The Essence of Romance

Lucy in the Sky

I want to say a bit about romance today, and how it is a stage one pro­gresses through, rather than some­thing “in and of itself.” Before I get there, let me men­tion a few things, and remind you of some resources.

If you’ve been read­ing my stuff for a while, and many of you have been around here since the days of Into the Cen­tre, some of this will be familiar.

To begin with, there are four free book­lets avail­able on the web­site. Three of the four are about estab­lish­ing and deep­en­ing your under­stand­ing of ele­gant relat­ing. I’m play­ing around with the two rela­tion­ships book­lets, think­ing I might turn them into a book. Or per­haps bet­ter put, mix­ing them into a book I’m already work­ing on — they will serve as a sec­tion in a book called Sim­ple Pres­ence. There is another book­let, The List of 50, that recently became a book called, Get­ting EXACTLY the Rela­tion­ship You Want. The book­let is still avail­able — I’ve rewrit­ten it into a sum­mary of the book.

If I were to put the three book­lets into log­i­cal order, it would be The List of 50, Build­ing Deep and Last­ing Rela­tion­ships, and The Respon­si­ble, Com­pas­sion­ate Rela­tion­ship.

The List of 50 came about when I was 32 — way back in 1983. Up to that point, I’d made a career of strange rela­tion­ships. Cer­tainly from uni­ver­sity on, I quite rigidly fol­lowed what I described in last week’s arti­cle — the path that leads from lust to romance. Which is not to say I couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence. At 32, I became painfully aware of my past ten­dency to want to domes­ti­cate lust-driven rela­tion­ships.

Let me give you one really bla­tant illustration.

I went off to uni­ver­sity at 17, and would say that I was book smart and life dumb. By that point, I really hadn’t failed of much of any­thing I put my mind to, and on those rare occa­sions when I screwed up, mom and dad were right there to fix things. Despite hav­ing a full ride schol­ar­ship to any uni­ver­sity in New York State, I decided to go to Elmhurst Col­lege, 20 miles out­side of Chicago. This was cer­tainly the first time I was away from home for an extended period of time, and it didn’t take me long to get into piles of trou­ble, some of which I ought to tell you about some­day. I’d saved up a few hun­dred dol­lars (remem­ber, this was 1968, and that seemed like a lot of money) so my first awak­en­ing hap­pened when I had to actu­ally buy text­books. I was quickly broke, and took a job at Wal­greens — a drug­store chain.

It was there that I met Irene.

Back then I had a bad habit of throw­ing out any­thing that had to do with a failed rela­tion­ship, so I can’t show you a pic­ture of her — but let me just say that she was drop-dead gor­geous. I won’t bore you with the details, but I took her to my spring Fra­ter­nity dance, and the music stopped when we walked in the room. I was deeply, head over heels, in lust. I had no prob­lem bask­ing in the reflected glory of the woman on my arm.

So, here’s the rea­son I’m telling you this story.

I was at Elmhurst Col­lege to get a degree in reli­gion and psy­chol­ogy — and my inten­tion was to be a Min­is­ter (which, of course, did hap­pen, albeit some­what delayed) — and one of the things I had decided was that sex was going to wait until mar­riage. (I changed my mind a month or so later, but that’s not part of the Irene story.)

A few days after the dance, Irene invited her­self up to my dorm room. At one point, I excused myself to go to the john, and when I came back, Irene was undressed and lying on my bed. Noth­ing much hap­pened, but that’s not the point.

What did hap­pen was that I stuck to my con­vic­tions, and took Irene home, despite what I really wanted to do. A day or so later went home to Buf­falo for Spring Break. I spent a lot of time think­ing about what had hap­pened, and about what I wanted to hap­pen, and I kept bump­ing against the “rules” I had set up for myself. Being some­what self-aware back then, I was quite capa­ble of rec­og­niz­ing my lust, but I couldn’t quite fig­ure out what to do with it.

I can actu­ally remem­ber the feel­ing of a very strange penny drop­ping.

