So we have supplanted worship of the Divine with the supplication to our search for The Other.
And this may be marriages undoing or its salvation, I am not really sure. On any given day it appears to be a mixed bag. Right now, if forced to guess, I would say undoing.
We have outsourced personal responsibility for that which we attract, and have created this absolutely infallible myth that it is not us, but this other person we must find to become whole, complete beings. And so we are forever in search, and even when we find, we don’t always stop the search.
And it is a set up of unlimited proportions...
We find someone who loves us and we love them. We do not notice or pretend not to that this person is being selected by our unattended and often unacknowledged childhood wounds. So it is just a matter of time before the wheels begin to fall off of this most recent foray on the love bus.
And when it falls apart, and it almost always does, whether we leave it or not is a more appropriate question. Most of the marriages I know, have GIGANTIC elephants in their marital halls that are being completely ignored, even as they grow in size and floor space every single day. Most people I know who are married, are not, in fact, happy. They are hostage. To an idea, to finances, to children, to family ties that bind and cut, to histories that are not really happy, but they have longevity and this seems to be the gold standard for marriage in our society today. If you have lasted a long time, then that is a marker of being a “good” marriage.
I am here to tell you that is the worst marker for a happy marriage I have ever seen. Just because you have stuck it out, doesn’t mean or have anything to do really with being happy, fulfilled, seen, valued, or even loved. Most people enter in with their delusion and wounds and then stick it out under some sort of misguided notion that their sticktoitiveness is to revered and celebrated. When really we should all be saying, “what the actual fuck are you doing? You are celebrating a 20 year anniversary with someone you can’t stand, do not trust and speak of very negatively, sometimes when they can hear you...”
But it is like we have all taken some sort of drug that distracts us from the truth that dogs our every footstep. Truth is all around us but we can’t see it, we won’t see it. Because we are so committed to the idea that this marriage, relationship will work because we need it to.
Need is a very different thing than want. And we can need it and want it with all that we are, but in the end, the other person involved has to share that commitment and be willing to walk through relational hell WITH us to get to some place where both parties childhood wounds are addressed, made space for and healed to the degree that is possible.
But this is not what we do. We marry that one and then struggle to get our needs met, find fault with that one and then begin to allow the sinking feeling that we have made a grievous error to sink in, then we all begin to plot either our exit strategy or drink or shop or fuck other people to numb the pain of our shared existence that feels like a living death...when we allow those very painful feelings to actually surface which isn’t often in our very busy lives.
We also get busy. With kids, work, kids activities, social commitments, hobbies, working out. The list is absolutely endless, but anyone who has ever seen someone do something with the intention to avoid and the person who does something with the intention to learn or grow can tell you the difference immediately. How? It feels different just watching them.
Have you ever attempted to gain intimacy with someone who is incapable? It feels awful. I can remember being a kid and trying to talk to my dad. My mom and I shared a close bond and talked all the time. I wanted that with him. But he was not capable. I don’t think he ever even got to a place where it ranked as something he wanted. He was that far removed from himself.
But I can remember a time in elementary school, I wanted to talk to him about something, probably something to gain his approval, or get his opinion on, and he would not give me the time. So I took up the long practice of following him around and talking at him while he busied himself with all his tasks that were really just very productive avoidance tactics. I can’t tell you how many times I followed that man around while he planted grass plugs, or weeded or did some other yard chore. I think one day, if my memory serves me (and it doesn’t a great deal of the time, so I can’t promise this is true) I followed him around one day attempting to gain his attention while he was actually mowing the yard! Yes, I am that sick! HAHA!
And this is what we do in marriage. This is what we do in relationships. We pick these people to love that are only going to light up those parts of us that failed to grow because of lack of care or grew too much or in a weird way because of too much of the wrong kind of attention. And then we marry them. And we try, daily, to make work that which will never, ever work out. Sometimes we stay for multiple decades, sometimes our married or relational life looks more like a revolving door. It really doesn’t matter whether you are a stayer or a goer. The result is the same. You are in a relationship with someone who is NEVER GOING TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT OR NEED. Or even worse, WILL ONLY GIVE IT TO YOU VERY INTERMITTENTLY...and you know what they say about intermittent reinforcement, right? It is the strongest and most long lasting reinforcer out there!
I hope I have done an adequate job of outlining the issue. We are wounded, everyone else is wounded. And we go about relating that and dealing with it all wrong. All fucking wrong. And instead of owning that which is ours to own (our wounds, our picker, our selection of that which has already failed us) we blame the other person for failing us, for not being what we need when upon closer examination, we could all see so very clearly that that particular person was never, ever going to be able to even manage their own wounds, let alone assist us with ours.
But the delusion otherwise is magnificent. And life altering. And relational ending. Which leads me back to this idea, not my own (James Hollis is a brilliant man) that instead of seeking the Divinity we used to, we have trained ourselves to instead search for this magical other that is going to fix it all any second now. And so we jump on the relational hamster wheel and are forever pissed that we just keep revisiting the same shitty places with different shitty people (or the same shitty person, as the case may be) over and over and over again. Creating familial wreckage in ourselves, our partners and perhaps most capriciously, our children.
I guess where I am going with all of this is that I would like to start a revolution. A soul revolution where we take back that which is ours instead of outsourcing to all those Others out there. And do the internal work on ourselves, so that we can participate in relationships differently, more completely, with better intimacy and love and connection and commitment. OR, maybe we have too much baggage to ever be able to accept, assimilate or heal. And so we perhaps do a better job of engaging our wound.
I am not advocating that we should all wear signs “DOING MY WORK” and “DON’T EVEN KNOW THERE IS WORK FOR ME TO DO” But it would be helpful. At least you would know what you marry up.
It would be nice to have something better to say at the end of our lives than we made money, we fornicated (Hollis’ reference to Camus and T.S. Eliot) and we did a really awful job relating to ourselves and thus also to others.
Let us all own, now before it gets any later, that there is hardly a person alive that can compete with the fantasy of the Magical Other that resides in our hearts, minds and bodies. NO ONE!
It isn’t even really a matter of falling out of love anymore, it is instead some sort of exchange program we unwittingly signed up for where we have the delusion, marry it with this other person, project all over them, then hold them accountable and revile them when they fail to live up to our unrealistic and bizarre notions of happiness, and love, and commitment.
Usually one of us is outgrowing the unconscious, unspoken parameters of our union, whilst the other desperately tries to keep that unintelligible promise going leaving one party feeling frustrated, hurt, betrayed and depressed and the other feeling anxious, despairing and controlling. It is bad deal all around.
And yet, and yet, we keep fucking doing it.
Again...still.
F U C K!
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