Today, we take a look at how our rela­tion­ships are indi­ca­tors of our per­sonal devel­op­ment. You’ll know that Dar­bella and I think that relat­ing is not about rela­tion­ships. (There is no such thing as ‘a cou­ple.’ There’s just two indi­vid­u­als who choose how they are going to relate.)

The pur­pose of a rela­tion­ship is the per­sonal growth of both of the peo­ple in the relationship.

This flies in the face of the roman­tic notion that rela­tion­ships are there to get my needs met. Often, peo­ple think that what they see in movies or on the soaps is “real.”

That you find your ‘one true love’ through
kismet or karma,
that you fall deeply and roman­ti­cally in love,
and ride off into the sun­set
on the gon­dola of bliss.

Real­ity is often much harsher, as is evinced by the “much men­tioned but slightly inac­cu­rate sta­tis­tic: there’s a 50% divorce rate – and that’s just for first mar­riages. Sec­ond mar­riages actu­ally fare much worse – near­ing 75% fail­ure. Why? Because peo­ple who get divorced the first time do not learn the les­son – do not under­stand the pur­pose of a rela­tion­ship. They think they picked the wrong part­ner, and that this time they’ll pick bet­ter. So, typ­i­cally, they marry the oppo­site of the first schmo (Yid­dish – schmuck) and think, “Great! Right part­ner this time! Now I can really get what I want!”

All they do is end up mis­er­able faster. They already know a divorce lawyer, so the 2^nd one typ­i­cally ends quicker. Unless they are stubborn.

All rela­tion­ships start with romance. At The Phoenix Cen­tre we talk about this stage being the hor­mone dri­ven start of a pairing.

In my book, This End­less Moment, I sug­gest that hor­mones are there to get us to breed, and noth­ing more. The endor­phin rush I feel at the first blush of love is noth­ing more than a drugged state designed to get me to ignore the other person’s true nature long enough to marry him or her.

This is the real­ity of all of our rela­tion­ships, assum­ing that we started them only on the basis of “love, lust, and hor­mones.” Or sure, we’ll deny that this is what we are doing, but how else to account for the star­tling real­iza­tion, some months in, that my part­ner is not who I thought she or he was?

All of a sud­den, I’m notic­ing flaws. Flaws!!!

We then enter the Con­flict stage, and that one we all know. It’s when we try to change our part­ner, first through wheedling (‘If you loved me, you’d change”) then bar­ter­ing (‘I’ll do this for you when you do that for me’) then black­mail, threats, fights, separations.

All of this is a result of feel­ing gypped – I didn’t get what I thought I was getting.

Last week I saw a quote that I wish I’d writ­ten down. It was some­thing to the effect that:

My part­ner is who (s)he is in his or her total­ity – every­thing from start to fin­ish.
My part­ner is not just the last thing he or she did.

Now, this is an inter­est­ing thought – and like most things at The Phoenix Cen­tre, is para­dox­i­cal in nature. On one level, fights start because of what is hap­pen­ing right now. On the other hand, it is unusual, when we fight, not to drag in the kitchen sink – all of the other sup­posed sins of the past. On the third hand, my part­ner may be exhibit­ing new behav­iour. This does not negate the past behav­iours. It is added to the past behav­iours, cre­at­ing a richer picture.

With­out belabour­ing the obvi­ous, the fight­ing stage is a cru­cial one. Some peo­ple fight for­ever. I remem­ber coun­selling one 60-year-old who had been mar­ried 40 years. In Octo­ber, she was say­ing “My Christ­mas will be ruined again this year. He won’t hang the lights right.”

I found out:

a) he’d never hung them right
b) she always took that as a sign he didn’t love her
c) she’d berate him and he’d stop talk­ing
d) this had been going on for 40 years AND
e) she’d never once told him how she wanted the lights hung, because “He knows, and hangs them wrong to spite me!“

They’ll go to the grave fighting.

Oth­ers, like many of our par­ents, (before divorce became socially accept­able,) do not fight. They sim­ply live sep­a­rate lives, shar­ing the house and the kids, and act­ing like room­mates with priv­i­leges. This is the stage of apathy.

Or, you get a divorce, learn noth­ing, and do it all over again.

The way out, which we’ll look at in detail next week, is drop­ping the need to be right, let­ting go of the fight­ing, and sim­ply get­ting curious.

So, back to the thread of this arti­cle series.

The pur­pose of rela­tion­ships is to deepen your self–under­stand­ing. That’s it. All the rest, includ­ing hav­ing kids, is sec­ondary. (I’m not den­i­grat­ing par­ent­ing – it’s a bio­log­i­cal neces­sity for the con­tin­u­a­tion of our species. We could do it with­out get­ting mar­ried – all that is required is sperm and egg.)

All the ‘sta­bil­ity of the nuclear fam­ily’ is so much pro­pa­ganda – remem­ber the 50% divorce rate? And most of the remain­ing cou­ples, per­haps 45% are stay­ing out of guilt, fear of fail­ure, or just plain fear. The kids sur­vive anyway.

The pur­pose of life is not sim­ply to breed and to die. If there is a pur­pose, it is to deepen our know­ing. Rela­tion­ship is a per­fect place (ther­a­pist David Schnarch, author of The Pas­sion­ate Mar­riage, calls this a cru­cible) to learn to see myself.

Often, clients tell me that I am the only per­son that truly sees them and accepts them. This is both true, and sad. I see them because I have no wish for them to be other than they are. And, I encour­age them to be all that they are – to drag out the scary, juicy, stuck, chargy, dark, horny, happy, depressed parts, and to try them on for size. I do this with­out judge­ment, because I am curi­ous and inter­ested in the total­ity of their being – not just the polit­i­cally accept­able parts.

My dance with Dar­bella is the same. I can­not ever remem­ber wish­ing to change her, nor have I ever judged her. We have fought a few times in our 28 years together, when both of us got stu­pid at the same time, but the fight turned into an explo­ration, not a bat­tle. In a sense, we chose to leave con­flict behind for co-creativity.

You need to look at your prin­ci­pal rela­tion­ship, or look at how you are keep­ing your­self out of one if you don’t have one. I’m not advo­cat­ing mar­riage. Many of my friends have prin­ci­pal rela­tion­ships at a dis­tance, or with friends. The point is, there has to be at least one some­one with whom I am in con­stant con­tact – a dance and dia­log where I get called when I get off track.

In my view, it is not sen­si­ble to be in a rela­tion­ship that I am not at least neu­tral about. If I am angry and judge­men­tal most of the time, why am I there? I need to move on.

If I am at neu­tral, and my part­ner and I have (mutu­ally) made a pact of self-exploration (usu­ally with the help of a ther­a­pist) I must let go of con­flict and choose curios­ity. More on this next time.

The rea­son for drop­ping con­flict and choos­ing curios­ity is sim­ple – con­flict steals my energy. I end up rail­ing against my part­ner, blam­ing him or her for every­thing lame and weak, and stu­pid in my life.

This is alto­gether too con­ve­nient.

Mon­i­tor your­self and your gut sense of your prin­ci­pal rela­tion­ship. You do not have for­ever, and apa­thy and lame accep­tance is sim­ply that – lame.