I wanted this woman, badly, and had no par­a­digm that would allow me to have sex with her. So, as he finally comes to the point, I decided that my log­i­cal choice was to marry her.

In other words, I tried to san­i­tize the lust into romance, in order to get what I really wanted.

Irene was Roman Catholic, and that wouldn’t do for a Protes­tant min­is­ter, so I went back to Illi­nois with three or four books under my arm, intent on con­vert­ing her. (I’m actu­ally sit­ting here laugh­ing as I write this. Yikes! What an arro­gant lit­tle guy was back then.) I handed her the books. She looked at them, and got really quiet. She said, “But, I’m just here for the sex!” Shocked, (as that approach to things had actu­ally never occurred to me,) I ended the rela­tion­ship on the spot.

Nuts, eh? Yet, I think it’s still pretty com­mon. Many of my clients are in rela­tion­ship with some­one for exactly this rea­son. I hear a lot of, “When we first met, I was really turned on by him, but now I’m not so sure.” The piece they don’t get is that this is a part of the nat­ural pro­gres­sion of rela­tion­ships. The level of “charge” goes down over time because the object of our desire, empha­sis on object, becomes a real per­son. As this de-objectification process esca­lates, at around the sec­ond year, a real sense of futil­ity can set in.

Any­way, romance is a stage that emerges out of the miasma of emo­tions and hormones.

Romance is lust, sanitized.

As such, it’s sim­ply a stage that the wise “tran­scend and include.” In excel­lent rela­tion­ships, both romance and lust are play­ers in a much big­ger play. Unfor­tu­nately, most peo­ple get bogged down here, and never move past romance to some­thing more useful.

I got a neat Face­book post­ing today, from an old friend — she gave me an update on the last 10 years of her life.

She wrote, “I found the arti­cle you sent out this week pretty appro­pri­ate. I have been part of ser­ial romances in the past 5 years. I do see the value of them as heal­ing tools though, re-opening those old wounds for deeper heal­ing to take place. I kind of think of it along home­o­pathic lines “like cur­ing like.” I don’t know if you agree with this philosophy.”

Of course, I have no idea of any of the dynam­ics of her ser­ial romances. I just thought it highly appro­pri­ate, given this arti­cle. Romance, as we’ve noted, is a stage. In the early going of this stage, the norm is to be starstruck and half blind. In other words, you look at the per­son you are in romance with, and you only see what you want to see — a con­fir­ma­tion that this per­son is your per­fect match.

I got another e-mail yes­ter­day, from a semi famous rela­tion­ship coach. He was announc­ing his impend­ing mar­riage — after know­ing his intended for less than six months. He passed the rela­tion­ship by some of the coaches he trains, and got the expected range of response. Some were hor­ri­fied, oth­ers danced jubi­lantly around the altar of, “Ain’t love grand!” Any­time any­one raised a ques­tion about the rela­tion­ship, the coach defaulted to, “She is my soul mate.” Which is another way of say­ing he’s deeply enmeshed in romance. It’s not to say the rela­tion­ship will not work out — time, and only time, will tell.

The impor­tant thing in any rela­tion­ship is not the places where we agree. The grow­ing edge is always in how we deal with the con­fronta­tion that comes from dif­fer­ing opinions.

Let me show you how this goes. In North Amer­ica, approx­i­mately 50% of all mar­riages end in divorce. An even more inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic is that 75% of sec­ond mar­riages also end in divorce. 25% of third mar­riages end in divorce, so obvi­ously we get more clever with prac­tice. The rea­son, I think, for the 75% fig­ure is that most peo­ple come out of rela­tion­ships blam­ing their part­ners for the fail­ure. They there­fore go into the next rela­tion­ship and do the same dumb stuff, and then are amazed when that rela­tion­ship tanks too.

Romance leads to con­flict, or, said dif­fer­ently, con­flict is a stage that fol­lows romance — 100% of the time.

What we do when con­flict hits varies. One choice, the sta­tis­ti­cally most preva­lent choice, is to leave. This is what my friend calls ser­ial romance. Oth­ers call it ser­ial monogamy. You get to a wall marked “Con­flict,” and you’re given the choice of door num­ber one, door num­ber two, or door num­ber three.

