Love and Hate in the Married State and the disillusionment of adult love.
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The controversy of Valentine's day every year takes over the sentiment and the commodification of love, through tacky red teddies, plastic champagne flutes, rose petals, heart-covered mugs and chocolates. If you choose to celebrate you are giving in to the pressure of the 'American' tradition, if you don't you feel outwardly proud and secretly most likely wistful for an old-school romance declaration of love and affection. If you are single it's a reminder, you wonder if it's appropriate to spread the love to your children and your gal pals, Galentine is the new acceptable version. If you do celebrate and give yourself permission to indulge in the tackiness and buy the Ann Summers and plan a romantic night, you keep it to yourself, your love is not the real deal. There are a lot of messages on social media and societal pressures on how to be and how not to be, and does anyone know how they feel?
'Last year I bought him Centaur for his birthday
(They promised he'd become half man half beast)
Last year he bought me something black and lacy
(They promised I'd go mad with lust at least)
Instead my rollers clink upon the pillow,
And his big toenail scrapes against my skin,
He rises to apply a little chap stick,
I ask him to bring back two bufferin.'
Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses
Valentine's day for the over the 20s is a signifier that you and your love must have matured and that you have let go of the honeymoon and the limerance and have accepted your partner 'warts and all' for all that they are and have dealt with the inevitable disillusionment in a way that you comfortably rub against each other and still have some kind care and consideration and occasional positive sexual encounters. Marriage, writes anthropologist Bronislow Malinowski, presents one of the most difficult problems in human life; the most emotional and the most romantic of all human dreams has to be consolidated into an ordinary working relationship'. We bring to marriage and long-term relationships many romantic and sexual expectations, and over time we translate any slight, any missatunement or disappointment in our partner's behaviour as a sign that it is all wrong, we have made the wrong choice, they don't love us, they don't care, they can't see us, they are not interested in our happiness. We bring into our intimate relationships our longings and unfinished business from our childhood and we make demands often unconsciously that these are met.
Couples may hold for each other the part of themselves they don't own or like, this is called the unconscious contract, we may look for someone to fulfil our young and infantile needs but we also meet someone complementary, who can embody disavowed parts of ourselves so we don't have to. This process is called projective identification and happens unconsciously and automatically; it involves the one partner acting out the part of the other partner's projection, for example, someone who does not accept their anger, may behave unconsciously in a way which induces their partner to be angry. Then the first partner can complain about their partner's anger but they never get to feel and accept their own. The partners can also hold for each other a part of themselves they need and they feel they are lacking but they can feel whole when they are with the other.
There are also primitive elements to the couple relationship, stemming from the earliest experiences in life and the first exclusive and dyadic relationship where there was only one person that mattered to the baby and that was usually the mother, until she becomes aware that there are other people two and she has to navigate and negotiate this first disillusionment. We seek to reclaim in the relationship an unattainable parent, the unconditional love we had or never had, the person who will give us security but also wings to fly, and to recreate the perfect symbiotic state or fantasy where we are one with the other and all of our needs are met. And of course, our partner will fall short of this and we will hate them for it at times. There are shared unspoken assumptions for each other and when they match, they may produce a less than healthy relationship but it can still function.
In marriage and relationships, we unconsciously hope to find a solution to our intimate and primitive problems trying to communicate something that was unacceptable in the past and to be accepted as we are. The romantic relationship is unique and complex in that we consciously decide to come together and try to satisfy a number of needs and work well in many arenas, the sexual, the parenting , the friendship, being only a few of these. That many relationships work at all under all this pressure and complexity it is a great achievement and a testament to the loyalties and satisfactions that are often not as pronounced as the disappointments. And it is those that we can turn towards in times of difficulty and in times of celebration and those that are truly worth celebrating on Valentine's or any other day. Accepting that love will never be perfect neither is our partner and neither are we and that we can live with the ambivalence and contain the hate with the love and still be content.
Many couples come to therapy because they have lost that loving feeling. The adolescent 'you are my everything love' has turned into 'ships passing in the night' irritating each other as they go and the pile of resentments mirrors the built-up of laundry and dishes in the sink. They resist the communication techniques and the 7-day love prescriptions, because underneath it all they are not prepared to let go and to forgive their partner for not fulfilling all their dreams and to accept them for who they are and the relationship for what it is, they are angry and hateful and want to maintain the anger because if they let it go, it's frightening. It may mean maturing, it may be accepting imperfection and ambivalence as part of the course, and it may mean growing up and leaving behind the adolescent love that mirrors our perfection in the perfect image of the other and the promise of self-definition and identity through the relationship.
It is about beginning to see the actual person that is there and sharing their life with us, to empathise and care, to feel bad when we cause them pain, to want to repair the damage and offer and receive comfort. To value the common values we share and to also have a realistic understanding of the person we love, and that for this love to become mature lasting and enduring, to accept that this comes with disappointments but also gratitude. The awareness that this will end in death, can be more than a grim reality, it can be a deepening of the love that is here, whether we celebrate Valentine's day or not.
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