You’re not perfect and neither is she
I’m going bold.
I’m going to try to sum up soul-purposed, intimate relationships in less than 2,000 words. Shall we begin?
There are entire sections of bookstores dedicated to relationships. I did a search on Amazon and there are over 70,000 books using the keyword “relationships”. Apparently, “How to Be an Adult In a Relationship”, “Love More, Fight Less”, “Too Good To Leave, Too Bad To Stay”, and “Calling In ‘the one’: 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life” and those sorts of titles are an industry in and of itself.
Assuming I live to be ninety-two years old, started reading when I was 5-years-old, and read a book a month on relationships I will only conquer 1,044 of the 70,000 plus sold where the water spiders work. If there are so many books on the subject, why the hiccup when we decide it’s time to get serious and find intimacy in our relationships? Do those books work?
The curmudgeonly, octogenarian journalist, Jon Rappoport, when asked how he and his wife had managed to stay together so many years, writes,
“We don’t like pain. And that was true. We didn’t have a taste for going after each other and tearing things to shreds. That’s pain. We avoided it. It wasn’t on our calendar.
The other side of that coin is love. However you want to define it. You know what it is.
Prefer love over pain.
Which isn’t some sort of conscious pledge or the result of a committee meeting. It’s unspoken. And of course it only works if both people prefer it and believe it.
Endless analysis is destructive.
Perfection isn’t the goal.
It seems to me love has become undervalued. I say that because when you find it, you should do everything in your power to keep it. No matter what. It’s not a minor discovery. It’s not incidental.
It’s the main event.
It overshadows everything else that can happen between two people. It needs to be appreciated IN FULL. Picking away at each other and gnawing on each other is a blood sport. It’s not an answer. It’s not a gateway into a resolution of problems.
Psychology, therapy, and even self-improvement have tuned people up. In the wrong direction. In the direction of finding flaws. Of looking for reasons for flaws. Of inventing shadows that don’t exist. Of taking offense where none has occurred. Of loading up the cart with all sorts of “insights about behavior” and putting that cart before the horse.
That cart is a billion-dollar industry. Love is no industry at all.
Lots of people say everything should be free. But when the greatest free thing in the world appears before them, they often try to reshape it. It doesn’t reshape. Over time, it grows wider and deeper, but it doesn’t reshape.
Maybe people, some people have to reach the point where their need for love is so great that they’ll take it and give it when it shows up and not ask about it or fiddle with it.”
Boom.
He nails it.
What I take away from Mr. Rappoport’s pithy narrative on relationships is this: Your heart and my heart are very old friends. There’s intimacy in that friendship. Intimacy is not necessarily sexual in nature -- yes, it can be but they are two distinct needs, sex and intimacy. Friends do not betray one another despite what the Housewives of Fuckuperyville or Get Love on Liaison Island sell us.
Genuine relationships are created when two or more people express who they really are, what they truly think and feel, and what they want or need[1]. There’s a poignant scene in the film “Good Will Hunting” where Sean (Robin Williams) and Will (Matt Damon) chat about “who we let into our weird little worlds”. The punchline, Sean says, “You’re not perfect, and let me save you the suspense…she isn’t perfect either. But the question is whether or not you’re perfect for each other.”
It's not supposed to be hard.
If you’re a square peg and someone else is a round hole, it’s possible that your true self, your authentic self, will be dimmed. It takes courage to show up such as when Iris finally breaks up with Jasper and ends up with Miles in film “The Holiday”. She finds gumption.
The industry works time and a half to sell complicated. It has to.
How to Become A People Magnet: 15 million
Ease at An Intimate Relationship: nil. zip. zero.
Just take a glance at Amazon to see the ‘billion-dollar industry’ at work. I don’t have time to read 70,000 books to understand that it isn’t complicated and shouldn’t be so hard. We make it complicated by 70,000 book industry that tells us it should be complicated. The industry’s existence is dependent on us believing such gobbledygook.
Warning: Do Not Go In Alone.
