Confusion. Hurt. Silence. Missed opportunity. It is one of the
ironies of modern life that many couples today are living together as
complete strangers. Or worse, in great unhappiness. The data on divorce
lead us to conclude that intimate relationships have been failing apart
for the last 20 years or so. The truth is that couples have never learned
reliably how to sustain pleasure in intimate relationships. The
difference is it never mattered so much before.
Here at the close of the 20th century we have the luxury of living
in splendid isolation. Unlike in more "primitive" cultures, most
Americans no longer live as part of a large family or community where we
develop a sense of comfort and safety, a network of people to confide in,
to feel at home with. This, I have come to believe, is what has drawn
many people into cults--the need to feel part of a bonded community,
There is a sense of being at home emotionally as well as physically. Our
culture provides for meeting all other needs, especially the need for
autonomy, but not for intimacy. Within this framework, couples today must
provide for each other more of the emotional needs that a larger
community used to furnish.
Compounding the wide-scale deprivation of intimacy we actually
experience, our cultural talent for commercialization has separated out
sex from intimacy. In fact, intimacy involves both emotional and physical
closeness and openness. But we wind up confusing the two and end up
feeling betrayed or used when, as often happens, we fail to satisfy our
need for closeness in sex.
Shifts in our general views about what makes life worth living have
also contributed to a new demand for intimacy. For many generations the
answer lay in a productive life of work and service in which the reward
of happiness would be ours, in Heaven. That belief has broken down.
People want happiness here and now. And they want it most in their
intimate relationships.
Here, it's clear, we are unlikely to find it easily. Couples today
are struggling with something new--to build relationships based on
genuine feelings of equality. As a result, we are without role models for
the very relationships we need. And rare were the parents who modeled
intimacy for us; most were too busy struggling with survival
requirements. Yet the quality of our closest relationships is often what
gives life its primary meaning.
Intimacy, I have come to believe, is not just a psychological fad,
a rallying cry of contemporary couples. It is based on a deep biological
need. Shortly after I began my career as a family therapist I was working
in a residential treatment center where troubled teenage boys were sent
by the courts. Through my work I began to discover what had been missing
for these kids: They needed support and affection, the opportunity to
express the range and intensity of their emotions. It was remarkable to
discover their depth of need, their depth of pain over the lack of
empathy from significant people in their lives.
It is only in the last 20 years that we recognize that infants need
to be held and touched. We know that they cannot grow--they literally
fail to thrive--unless they experience physical and emotional closeness
with another human being. What we often don't realize is that that need
for connection never goes away. It goes on throughout life. And in its
absence, symptoms develop--from the angry acting out of the adolescent
boys I saw, to depression, addiction, and illness. In fact, researchers
are just at the very beginning of understanding the relationship of
widespread depression among women to problems in their marriages.
When I brought the boys together with their families, through
processes I had not learned about in graduate school, it transformed the
therapy. There was change. For the adolescent boys, their problems were
typically rooted in the often-troubled relationships between their
parents. They lacked the nurturing environment they needed for healthy
growth. What I realized was that to help the children I first had to help
their parents. So I began to shift my focus to adults.
From my work in closely observing the interactions of hundreds of
couples, I have come to recognize that most of what goes wrong in a
relationship stems from hurt feelings. The disappointment couples
experience is based on misunderstanding and misperception. We choose a
partner hoping for a source of affection, love, and support, and, more
than ever, a best friend. Finding such a partner is a wonderful and
ecstatic experience--the stage of illusion in relationships, it has been
called.
To use this conceit, there then sets in the state of disillusion.
We somehow don't get all that we had hoped for. He didn't do it just
right. She didn't welcome you home; she was too busy with something else;
maybe she didn't even look up. But we don't have the skills to work out
the disappointments that occur. The disappointments big and little then
determine the future course of the relationship.
If first there is illusion, and then disillusion, what follows is
confusion. There is a great deal of unhappiness as each partner struggles
to get the relationship to be what each of them needs or wants it to be.
One partner will be telling the other what to do. One may be placating in
the expectation that he or she will eventually be rewarded by the other.
Each partner uses his or her own familiar personal communication
style.
Tags:
20th century,
autonomy,
belief,
commercialization,
confusion,
cults,
intimacy,
intimate relationships,
ironies,
larger community,
love,
many generations,
marriage,
physical closeness,
primitive cultures,
productive life,
relationship,
sex,
splendid isolation
