Historically marriage has been about preserving wealth and bring stability to the culture and procreation. Love really had nothing to do with it. Marriage was certainly not a place created to make an individual happy. In fact, in my experience, marriage is often the place people go to make themselves and others miserable.
From a historical perspective, marriage, as an institution, was not really concerned with love. And the research bears out that arranged marriages are not better or worse off than when we have the free will to select a spouse. Really none of us is really doing better than chance. Actually, with the divorce rate being 52%, chance is fairing better.
And perhaps the best reason for our repeated failure in marriage is this common, corrosive thread that each of us are out there seeking to replicate the abuse, wounds and hurt from our childhoods. And our relative success really seems to come from either the blessing of having a mostly functional childhood, or doing a fuck ton of work to heal from most of the rest of our experiences of a traumatic childhood.
Since there is this largely unconscious part of us that is operating outside our working knowledge, we are out there in the world selecting people, marrying them and failing to see the connection between our trauma and our choices. Some of us never see it, and others of us see it but only after a lifetime of making the same wounded choice over and over again.
I know it seems counter-intuitive. We are abused or neglected, creating the wound of too much or too little, and then we seek to heal it by selecting another, similar person to wound us in the same way again. But THIS TIME, it will be different. That neglectful, dismissive partner will love us and care about us and not treat us like an afterthought. THIS TIME, we will be redeemed.
Nope.
The universe plays out for us the same lesson over and over again, until we learn that someone who is dismissive and neglectful is likely always going to be that way. And we can’t change it because it is not ours to change. And our willingness to love that person and grant them access to us and love is just a current manifestation of our ancient wounding playing out in real time.
We are not really getting what we want, we are getting what our wound wants...
James Hollis leans toward believing that the search for love is so great that it has replaced the search for God. And I couldn’t agree more. We seek to find happiness and fulfillment in that loving union we just KNOW is coming for us. Except that once we get it, we find it lacking in ways great and small. Then we just move on to the next one...always seeking and finding and leaving only to return to seek and find and leave again.
And it is a repetition chaos. It brings such upheaval in our lives. It brings a crisis of epic proportions. And so much pain and sadness and hurt and wounding. But we don’t stop often to ask what our part is and why we keep getting the same lesson over and over again. We instead feel we are just misunderstood and that any Supreme Intelligence just has it in for us.
Have we really supplanted the search for God with the search for romantic love?
I think so.
I would much prefer to get a boyfriend than do the harder work of coming to know better a God I do not understand, cannot touch or see or sometimes really even believe exists. We seek The Other because they are more readily available and they tend to answer back In real time.
And so we believe in the false God of marriage. We believe despite repeated failings and betrayals. We just keep signing up over and over again. We are committed to the cause even though the cause lets us down repeatedly. We are crushed, dashed, wrung the fuck out, but after a little time to regroup (notice I did NOT say heal) we begin the whole fucking ordeal over again, thinking “THIS TIME, it will be different.” When what we really should be saying is “If I want this to be different, then I have to actually change myself, because the same me is going to pick the same person again...forever.”
Mr. Hollis’ premise is that if you want a better loving relationship, you have to clear up your own issues, wounds and ultimately relationship with yourself. Only then can you make better dating and relational choices. And that just isn’t how we work in this world. It isn’t me that needs to change, I am fine, thanks very much, but YOU, YOU need to be fucking different like right fucking now.
And so marriages fail and we are helpless but to begin the cycle over again, seeking to replicate that which just failed...again, still. And our delusion so great, it is impervious to any thought or belief to the contrary. I mean how many of us have thought, after ending a particularly horrible entrenchment, “ya know, I am gonna take some time off for myself...” And then you meet him or her, with all their shiny attractiveness and sex appeal and presence and availability and all that inner work just seems like such a fucking waste of time. I mean, if the universe didn’t want you to indulge, they wouldn’t have presented Mr. and Ms. Right Now. See it wasn’t YOU that was the problem, NO! It was the last Mr. or Ms. Whatwastheirname.
And so the cycle repeats itself endlessly. And we fall in and out of love, we date and relate and break up and begin again. We marry and divorce and the seemingly endless cycle goes on and on forever. And we keep thinking and believing that this time it will be different, when the problem is that The Other is the problem. Um, nope. We are the problem and our primary issue is that we keep selecting the same Other but calling it different. Then blaming The Other for that which is largely ours.
Look at all the shit written now about Narcissists. I mean everyone is dating them, marrying them and then breaking up with them...but why are we not asking why these lovely people who are so duped by the love bombing are falling for these fuckers in the first place? I mean, the narcissist only proliferates because there are those of us who are willing to love them in the first place. And so...I have to ask, what the actual fuck is wrong with us????
We are the problem. Which is the best news ever, if your ego can withstand the moniker, because if we are the problem then we can become the solution.
And our first order of business, so it would appear, is that we have to see that we are engaged, married if you will, to this idea that it is all about finding the right person, instead of being the right person. And also I think, we are not entitled to anything. Not everyone gets a happily ever after. Some of us get a pretty mild cancerous growth kind of love. It isn’t going to kill us today, but left untreated, it surely will. And there are those of us whose choices are so toxic that our love relations will actually kill us.
So it all begins in childhood and then proliferates. And until and unless we deal with the wounds childhood provides, we will just keep selecting the same people over and over again and keep calling it bad luck, or misguided choices, or red flags we pretended not to see. The red flags, so it would appear, are always ours. Oh sure, the other person has them too, you just can’t do shit about them.
So it would seem to me, after a lifetime of relational analysis, our best and most likely successful path would be to take the time needed to heal that which festers beneath our shiny veneers and do the inner work on ourselves in order to free ourselves from the domination and control of our very wounded subconscious that holds all the cards in our selection of love partners.
And until and unless we do, I will have a never ending supply of clients to divorce. Which helps me pay my mortgage but honestly breaks my heart every fucking day. For me, for you, for all of us caught in this endless cycle of loving and losing.
I pray for myself, for you and for humanity to one day, find a way to do it differently...
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