Coming Apart. Daphne Rose Kingma
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Coming Apart - Daphne Rose Kingma страница 6
Название: Coming Apart
Автор: Daphne Rose Kingma
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Социальная психология
isbn: 9781633410770
isbn:
In the past, individuals subjugated themselves to the needs of the relationship in order to accomplish work, some task that was a mutually agreed-upon goal. Now we live in a time when relationships exist to serve the deepest needs of the individuals in them.
In a sense, we are asking the relationship to subjugate itself to the evolution of the individual. Because we have solved the issues of basic survival, we have the luxury of moving on to deeper levels of development: emotional, spiritual, aesthetic. And it is in relationships, the intimate and challenging encounter with another, that we do this. This is not a state of affairs toward which we are moving; it is the place at which we have already arrived.
This is a difficult concept for us to admit to ourselves, despite the impact of the “me generation.” All evidence to the contrary, we have not yet consciously acknowledged the degree to which we value the development of the self. But it is true that we enter into relationships primarily to discover, foster, enhance, and sustain our individual selves. We haven't really openly acknowledged this because we don't like to think of ourselves as selfish or self-oriented. There is a certain part of us that wants to believe we hold human communion and, therefore, relationships as a higher value than self. We don't like to conceive of ourselves as being in relationships to get something—that's too crass. It also violates our soft romantic sensibilities. We don't want to believe that we fall in love in order to get something out of it.
We want to hold love out as the one part of life where there is still magic and mystery, where there is still romance. Although love does serve to meet our needs for magic, mystery, and romance, the deeper truth is that we all enter into relationships for very specific reasons, whether we choose to see them or not.
In spite of the progress of civilization, relationships are still task-oriented. When we fall in love, we fall in love with the person who will help us accomplish something—whether that's something we know we're trying to accomplish, like getting a college degree or having a family, or whether that's something about which we are entirely unaware, like trying to achieve emotional security.
I am certainly not saying that we should take the mystery, the magic, or the romance out of falling in love, but we certainly do need to take the mystery out of falling out of love. When a relationship ends, it is vital to look at it through reality-colored glasses and ask, “What was it really about?” “What were we doing together, anyway?” We need to see what happened so that we don't feel guilty, so that we learn for the future, so that we can love again.
My experience in helping hundreds of people go through the painful process of parting is that it is only when we truly understand the meaning of our relationships—the tasks we undertook in them, the gifts we received from them—that we can survive their endings with our selves and our self-esteem intact.
3
Exploding the Love Myths: Why Are We Really in Relationships?
JOHN AND DEBORAH FELL IN LOVE when they were both in their late twenties. They'd both had a number of puppy love relationships and were now eager to settle down. He'd been out of college for a couple of years and now was working as a bank management trainee. She was just finishing college.
They had a number of friends in common. She was attracted to his steadiness—“He was so peaceful and comforting”—and he was drawn to her liveliness and affection—“She really adored me.” The shy beginning of their romance (“I was the one who called him for our first date,” Deborah confessed) flowered into a series of dates and excursions, mutual appreciation of one another, and the feeling that there was no reason whatsoever why there shouldn't be more—a lifetime of what already felt so good to them. After living together in peace and delight for more than a year, they decided to get married.
When Marie and Neil fell in love, everyone thought they were the perfect couple. Neil was a dashing 6'5″; Marie was a dazzling, willowy blond.
“It was love at first sight,” according to Marie. “He was just my type of man, grown-up, handsome, accomplished. He met all my criteria for a mate, and when he chose me in return, it was more than I ever could have asked.
“It wasn't just surface, either. We had a lot of things in common. We were both in business. He was a few steps ahead of me when I was starting out and available to give me the guidance I needed. He was my hero and my colleague. My ideal. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Six months later, we got married.”
In general, when we tell the stories of falling in love, they follow a very specific format: They fell in love, got married, and lived happily ever after. In our unconscious mythologies of love, we see marriage—the cementing of a relationship through the ceremony of marriage—as a destination. We assume that marriage itself is the goal. We assume that love will drop us off at the doorway of a committed relationship and that once we have walked through it, all will be well. More of the same until the end of time. We expect that the high-riding, ebullient, positive feelings that cause us to fall in love will sustain us through all the years of our relationships, that love will dissolve our differences and conquer all. We presume, in a sense, that relationships are about the supremacy of love, that they will meet all our needs and last forever.
However, as the very existence of this book testifies, there is more to a marriage than simply setting it up. A lot goes on in the house of love and, rather than being a destination, relationships are often just a roadside inn, a stopping place on our journeys through life.
So if relationships aren't, in the end, about living happily ever after, about love that conquers all, then what are they really about, you may ask. Why do we really fall in love?
The reason we fall in love is to help us accomplish our external and internal developmental tasks.
Developmental Tasks
In our lifetimes, we are each trying to do a single thing: to create our selves. We are all trying to solve our basic psychological problem—which is to answer in depth and to our own satisfaction the question, “Who am I?”
What this means is that as we proceed through our lives, we are all trying to get a sense of our own identity. In order to do that, we create a series of life experiences that either help us discover who we really are or confirm who we have discovered ourselves to be. This process of self-definition or self-discovery occurs through what I call “developmental tasks,” and it is our relationships, more than anything else in our lives, that help us accomplish the developmental tasks through which we define ourselves. That's why we choose the people we do and that's why they choose us. That's also why relationships begin and end.
Developmental tasks are stepping stones in the developmental process. Learning to walk after learning to crawl is a developmental task for an infant, just as attending college after completing high school is an intellectual developmental task for a young adult. The completion of each of these tasks marks the putting into place of another piece of the personality, a further identification of the self, a further coming to terms with who one really is.
Whether we are consciously aware of this or not, we are all, at any given moment in our lives, engaged in this developmental process. We're all going about the business of becoming, or trying to become, ourselves. We're all trying to grow up and leave home: to get educated, to decide whether or not to have children, to survive financially, to solve our addictive СКАЧАТЬ