Door # 1–The wide first door is marked “EXIT.” Now it doesn’t mat­ter what excuse you give for exit­ing. “I’ve learned all I can from this rela­tion­ship,” is no dif­fer­ent from “I can’t stand the pain of this con­flict so I’m leav­ing,” as far as the actual result goes.

Door # 2–Of the 50% who stick it out, 40 to 45% choose apa­thy as their way of deal­ing with the con­flict. The pic­ture I get of this is typ­i­cal of what most mar­riages looked like prior to the 50s or 60s — when divorce became socially accept­able. This pic­ture is like “Father Knows Best,” where the mother waltzes around in a house dress, and dad comes home, and retreats to his home office or den, there to dis­pense wis­dom, and to sighed deeply, over the foibles of his fam­ily. You might say that the 70s ver­sion of this is Archie and Edith, sit­ting 3 feet apart, watch­ing TV, and often being miles apart in under­stand­ing, com­pas­sion, and self-awareness. In other words, there is no open war­fare — there’s a polite silence you could cut with a knife.

Which is not to say that within that 40 to 45%, there is no fight­ing. Most of the cou­ples I see are still caught in the loop of think­ing that their part­ner should be what they want them to be. They come in to ther­apy to get me to change their part­ner back into the per­son they were in lust, then in romance with.

All rela­tional fight­ing is specif­i­cally about this: get­ting the other (per­son or sit­u­a­tion) to change so that “I” don’t have to.

Door # 3–Acceptance and Curios­ity–The remain­ing 5%, the peo­ple who choose ele­gant and full-bodied relat­ing, rec­og­nize that the point of relat­ing is self-exploration. That’s why I love my friend’s expression,

“… re-opening those old wounds for deeper heal­ing to take place.”

Yet, to do this, you have to be will­ing to stick around — to work through the stick­ing points in your own per­son­al­ity as opposed to pre­ma­turely leav­ing. “I can’t do this any­more” is often code for, “I am unwill­ing to con­front this about myself.”

The con­flict that is a part of romance is this: the more we trust our part­ner, the more of our­selves we are will­ing to reveal–and what’s left to reveal is the stuff we tried to hide.

In the ini­tial stage of romance, we only or mostly show what we per­ceive as the “good stuff.” If we are naïve, we see our part­ner only through the eyes of romance, and think the way that they are pre­sent­ing them­selves is the way they actu­ally are. This is naïve, because peo­ple in romance are pre­dis­posed to show the stuff that will keep the other per­son around. As time goes by, lit­tle bits of the other stuff begin to trickle and slip out. Ini­tially, this is chalked up to the other per­son hav­ing a bad day, or being off their feed, as the observ­ing part­ner des­per­ately looks for a way to excuse the behavior–as opposed to inte­grat­ing the behav­ior into their view of the other.

Even­tu­ally, the part­ners grow so com­fort­able with each other that the other shoe drops. The “other stuff” becomes a flood of behav­ior that is the other side of the person’s personality—the other side of the other person’s “good stuff.”

Typ­i­cally, at this stage, clients tell me, “My part­ner lied to me!”

What’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing is that the part­ner is finally telling the truth. Each of us is who we are, not who we pre­tend to be. If one chooses door three, accep­tance and curios­ity, this new mate­r­ial can be incor­po­rated into how we see our part­ner, and we can begin to notice how we make our­selves uncomfortable.

For me, I spent decades try­ing to get my part­ners to become who I wanted them to be. In 1983, with the advent of the List of 50, I decided that from that point on I would only hang around with peo­ple who were not in need of fix­ing, but were rather peo­ple who were intensely inter­ested in being self respon­si­ble. A month after writ­ing my List, Dar­bella and I became a cou­ple. Old soul, slow learner, that’s me.

Next arti­cle, we’ll talk a bit more about how con­flict can lead to self respon­si­bil­ity and self under­stand­ing in a rela­tion­ship built upon accep­tance and curiosity.