So why are people not able to have soul-purpose relationships? Why do they turn to dating apps whose entire raison d'être is to hook you perpetually on the notion that their app is the ‘Havidol’ drug they sell. You can swipe away a person who doesn’t look like someone you can be intimate with.
“Darn it. Perfect in every way. Oooops but she has green eyes, and I dated a green-eyed monster and that did not end well. Swipe! More Havidol please.”
People seem to be afraid and won’t take a risk. That is fear.
Perhaps people are afraid of intimacy because of past situations and experiences. Trust me, I have been hurt and done the hurting (not proudly). Maybe it is because most people have busy lives, they are time-poor, distracted by multiple social issues and just trying to get by and it is much easier to make excuses…
“Ron, I’m trying to decide if I should go to the lizard expo or micro wrestling.”
We won’t get hurt if I go to one of those options and since there are books and movies and dating apps all confirming that it is just plain hard to have an intimate relationship, then cold-blooded reptiles in containers chomping on insects and frozen rodents feels safe.
Consider this.
The human brain works in ways that may seem counter intuitive. Many of us think that we look at evidence and then create a story to fit it.
The opposite is true.
We decide on the story first, (even if it is a lie and tell it to ourselves and hear it over and over and over and over ad infinitum), then find the evidence to fit our story.
“I am unlovable because. There is no one out there for me because.”
70,000 books** tell us that when the greatest free thing on the planet presents itself, we have been ingrained to mush it, smoosh it, rip it, stare at it, doubt it and shoot holes through it before we believe what it is. Patrick Williams and Lloyd J. Thompson call it “The ABCs of WAR (wrecking a relationship)”. If you want to destroy a relationship you wage a relationship war using tactics such as accusing, blaming, complaining, defensiveness, emasculation, hostility, jealousy, no affection, and so on down the alphabet[2].
I am not a relationship guru, but I have been successfully married for twenty-two years to Matt. He and I don’t like pain either. Shredding each other to pieces and destroying trust is not on our calendars either. We prefer love over pain. I didn’t come to this without my own jaunts down the wrong road.
After a lot of reflection, I learned that I had to be the kind of person I wanted to attract. I took a sensitive approach with myself when I recognized what I really wanted. This process needs compassion, understanding, and kindness to us and others. The industry sells fear of intimacy unless you do these 7 steps to fix yourself. The common emotion experienced in these situations is fear. People are afraid of being left feeling vulnerable, helpless, suffering, shunned, ostracized, or alienated.
It is not supposed to be hard. Rumi wrote, “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
About 20-years ago, I witnessed one of the most intimate acts between two people.
Bill and Mae Mallory had been married for over forty years. They were our ad hoc parents, he, the priest at our then-church, and she, a voracious reader and gracious woman. Bill, also, was a two-time Vietnam combat veteran-cum-Episcopal priest. About twenty years ago, his beloved Mae Mallory had terminal cancer and was in her final stages. By the grace of God, she was in their home.
Matt and I were living in New York at the time and made the decision to drive to Baltimore to say goodbye to Mae Mallory. Not knowing what to expect, I had no idea she was transitioning. She was not lucid but resting peacefully in their bed.
Bill invited us in and up to their room so we could sit with her. And he said, “She can hear you so please feel free to say what you want. She may not respond, but I know she can hear you.”
And with that, we sat down on some chairs at the foot of their bed. Meanwhile, Bill left and came back with a small bottle in his hand. Without saying much, he placed himself gingerly at her feet and gently pushed back the sheets to start painting her toenails. Without looking up, he said,
“She always loves getting pedicures. It is important to her to have freshly painted toenails.”
Here’s the secret: It’s not supposed to be hard.
there was no source for this photo (if someone can find the source, let me know and I will correct)
[1] Williams, Thomas, “Total Life Coaching,” 2005, p359
[2] Williams, Thomas, “Total Life Coaching,” 2005, p349
**Note: None of the above is intended to detract from the books that have helped people written by the authors who believe they are helping. It merely highlights the ‘relationships are complicated industry’.
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