every relationship changes every person to an equal degree. For many people, relationships are simply a resting place, a “holding tank,” where not much significant forward development is accomplished, but in which a certain state of being is allowed to continue uninterrupted. Sometimes this uninterrupted state of being is a kind of growth in itself. As one man said at the end of his relationship, “Ruth was disappointed because I wasn't ambitious; but I couldn't be ambitious then. I'd been through so much in Vietnam that what I really needed was a quiet place. I needed the same person to come home to every night. I needed reality to be unruffled and boring. I needed to cool my heels and get my bearings. In a sense, that was her gift to me: she gave me a place to vegetate for a while.”
Relationships also end when the developmental process gets out of joint. A relationship can continue for only as long as the two people in it are either in a parallel or similarly focused developmental process. But when one partner wants to change the agenda and the other prefers the status quo, there's trouble.
For example, Mike and Karen, both high school dropouts, met when they worked at an electronics factory. They were both movie fanatics and played on the company softball team. Since they had grown up in poverty, each dreamed of owning a home. After a two-year courtship, they got married. In order to save money to buy a house, Karen supported Mike while he went through training to become an electrician. They pooled their resources, and within four years they bought their first house.
After three more years they had two children, and Karen began to be discontented. Now that she was at home with the children, she missed the stimulation that in the past her work had afforded. She also realized that for most of her life she had been pressed into the caretaker role. As a child, she had had to take care of her sick grandmother, an experience that now caused her to resent staying home with the children. She realized she wanted to go back to work, but when she discussed this with Mike, he became irrationally enraged.
Mike was from a broken home, and it was very important to him to be the provider for his family. He'd been willing to have Karen work while they were saving to buy the house. But now that it was theirs, he believed her place was in the home. He wanted his children to have a stay-at-home-mother, the way he never had.
At this point, Mike and Karen's process began to be distinctly out of joint. They no longer had a common purpose. When they were both working toward buying a house, they were the perfect partners for each other. But as Karen pressed forward with her psychological need to develop her own capabilities, Mike's dream of a traditional family was threatened. After a year of discussion, bargaining, and pleading, Karen delivered an ultimatum: whether he liked it or not she was going back to work. Declaring that she was an unfit mother for the children, Mike took the two boys and moved out.
What I am trying to show in all these examples is the profound impact of childhood on adult relationships. Without realizing it, we often choose partners who will help us trace back through the dark woods of our childhood, like Hansel and Gretel, picking up the scattered crumbs of our identities along the way. It never ceases to amaze me how little most people know about their own childhoods by the time they reach adulthood, the altar, or the divorce court. For all of us, childhood is the archaeological site from which all the important information about ourselves can eventually be excavated: our hopes, our deficits, our expectations, our personal myths about love and sex, our beliefs about the opposite sex, our sense of self-worth, our feelings about our bodies, and all the thousands of other perceptions and beliefs that form our self-concept.
Most of us move into adulthood essentially uninformed about ourselves, unconscious about all of the influences, persons, and scenarios that have shaped us. As a result, we try to design the experience of adulthood on a conscious level, but also, and more importantly, we try to design the experience of childhood on an unconscious level, in such a way as to recreate what has already occurred so that we can finally understand it.
That's why we frequently see women who as children were abused by their fathers marry men who beat them. It also explains why men who had aloof, unaffectionate mothers often marry women who are physically and emotionally distant.
For every single one of us, childhood is the first run of the most important movie of our lives. It would have changed our whole lives if we could have seen it when we were young, but unfortunately we missed it the first time around. Years later, we catch the rerun at another theater—in our love affairs and marriages.
For almost all of us, the vital information about our childhood that we absolutely must have comes only with our adult relationships. Magically, unconsciously, we take the scenarios and emotional dynamics that existed in our relationships with our parents and recreate them in our relationships with our sweethearts, lovers, husbands, and wives. It's as if we're saying to ourselves, “I'll have to do this again until I get it right.”
There are a couple of theories about the repetitive psychological patterns in which we all seem to engage. One is that we are all hopeless incompetents and masochists. We just keep doing the same rotten, miserable things over and over because, at heart, we thrive on misery. The other theory is that we keep creating a rerun of our childhood movie because we're trying to understand it, to get the information we missed the last time around (or the first time around). This theory holds that we reenact, recreate, and review the childhood movie until we have received the lesson it has to give us and then go on in our lives—as ourselves, able to have healthy, whole, adult relationships.
As you may guess, I subscribe to this kinder view of human nature. I don't believe we're all masochists, but I do believe that it takes us a long time and often many experiences to teach us the things we need to learn about ourselves.
Since adult relationships are our primary means of learning the lessons from childhood, it follows that often these adult relationships will not be the perfectly crystalline, boundlessly happy eternal unions we wish they would be. Rather, it is in their very raggedness, incompleteness, and frustration that they become powerfully instructive. It also follows that through them and at the end of them there will be much to be learned about our relationships with our parents—about what I call the unfinished business of childhood—and hence about ourselves.
For every person—married, living with a partner, or single—the paramount task of living is the creation of the self. The reason relationships are so important to us, and the reason their endings are so painful, isn't just that when they are over we miss the company; it is because through them we undertake the process of bringing ourselves into being.
Let me say again that in my view, it is the creation of the self—living as exactly and wholly as oneself as one possibly can—that is our primary task as human beings. Because relationships assist us in accomplishing this purpose, I see their endings not as tragic but, although needled with pain, as potent opportunities.
4
Charting the Life-Span of Love: Seven Relationships and Why They Ended
WHILE IT IS TRUE THAT there are as many variations in relationships and reasons for their endings as there are couples who enter into them, there are also certain basic themes and issues that operate in both the creation and the dissolution of relationships.
What follows are the stories of seven relationships and the issues upon which they foundered and ultimately disintegrated. Although these are composites drawn from among the hundreds of disengaging couples I have seen in therapy, and although no story will exactly replicate your own, I have included them here to provide you with a sort of dictionary of the many kinds of developmental tasks which are consciously or unconsciously undertaken in relationships. They can give you a way of identifying the tasks that are being or have been accomplished in yours.
Because of our obsolete mythologies of love—in particular the myth that love is forever—our natural instinct is to feel as if our relationships have ended “out of the blue,” with no real reason whatsoever, or worse yet, for reasons single-handedly precipitated by our spouses or sweethearts. Yet, as these stories reveal, relationships always end for a reason—they end when developmental tasks have been completed by one or both partners.