What is relationship?
By way of technology and elaborate social contracts the Western world has gradually softened the inconvenience of fighting for survival. I’m 57, and I’ve never been in serious danger of starvation or death by heat or cold. None of my friends have either. Whether this is good or healthy I don’t know, but it’s true.
(This privileged arrangement is not the norm for the vast majority of humans, even now, of course)
So now we’re left with all of our high-falutin’ ideas of love, brotherhood, mother/fatherhood, marriage, altruism, etc, etc, mostly in tatters. Technology (that Promised Land of free time, elegant use of energy and talent and materials, food and shelter for all, health care miracles, plenty in all corners of our physical lives) has brought us face to face with ourselves.
We can look back at thousands of years of human culture with condescending judgement. The long patriarchal history of the domination of women, of human slavery, of child labour, of the exploitation of the millions who had no access to power is now an embarrassment. It continues in most of the world, but we believe despite all the evidence that it’s in its death throes. At least in our little corner (what Doris Lessing called the NorthWest Fringes) we feel righteous and indignant and just a little impatient with our Third World kin. Not to say frightened. They seem to us perversely unenthusiastic about learning from (and skipping) our mistakes and avoiding all the grotesque advantages those ‘mistakes’ have afforded us.
But where do we find ourselves? It’s not necessary to list our woes (the destruction of the environment, human violence, child abuse, prostitution, pornography, corruption in government and commerce, terrorism are only the tip of the iceberg) to feel the deep unease and lack of hope that prevails among us.
What unnerves me most, though, is much closer to my cosy little home. The only thing that could possibly mitigate our history for me, that could begin to be an apology for the enforced sacrifices that millions have made to fuel the evolution of this grand social artifice of the democratic technological West, is in worse shape in us than ever before.
Love and relationship.
Perhaps it was inevitable. The dark side of our grand democratic humanist designs is an unconscious running from the fear of insecurity, unpredictability, change, and all threats of the unknown. We wrongly believe that we’re running toward certainties, permanences, and fixed forms of life and living. Freedom from disease, poverty, danger, conflict, inconvenience (and even Death) is the underlying justification of most of our popular political, economic, social, and artistic rhetoric. This underlying bedrock of our thoughts and actions leaves no area of our psychic reality unaffected.
Including, unfortunately, our attitude toward each other - our human relatedness. Our relationship.
Formulaic religious devotion and convention, once the benign spin-offs of the lives of mystics and seers that pointed the way, are no substitute for relationship. Political ‘isms’ appear to have little effect on the psychological structures of their practitioners. Educational techniques foisted on the masses seem to have done little to enlighten us in this regard. Economic theorists have effected little change in the overall balance of exploiters and exploited in the human body politic.
Fair enough.
But now that I (and most of my fellows) have time to spend on the real matter of my private life, out of which all these larger structures are formed, I find that I am unable to sustain a relationship with a partner beyond the point where she or he or we or I (if you care to try on the first person as you read) is/are/am not what was first presented to them in order to attract and ensnare them. There are very predictable statistics to indicate this.
Most relationships last as long as we can agree to continue lying to or hiding from each other. They then end overtly with separation and divorce, or worse, covertly with a tacit agreement to continue formally as a social gesture toward stability and maturity. The latter ploy is often justified by the term ‘commitment’.
Commitment is a foolish idea. It is really a promise to pretend to succeed rather than admit bankruptcy. To do as millions have done, and continue to behave as if our engagement with each other hasn’t been betrayed or lost. So we see the millions of sorry human lives lived out without depth or evolution or fulfilment simply to satisfy a social expectation.
This ‘commitment ‘ is now thoroughly out of fashion, of course. So the divorce rates increase among the non-religious humans, while the religious avoid the problem by going nowhere near any of the issues that might deepen the argument and perhaps the outcome. A shame because the best hope of some positive evolution in this matter lies more in the quadrant of the religious/spiritual than in that of the materialist.
The unfashionableness of commitment, which at one level is quite reasonable and right, loses some of its righteousness if we stop to wonder if that option - a promise made in ignorance - was the only option that longterm relationship might grow from. We could crow with more conviction if we hadn’t taken the first and easiest exit...
But there may be another potentiality lurking in the common experience of love and romance and devotion (not a synonym of commitment, I don’t think). When we were more commonly susceptible to marriage, it was usually preceded by a period of engagement.
Now there’s a word with possibilities.
Perhaps we should examine whether marriage was a step too far. Or rather, that it was not a step we could really take at all. When two people are deeply and devotedly engaged, they are married. But for most of us, marriage was synonymous with making a commitment - a commitment we were too young to realise was a red herring. Many of us divorcees can vouch for the inefficacy of promises in the face of ultimate disengagement.
Commitment is sustained by repetition - of promises, of reassuring habitual behaviours, of formulaic reassurances. It’s a closed system. And most relationships end because someone moves or grows or is dragged outside these confining walls.
Engagement, on the other hand, is sustained by renewal not repetition. It doesn’t demand predictability of events or reactions or opinions. It’s an open system with only a few simple non-negotiable dynamics to direct and protect it:
that we offer the beloved honest reflection and clarity that doesn’t judge, and turn to them for the same in return
that we practice love whether we feel it or not
that we don’t indulge in the intoxicating distraction of comparing the beloved to other men or women (who are projecting illusions at us just as they are projecting at the rest of the world)
that we recognise the rarity and beauty of this gentle continuity of engagement in our own short lives and in the random world of unconscious action and reaction where we otherwise exist
With commitment there is no end of promises.
With engagement there is no end of promise.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
