I need a word for these non-dating casual new friendships that I develop from time to time. Many of them follow a pattern of a few deep-ish conversations that can’t be sustained over a long period of time. They’re not therapy sessions, they’re not quite comparing scars, but more along the lines of matching up theories. Sometimes they develop in to a type of friendship, but not ones that I suspect would stand the test of either one of us entering in to a relationship. My friend Stacy has told me she’s not sure she’d stay friends if I started dating someone seriously. And honestly, given how my last friendship that started out as a date turned out to be a bit of a betrayal by someone who did not stick by me… I’m ok with fleeting and temporary. Though, it is counter to the life I eventually envision (one with deep close friendships, dinners from time to time, game nights, etc. etc.)
For the past few weeks I’ve been texting with a woman in Nashville. She’s a widow, three kids, and a therapist – or former therapist turned yoga instructor. Like me, she’s trying to figure out what it all means. I’ve dated and talked with more than a few therapists – we get along because we can speak some of the same language. There were times in therapy with my ex-fiancee, B, when I felt like I had done a whole lot of relationship homework prior to meeting her that she hadn’t done (reading about turning towards each other and how to be vulnerable and confident and safe in a relationship). That’s not a criticism – we were just at different places. At times, it made me feel like I had an unfair advantage or that the session was one-sided. When I started dating, especially with my first serious post-divorce relationship, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I had nothing to go on from my marriage – we never thought about whether or not it was broken or how to fix it. My wife and I didn’t really fight, because I don’t think either of us had any fight in us – we were young when we met and I don’t think we thought about the complications of adult relationships.
When I met B, I had no idea what a healthy relationship looked like (or had forgotten), but was determined to learn with someone. B once told me that I treated being in a relationship as though it were my essence – and it was true. I was determined to be the best at it, to take accountability, to to find new heights (from which we might fall). When she left, I dove in to the psychology even deeper – reading zen tracts on happiness and books on how to heal relationships. For months, I held out hope and was practicing a type of waiting that would make me ready to accept…. mostly hope of a reconciliation, but also looking for an understanding of finality. I stopped reading the books because they started to frustrate me. They would say healthy relationships do x, y, and z, and I’d think “hey, we did those things…” They would talk about the importance of discovering new things together – we did a lot of that. They would talk about the importance of being able to have difficult conversations – we did a lot of that too. Last night, my friend in Nashville asked if I’ve read/watched Esther Perel. I said I hadn’t and that I’ve been avoiding the relationship guru talk – not because I know it all, but because it either frustrates me to see we had most, if not all, the ingredients or because I have no way of practicing any new learning.
Curiosity usually gets the best of me. This morning, in addition to sitting down to edit and write (this post), I started to watch some Esther Perel. I still watch these things to see what we we had and didn’t have. I still watch and say – “thank god we weren’t that bad,” or “yeah, we were working on that.” I sometimes wonder if I watch and read things simply as validation. The biggest validation tends to be over my ex-friend, Jen. I haven’t come across one couples therapist that supports her belief that healthy couples don’t fight. The very first question asked of Perel: “Is it good or bad for a relationship for couples to have a fight from time to time?” She replies, “It’s a must.”
At one point in the video, she talks about the conditioning we bring in to our relationships. My parents got divorced when I was pretty young – if there’s a silver lining to that, it’s that I didn’t really get to witness their dysfunction (whatever that might have been). So… on the one hand, I didn’t really get to see how a loving couple fights and repairs and behaves, I also didn’t get to see how a dysfunctional couple fights and doesn’t repair or avoids. B would sometimes talk about how dysfunctional her parents were (my friend Jen would say the same thing about her parents). B would say she wanted to avoid that co-dependency at all costs. In some respects, I feel lucky to have been a bit of a blank slate.
In the video, Perel talks about letter writing as a way to keep fights in perspective and take accountability. Parts of this blog have certainly been about that process… taking accountability for my triggers and baggage and insecurities. I’ve written poems about fights that had nothing to do with B and everything to do with my dad. I’ve written posts in which I’ve really tried to examine my more “clingy” behaviors and how they might tie to my experiences as a child or being cheated on in my first formative relationship. Taken together, this might be one long letter, a public apology, a public attempt at building understanding… One of the guys in the video talks about how the closer a person is to us, the more damage they can do. Last night as I sat and thought about writing or painting, I kept hearing the lyric from the Morphine song, “The Saddest Song” – “when two worlds collide, no one survives…” I still walk away thinking that the greatest thing two people can offer each other is an attempt to understand who they are at their core. I’ve posted the quote from Adrienne Rich several times. It’s worth repeating:
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
At the very end of the Perel video, she talks about her parents. They met while being liberated from the concentration camps. She talks about how she was curious as to how they could find love amid such human devastation. They, too, fought. She admired how her father would always try to bring it back in to perspective…. “is this really how we want to spend our time?” I’ll read and watch some more Perel because while I may not be able to practice it, and it will frustrate me to see that my engagement had much more hope than doom in it, it’s good to internalize these lessons – compassion, forgiveness, perspective, accountability. Whoever the next fight is with, because there will be other fights, we’ll still need tools and understanding. We’ll need to be able to pull back and say – “Babes, I wouldn’t want to go the hard way with anyone else.”