary Oliver says in that brilliant and famous poem, ‘Wild Geese’,
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
I myself do not dwell much in that third state of marriage, no matter how often I pop in to visit those realms and remember, just as often, I forget and think of myself as separate and self-determining. I’m not too harsh with myself around the forgetting, because it’s all part of what it is to be a human, and long-haul relationships are very much in the human realm, even as they force us, or at least encourage us, into our most ‘remembering’ selves, our better selves, without which we would sink like stones in a murky pond and be quickly drowned by boredom, disappointment, and or be dulled by habit. Although all of these sentiments still arise, as part of the great experiment of conscious life.
Another determinant which seems to give long-term relationships traction and durability, is how much we may have allowed our separate lives to overlap. To what extent do we create from two individuals, a third entity, which is the relationship itself. This third entity exists from the overlapping of the two separate ones. The greater the area of Venn diagram (the area of overlapping between two spheres), the stronger the glue. For some it’s a joint business, home building, making and maintaining, children, that is a big one, maybe the most adhesive glue of all, kids. It could also be money, sex (at least for a while), it could be shared creative interests, values, the list is long etc. It could be several of those. I have heard that third entity called the ‘sacred other’, amongst other names.
When they say a business is too big to fail, it relates to a marriage or long-term relationship. If a couple has invested too much time, money, security, creativity in the joint pot, then the prospects of failure are simply unacceptable or untenable, it would leave the partners too raw, broke, broken or scared. However all too often in relationships, if couples do not see an easy or viable exit plan, instead of digging deeper, they can go into autopilot and just go dull inside of regular daily life. In my humble opinion, leaving should always be an option so we don’t ever assume that we are trapped or start taking the other for granted because we are too enmeshed, or too scared to leave. However, if what holds us together is not resilient or vibrant enough, the Venn between us not robust enough, ‘leaving’ becomes the default easy option, utilized because there isn’t enough skin in the game to make it worthwhile to plough through, or creatively negotiate the hard stark times.
The new age notion propagated in so many self-help books, that each person carries 50% of the fault, or responsibility for things that go awry in a relationship is very tidy and sounds fair. However, it’s more accurate, I do believe, to postulate that both parties in a couple, whatever the nature of the relationship, do co-create the structure, the conditions, the tone and the disputes, although I exclude children/parent relationships from this notion, as those tend to be more determined by the conditions set by the parents, since the parents have both the power and control. But in non-parental relationships, sometimes one person is clearly more blind to how they may be contributing to the ‘shit show’, but in another instance, it might be the other who is more blind, or in denial, or defensive. What is true is that nothing useful comes from playing the ‘blame game’ if we actually wish to climb out of whatever trough we might have jointly dug for ourselves.
What is also true, is that the things we give energy to and pay attention to, tend to flourish, while those we backburner or ignore tend to wilt. Relationships need to be tended like any gardener knows: when to leave things be, when to go in for the heavy weed, when to fertilize, when to leave fallow. We do need to become gardeners of the ‘intimate’ to foster healthy connections.
What enables us to bear the impossibility that long term partnership sometimes appears to be, is the extent to which we can share honestly with each other, even the hard stuff. Especially the hard stuff. The few times in our many years together when my hubby has actually said to me, ‘Priya, I really hate you right now’, I in turn would be delighted by the raw honestly of his declarations, I would invariably smile. He would stop in utter stupefied bewilderment and say, ‘Why on earth are you smiling when I’ve just told you that I’m hating you?’ For me, the relief of having negative feelings openly expressed, especially by one who is more naturally inclined towards a certain southern gentility, immediately releases and relaxes whatever tensions might have been building, thereby opening the door to the wondrous alchemy that direct honest communication can and often does evoke.
Being authentic and honest is, again in my humble opinion, more important than most things, more important than loving, since it’s hard to imagine being able to love fully if you are withholding your true feelings or thoughts. Being honest opens us, relaxes us, allows us to show up real and true, the very building blocks upon which the house of love can be solidly built, after the first disillusion of projected love has smashed it down.
But being honest is not just about expressing whatever beef is rubbing you the wrong way, it’s also about going under the surface of what is upsetting you to determine what vulnerability is being touched, threatened or exposed within you. It harkens back to the first marriage, to know yourself well enough that you can determine your deeper responses, to determine what deeper master your feelings are serving or protecting you from. That is the stuff that needs to be uncovered, explored and shared.
I will leave you with this poem I share with anyone about to marry. The poem speaks not of love, but rather of the deeper conditions from whence authentic love might indeed arise. It’s by Adrienne Rich.
“An honorable human relationship is a process’
Delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved.
A process of refining the truths they tell one another.
It is important to do this.
It breaks down self-delusion and isolation and does
Justice to own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people
To go that hard way with us.”
Long term partnership, be it marriage, or deep friendship, is being willing to go that hard way with another, being willing to break down self-delusion and isolation, to be vulnerable, belly and heart exposed, trusting the other is right there, as your friend, companion of the way, as you are theirs, willing to be honest with what is, rather than what should be or might be.
It’s a big ask, one that requires us to stretch into the most authentic version of ourselves.
May this midsummer’s solstice bring you all what you most need.
Love, Priya.
