Those who saw How Will We Love? most likely remember the couple at the very end of the film, where the man’s voice cringed as he almost cried – with deeply visible depth of pain as he remembered the pains of getting there – as he explained what he understood about love while counseling couples all of his adult life. That man is Harville Hendrix.
"One characteristic of couples who have reached this advanced stage of consciousness is that they begin to turn their energy away from each other toward the woundedness of the world. They develop a greater concern for the environment, for people in need, for important causes."
I return to that name via a book: Amir Levine and Rachel Heller have recently published Attached, which I haven’t got my hands on yet, but thanks to social advertisement, I am very tempted to buy (the book has a facebook page and a dedicated website, but if there was only one link I would advise to follow, it would be the NPR interview with the authors).
However in trying to mentally place Attached in my own taxonomy of maybe-better-than-your-average-POP-psychology reads, I recalled that Harville Hendrix’s book titled Getting The Love You Want was still in my to read list. I need to say that I love Hendrix’s honesty, and I somewhat suspect that Attached is most likely Hendrix’s work rewritten with the twist of “modernity”, as we understand it now in the glorious 21st century. The century of Individual (at least it is the Age of Individual for my generation – Gen X – which should go by way of a disclaimer, I am very sorry for myself to belong to).
So I took on Getting… . Reading it was so very aggravating. If I could compare this self-help sort of a book to a serious novel, I would courageously say it was way more sad than Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (would be fun to analyze Jude and Sue’s relationship via attachment theory, wouldn’t it?). My primary reaction was to numerous realizations that the book offered that spoke for absolute obligation to work hard for everyone who is interested in achieving the ultimate growth. The second wave of sadness was thinking of marriages that I know of that dissolved. After what seemed as a huge journey that I made in understanding complexity and complications, I’m back in square one: those marriages had all the promise in them, two perfect people each, and I regret, I regret with full weight of the world’s madness that they broke down and devastated lives while their goal was so close, so nano-distance close to finding the path to healing."If the son of a depressed, sexually repressed mother chooses to marry a depressed, frigid wife, how can he recapture his sensuality and joy? If a girl whose father died when she was young moves in with a man who refuses to marry her, how can she feel loved and secure?"
True, the book is more or less for couples. Not daters, but committed couples. Realization for us daters: don’t worry, until the ring is on it, you can be whoever you want and behave however you wish, it will all be of no consequence, so shed the illusion you can do anything (alone, you can’t), and don’t crack your back carrying the stone of responsibility for failure: as you, or your partner never truly committed to one another, failure you could not escape. The pain of inevitable breakup is only that there is always one who might have committed in their heart, and the lizard brain sends us either into grief or hostility – depending on our neurological design. Just to be clear, Hendrix does not speak of this in the book, this is what I got from in between the lines. It helped that since I started reading the book, I had some interesting dream experiences: every night I dreamt of what it looked like the last close encounter with some of my platonic beaus (I finally found the psychological meaning of the many platonic stories I had: those were the most honest and responsible people of my life! It is good to have cherished memories of people not crossing boundaries, intuitively. I wish all the best for them, now that it is consummated in my brain. And those were some of the most fun dreams!).
My little e-reader got scribbled with interim conclusions… all over my copy of the book.
- People are all good.They make perfect sense.
- In a hopeful couple, two people are inherently incompatible ("compatibility" is bogus, an inpossibility, a wishful thinking, and a dangerous rationalisation).
- Both will either grow and heal each other, or hurt each other – it solely depends on how much they are willing to learn to want to be truly caring (loving is not enough).
- One thing I suspect to be true is that a person can probably love countless times, but there is only a finite number of encounters in one’s life where there is a chance that another person would be able to care for them the way that a Spouse would... Herein lies the tragedy.
- Your work is NOT to nurture relationship/team, but specifically your beloved (i.e., not you, not your relationship, but your partner, the individual person – this was somewhat surprising to me but made perfect sense).
Now to leave this entry, one passage about Hendrix's isolaters, and Levine's avoidants. Here, maybe, it all should start... with the examination of unconscious weapons of massive destruction.
"By asking my clients a simple question, "What does your spouse do to avoid you?" I have come up with a list of over three hundred different answers. According to my informants, their mates were: "reading romance novels," "disappearing into the garage," "camping out on the phone," "worshiping the car," "spending too much time with the kids," "volunteering for every committee at church," "spending too much time with the boat," "spending time at her mom's," "having an affair," "avoiding eye contact," "memorizing every word of The New York Times," "falling asleep on the couch," "being a sports junkie," "coming home late for dinner," "fantasizing while making love," "being sick and tired all the time," "not wanting to be touched," "four Scotches a night," "spending too many evenings at the Rotary," "lying," "refusing to make love," "having sex but not making love," "living on the tennis court," "bulimia," "jogging ten miles a day," "going on weekend fishing trips," "going shopping," "having his own apartment," "daydreaming ," "refusing to talk," "smoking marijuana," "working on the house all the time," "masturbating," "playing his guitar," "keeping separate bank accounts," "picking fights," "reading magazines," "doing crossword puzzles," "refusing to get married ," and "going to taverns."
