I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
In her book Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the Ending of Yours, author Daphne Rose Kingma proposes that in the modern age, relationships often serve as developmental vehicles for people:
In the past, individuals subjugated themselves to the needs of the relationship in order to accomplish work, some task that was a mutually agreed-upon goal. Now we live in a time when relationships exist to serve the deepest needs of the individuals in them.
In a sense, we are asking the relationship to subjugate itself to the evolution of the individual. Because we have solved the issues of basic survival, we have the luxury of moving on to deeper levels of development: emotional, spiritual, aesthetic. And it is in relationships, the intimate and challenging encounter with another, that we do this.
She takes a somewhat existential view:
In our lifetimes, we are each trying to do a single thing: to create our selves. We are all trying to solve our basic psychological problem—which is to answer in depth and to our own satisfaction the question, “Who am I?”
While her approach makes for an enlightening and practical breakup guide, I find this reading of the purpose of relationships incomplete. We enter into relationships for many reasons, not all of them about creating and growing our very selves. For many people, relationships are not existential, in the sense that they allow one to formulate a new self. People seek companionship, intimacy, someone to tackle the daily and bigger challenges of life with. People seek conversation, a ski partner, someone to build a life with.
But I believe that relationships should involve personal evolution and that the best ones drive it.
A conflict exists when one person in a relationship seeks personal growth and the other doesn’t. You can pursue personal growth in so many ways: by improving your health-related habits, learning a new topic, becoming more flexible in your thinking, cultivating a heretofore non-existent curiosity. But at my age (part of the over-fifties dating club) many people don’t have a drive for growth. They seek comfort, and habitual pleasures, and perhaps a nice hobby or two.
I should allow that at any age there are people who want to grow and create new versions of themselves and there are people who are happy as they are. It’s probably not so dependent on age.
A conflict can arise if one partner is changing and the other is not. One partner is the Being partner and the other is the Becoming partner. It’s existentially lonely to be a Becoming partner in a relationship with someone who is content with Being. These are two different temporal languages; two languages of meaning. The Becoming partner may find themselves becoming someone who is not content with who the Being partner is. Of course, two Becoming partners may grow in different directions–one of the most common reasons for a breakup is often, “We just grew apart.” Two Being partners, however, if they are compatible from the start, should continue to be compatible!
Maybe a becoming person is not suited for long-term relationships?
Experiencing a breakup
I’m going through a breakup and it feels terrible, but it also feels necessary to me. If I had a developmental task in the relationship that was ending, it’s probably the exact same developmental task that launched almost fourteen years ago with my divorce: to finally feel comfortable and capable by myself, to develop a personal sovereignty over my life that doesn’t depend upon the presence and capacity and strength that a man offers.
Curiously, I’ve been somewhat locked into my own version of not evolving for the last fourteen years as I engaged in relationship after relationship that ultimately failed to work for me. I kept thinking that the solution lay in a different man, a different relationship rather than in committing to no relationship at all.
Seeking a relationship has represented my version of French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel’s crispation, “treating every challenge in life as a problem to be solved with systems and habits and technology rather than as a mystery to confront and change you.”
I’ve approached my existential loneliness and lack of trust in myself as solvable through habits and technology, specifically through online dating apps via which I pursue relationships.
A woman alone in her garden
I am back to thinking of the Nine of Pentacles, one of my favorite cards in the Tarot. I wrote about this card last June, shortly after I starting dating the man I am now leaving.
I’ll quote again from Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, describing this card:
The woman stands alone in her garden. To achieve what she has, she has had to give up normal companionship. In readings, this symbolism does not mean that the card inevitably advises giving up a relationship; but it does call for self-reliance and a certain loneliness in pursuit of goals. [emphasis mine]
It’s not surprising to me that I think of this card when I’ve been spending most of my time tending to my garden and to my investments recently. I do feel lonely in the pursuit of my goals, but it’s not an unpleasant kind of loneliness. It’s the kind of loneliness that people like me must suffer, if they are to live their best life.
Avia Venefica describes the symbolism of the falcon in this card:
Further, the falcon sports keen intellect and inexhaustible focus. This made them ideal for trained hunting events. Their ability to hone in on their target is superior. We can take symbolic cues from this in the nine of pentacles Tarot card meaning.
When this regal bird waves its plumage to our psychic eyes it indicates we have engaged in focusing on very specific aims. We’ve invested in the personal training of our senses with a goal to achieve results.
I am a person who would rather be alone in the company of her thoughts and learning than just about anything else. This makes me unsuited to being in a relationship, but well suited to pursuing new passions with my inexhaustible focus. If that describes an autistic person, well perhaps I am. If only the label autistic weren’t so ugly and unpleasant maybe I might have taken it on sooner. But anyway, I believe that labeling people with mental health categories that put them into boxes they can never escape leads to its own kind of crispation: thinking that you understand someone because you’re seeing them only via that categorization.
One of my favorite quotes from comedian Lily Tomlin is, “Just remember, we’re all in this alone.” Today, I cherish my aloneness and my loneliness.