Coming Apart. Daphne Rose Kingma

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СКАЧАТЬ With our sweethearts, husbands, and wives as our constant protectors, we feel that we are safe. This is also true, in a different way, for people whose parents didn't create a feeling of security in childhood. For them there is a desperate need to establish the sense of security that was always painfully lacking.

      One of the reasons we try so hard to duplicate our early experience through our adult love relationships is that in our society there are only two kinds of relationships we believe we can legitimately have. One is as a child in a family; the other is as a grown-up with a spouse. Despite the variety of options that are available to us—living alone, living in a singles’ community, living with roommates or friends—at the deepest level of our psyches, we still believe that these are poor substitutes for the real thing: a couple relationship that in its intensity of focus replicates the early childhood experience.

      As children, our relationships were fixed; we were inextricably part of a family unit. But, in adulthood, we move into that segment of life where we choose our relationships. We hope to recreate in the format of an adult romantic relationship the feelings of security and connectedness that we experienced as children. When these adult relationships end, we are tossed out into the open sea of nonconnectedness; it suddenly feels as if we are totally alone. We can't go home and be little children again, so when we end our adult relationships, we feel as if we have separated ourselves from the only context and format we believe we're allowed to have as a safe harbor in our adult lives. We feel emotionally devastated.

      Obsolete Mythologies of Love

      Another thing that makes breaking up so painful is that we have a number of myths about love and relationships, about how love and marriage “should be,” that are no longer a reflection of reality. Our beliefs about love no longer match up with what's going on in the world, and they are contradicted when our relationships end. I call these out-of-date notions the obsolete mythologies of love.

      Love Is Forever

      Our primary and probably most potent myth about love is that love is forever, that when we make a relationship, it will last for our whole lives. Our marriage vows—“Till death do us part”—are the public ceremonial expression of that myth. We don't say, “I'll love you as long as it feels good,” or, “I'll love you until I find somebody else.” We say, “I'll love you forever; I'll live with you until one of us dies.” We expect the person we choose to be our partner to be with us for our whole lives.

      It is this assumption in particular that makes breaking up so hard to do. In ending a relationship, we negate the myth of forever; we violate the assumption that our relationship will last us for our whole lives. What we see is that instead of being forever, our relationship was just an episode.

      Because almost all of us have subscribed to the myth of forever, when our relationships end, the only thing we can say is, “I must not be any good; there must be something the matter with me. I created this relationship with the intention it would last forever, but now it's ending. It certainly can't be ending because the idea that love is forever is wrong, so it's got to be me who is wrong.” We spend an unbelievable amount of time in self-flagellation because we can't imagine that the notion of forever could possibly be inappropriate. But it is. There isn't a person in the United States who hasn't witnessed a divorce or the heartbreaking end of a romance. The truth is that relationships end. It is high time we explode the myth that love is forever, so that when we end relationships, we can do so without such devastating crises in self-esteem.

      Love Is All-Inclusive

      Another one of these obsolete myths is that relationships are all-inclusive. When we make a relationship with someone, we assume he or she will be sufficient to meet all our needs. In other words, we believe that the person we love will be the one person with whom we always go to movies, with whom we always go out to dinner, with whom we go to church, with whom we have all our conversations about our bad day at the office or our ailing back, who knows all our troubles and to whom we unburden ourselves.

      We don't enter into relationships saying to ourselves, “Well, in my relationship I'm going to handle my needs for sex and a Friday night date, but I'm going to have an intellectual life with my friend Sally and a cultural life with my friend Stan.” When we enter into a long-term relationship, we generally assume that the person we love will be sufficient—or almost sufficient—to meet all our needs. We expect that 95 percent of our needs will be met in our primary relationships and the other 5 percent—well, we'll just forget about them.

      We presume the person we love will provide us with companionship and entertainment, with intellectual and emotional stimulation, with physical solace and sexual satisfaction, that he or she will be our . . . everything. We think of a relationship as an exclusive and all-encompassing resource, and we conduct our lives according to this expectation. We begin by turning to our partners and constricting our outreach to others. More and more, we ask our partners to meet all our needs, until they become the focus of our existence.

      It is because we have such all-encompassing and exclusive expectations for our relationships that we are devastated when they end. At the simplest level, who will be our Friday night date? How will we meet all our needs—for sex, for conversation, for succor, for daily companionship, and for consistency? What or who will provide the ground of familiarity in our lives? How can we replace the handy-dandy, live-in jack- or jill-of-all-trades that the person to whom we were related had inevitably become?

      The great cafeteria of needs that were being met with affection and efficiency by the single person we chose to hold close in our lives is now no longer being met. We are paralyzed not only by thoughts of loneliness—“What will I do for companionship now?”—but also by the aggravation of needing to learn, on what feels like a moment's notice, how to meet all our needs in a variety of other ways.

      What's ironic about the forever and the all-inclusive myths is that they sprang up in times when the life span was half of what it is today. In those days, when a person said, “I'll love you forever,” forever could be two years or ten years, but it very seldom approached the forty, fifty, or sixty years of marriage that could conceivably be possible today. But even in the past, people often had multiple relationships. They could get married and easily say, “until death do us part,” because death often did part them, and the surviving partner would go on to marry again. Relationships ended not because of what occurred within them, but because of external circumstances. It wasn't necessary to ask, “Was I a bad person?” “Did I fail?” “Did this relationship end because I wasn't okay?” None of these questions had to be asked because the usual cause of the ending—death—was out of everyone's hands.

      When we apply these myths to ourselves now, however, they can only have one psychological result: we find ourselves in a crisis of self-esteem because we are unable to build relationships that are in accordance with these myths.

      The circumstances in which we find ourselves today are very different from those that spawned our cultural attitudes toward relationships, and these mythologies didn't always have such personally negative effects. In the past, the continent needed taming, and its subjugation was best accomplished in community, by teams. The teams began with a pair of people who fell in love or married for convenience and then had children, developing a society and work-force that could get the tasks done.

      People were too poor and too busy to worry about anything except economic survival. The point of a relationship was, above all, to establish a stable economic unit, which, with the efforts of all its members, could create a somewhat comfortable life. Once you chose a partner, you just made it work. There was no worrying about the emotional well-being of your relationship or whether you felt good about yourself.

      But now СКАЧАТЬ