Connection before Conflict
14.A Few Things about Sex I Know for Sure
15.Conflict: Everyday Squabbles, Big Troubles, and Intractable Differences
People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, “I can work around that. I can make something out of that”? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.
— ELIZABETH GILBERT, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
An age-old idea maintains that “love at first sight” or “finding the one” is the key to a long and successful partnership. I’m sure some people have had that experience, managing to turn their first head-over-heels infatuation into a long-term successful relationship. But just as often, it leads to disaster. I speak from experience.
I was eleven when I met him: a boy with gray-green eyes and a smile so endearing I felt my breath leave my lungs. It was the pounding of my heart that helped me remember I was still alive. He had a special affectionate name for me, and to this day I have never said it out loud.
You might be thinking, “Isn’t this supposed to be a serious book about relationships? Those last lines could have come from a cheesy romance novel.” You wouldn’t be wrong!
But I did experience that level of intensity at age eleven. He stayed locked in my psyche for twenty-nine years, and even writing about him sixty years later, I feel a tiny pang of longing. It could be the rush of chemicals that still run through my brain at the memory of him, or perhaps I yearn for those moments when I thought the euphoria I felt in his presence meant I could stay in that state forever.
Back in those days, I listened to love songs about finding The One and watched Hollywood movies that always ended with lovers walking off into the sunset. That’s how the story ended: two people finding their other half and finally becoming whole.
One day, my eighth-grade teacher, Sister Germaine, had us write about the miners in the great Yukon Gold Rush of 1896. As soon as one man struck gold, a stampede of thousands followed, hoping they too would find the key to happiness. But most came back empty-handed. The few who did strike gold squandered it — and often their lives along with it. But once in a while someone struck gold! I wrote my paper comparing the Gold Rush to the search for love, arguing that finding The One was worth risking everything; love was the gold that was the key to happiness. Sister Germaine spoke to me kindly but sternly, telling me something I’d never heard before. She said, “Linda, the gold you are looking for is inside of you.”
I wish I had been emotionally intelligent enough to absorb those words. Instead, my friends and I laughed in secret at the old nun who’d “never known real love” and therefore had no idea what she was talking about.
And so I became a love junkie instead. That feeling the green-eyed boy gave me was love’s designer drug itself: a fluttering heart and fierce hits of pleasure.
But that “true love” didn’t turn out so well. Despite my certainty that he was The One, there came a day when I discovered he had a special name for my best friend too.
For the next twenty-five years, I re-created variations of this scene with various partners, always looking for The One who would fulfill me, make me happy, and be my other half. The relationships all began with a giddy rush, then sank with a thump, and before I knew it, I was playing sad songs and reading poems about heartbreak. There was always another unhappy and inappropriate relationship waiting where the last one had left off, and then another, and still another after that. I thought the chemical rush was a signal that I should be with that next person, and I ignored the many signs trying to tell me that the people I picked just weren’t right.
The morning I turned thirty-five, I felt myself at a crossroads. I didn’t want the next part of my life to be a repeat of the relationship unhappiness I had experienced in the first part. So I found my way to a good therapist. I read books and went back to graduate school studying counseling and psychology, determined to uncover the roots of my disastrous history with love. Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt, the married couple who founded Imago relationship therapy, taught me that “familiar love” is often mistaken for “real love.” It was perhaps the harshest but most valuable lesson I learned. Sometimes when we feel we’ve known someone forever, it’s not because we were together in another lifetime or because we were meant to be together because of the alignment of the stars. It is simply that their attachment style, difficulty managing anger, or other aspects of their personality mirror those of a parent we struggled with.
One day I said to my therapist, “I realize there is no such thing as ‘The One.’”
She replied, “Oh, but there is. The One you’re looking for is inside of you, not outside.”
The message of Sister Germaine, the old nun who “didn’t know about life,” had come back to me. This time, I didn’t laugh. I knew my therapist was right. But I had no idea how to find The One in myself.
So a new kind of quest began. Who was I? I traveled the world, studied various philosophies, and spent many hours in contemplative practices. I asked myself many questions: Who am I? What has made me the person I am? How could I have not known I was The One, instead looking to person after person to find an answer that dwelt only inside of me? The year I turned forty, I went on a weeklong retreat aptly entitled “What Is the Meaning of Your Life?” There, I realized the five years I’d spent on looking within had helped me to become The One I was seeking.
A month later, I rediscovered a dear friend I hadn’t seen in years. Tim had been on a similar path of self-discovery, and we renewed a deep and loving friendship. Slowly, it evolved into more. We took a long time to let our relationship grow into something we trusted enough to create a life together. We’ve now been together thirty-five years.
Of course, even after all the inner work we’d both done on our own, the human dilemma and all the struggles it brings to relationships knocked us around again and again once we came together. Still, we stayed with each other. We even gave the process a name: staying on the bronco. What bound us together — besides deep friendship and a mutual love of dogs, good books, crazy and wonderful passion, and wicked humor — was a shared belief that love and marriage are not places to hide from life. A committed relationship is a place to grow, to learn and inquire and challenge ourselves. It’s a way to better know the self and, even more challenging, to practice the arts of tolerance, forgiveness, and apologizing. Relationships are opportunities to practice wholeheartedness and, in magical moments, to fully experience it.
So after years of thinking both the best and worst parts of my relationships were all about the other person, I finally realized that love is an inside job. Many of the troubles