“Renegotiating Love (evolution and symbiosis)”

“Renegotiating Love (evolution and symbiosis)”      Feb. 9, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Nancy Friday was a Freudian Psychiatrist and researcher/writer

When we grow up and fall in love, we make bargains with men based on the one we made with mother. Our adult expectations of the loved one grow out of and are in reaction to that first, most important love experience. We don’t like to think our mature, sexual lives have anything to do with the nursery, but there is no other way to explain or understand the deals men and women make. Lovers’ contracts, like the one with her, are too crucial to the love experience to speak out loud. The terms in the small print below the beautifully spoken vows of love aren’t even conscious: “Promise that you will take care of me, love me unconditionally, and never arouse in me any fear of abandonment, jealousy, loss of face, or suspicion that any of the many sacrifices I’ve made for you have been in vain. In return, I am giving my-self to you. We will be as one. If you break this deal, I’ll die (or I will kill you).”

                        

I don’t know if it was curiosity or suspicion that make the clerk at Sam’s challenge me when I was attempting to buy a couple of cases of condoms as a tax-exempt purchase for the church, but honestly, I had a good reason. 

I had been raising money for the teen homeless program operated downtown by a Catholic charity. A fairly grizzled old church member complained, “The only help I would give those kids would be something to keep them from being pregnant all of the time.” And I said, “Ironically, I think that I might be able to help you with that.” Sister Lorraine was still in charge of Kitchen Inc., so she couldn’t provide the teens with condoms, but she was smart enough to realize that they needed them, and she didn’t mind if I was the one to buy them and provide them.

Churches tend to change our rituals and our values fairly slowly, but in the world of human sexuality, things have changed pretty quickly over the past few generations. 

Progressive churches have often been called upon to try to help our society to evolve in our ethical thinking about this most personal and private aspect of what it means to be a person. The conception we have of marriage and the exclusive sexual relationship appropriate to it, is something we inherited from our more agrarian past.

For most of human history, though we have insisted that marriage was instituted by God as a holy estate, more honestly, it was a cultural institution intended to provide for stability. The marriage contract was tied up with the need for certain knowledge about who owned the land, and to provide for a safe and effective way to raise children. Most religious rules have to do with what benefits society. The God who is the great mystery of existence does not appear to mix it up to much in the affairs of people or other breeding animals, but civilization has a huge investment in stability and predictability to allow for human survival. 

A number of things began to challenge the social contract of marriage. There was the industrial revolution that brought more and more people into cities. There was World War II that brought more and more women out of homes and into manufacturing jobs. And then there was the creation of what men and women had longed for but never before had available to them, effective birth control.

The century between the Civil War and the sexual revolution of the 1960’s saw almost all of the assumptions about love, romance, marriage, and the civil contract of coupling being at least questioned if not outright rejected. It became possible for women to have careers and financial power without male family control and it became possible to have sex without having children and the need for a secure family setting. 

This, of course, frightened a lot religious people who have been the vanguards of the traditions of culture. I grew up hearing preachers often insisting that women not work, that we avoid men and women mingling outside of family settings, and, of course, the Catholic Church insisting to this day that women not use birth control because to do so gives women way too much personal power and autonomy. And, frankly, unemployed women have comprised a great deal of the volunteer work force that churches have depended on for centuries. But the world was changing and the church has never been terribly good at change.

I can get out over my skies pretty quickly on this topic but I am deeply indebted to the late Freudian psychiatrist, Nancy Friday, for her important books on women and sexuality. Where it is easy for me to see how the marriage contract has utilitarian roots in our agrarian past, Friday also examines how deeply our early childhood needs are reasserted in how we approach marriage. She says that even our traditional marriage vows are an echo of the unspoken contract that a woman has with her mother . . . a pledge of undying love.

I have never had anyone in counseling who didn’t want to flatly deny that there is any connection between their adult sexual relationships and how they felt about either their like sexed or opposite sexed parent but, the people who convincingly know a lot more about the inner recesses of the mind than I do, insist that it is universally true. Friday says that our traditional wedding vows amount to a request for a: “Promise that you will take care of me, love me unconditionally, and never arouse in me any fear of abandonment, jealousy, loss of face, or suspicion that any of the many sacrifices I’ve made for you have been in vain. In return, I am giving my-self to you. We will be as one. If you break this deal, I’ll die (or I will kill you).”

 While there are parent and child virtual divorces, for the most part, for good or for ill, we remain in our children’s lives for as long as life lasts. I have not been married to her mother for 25 years and she graduated and moved away a years ago, but there is rarely a day that goes by that we are not in contact, even though she is now in Bali vacationing with friends, there is a bond between us that neither time nor distance can challenge. Marriage, however, not so much, and yet we innately long for that. I have had an interesting life with lots of wonderful opportunities and experiences, but my life’s greatest regret is that I have never had a successful marriage or even a long term successful romantic relationship. We all inherently want it, but most of us never have it. 

It is interesting to me how often our comedians are able to get at the truth of our experience better even than our priests or our therapists. One of the most common jokes among older people is for a man or a woman to say, “I’ve never seriously considered divorce, but I have often contemplated murder.” I think Nancy Friday is right on the money… no matter how secure you may be in your sense of yourself, you would really rather have a life-long love relationship that can survive all of the changes that come with age and the evolution of life.

Friday’s work speaks at length to the problem of symbiosis. That is, early in life, sameness is interpreted as being love. Mother and daughter relationships become especially volatile when a daughter expresses independence and separation from mother’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. That’s what adolescence was invented for . . . managed open warfare . . . but it usually ends in friendship. That confusion of symbiosis is often translated into marriages in which the connection is rooted in sameness. “If you love me, you are like me, and you will not change.” That’s obviously pretty toxic, isn’t it? Successful parenting involves allowing our kids to be different from us and still love one another and the same must hold true in marriage.

It is very difficult for us to pull apart the threads of our prejudices that we learned in church, what just came to us through our culture, and what we actually feel simply because we are human. And all of that is complicated by the fact that those of us who are comfortably heterosexual, are often clueless about the nuanced differences which exist in gay, trans, or queer relationships. 

I was scolded by a listener this week who took umbrage with a disparaging remark I recently made about polyamorous relationships. Again, I tried to couch that comment in my own experience, acknowledging that others have different experiences but, when a listener wrote and described his situation in which he is a bisexual who is married to a woman but who also has a boyfriend and that his wife also has a boyfriend and that all four of them are a family unit with mutual respect and care . . . what reason, other than a thousand years of religious prejudice and patriarchy, do I have to judge that arrangement negatively? 

I don’t want an open marriage. But then, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be bisexual, or gay, or trans. 

And if I have no existential point of reference to comprehend the lives of those who are differently oriented, what on earth would put me in a position to judge the merits of their family arrangements? Isn’t it obvious that such dismissive judgements, the imposition of straight, sys-gen expectations on everyone else is just wildly inappropriate?

And when I say that I have never seen open marriages work, implicit in that is a time stamp . . . I am reminded that in my work with addiction, at least in the VA system, we defined six months of sobriety as a successful treatment. It isn’t what any of us want for our clients, but, hey, six months for a lot of our patients was a definite win. Just because some relationships only last for a few years rather than a lifetime does not mean that they were failures. 

I can affirm that though my marriage only lasted for 16 years, that for the first several years that relationship was salvific for both of us. We both emerged from families with issues that were crushing us, and together, we survived our need to break free and become more fully ourselves. It just so happened that when we had emerged from our relatively dysfunctional families, that we were just not a good fit for each other nor were we together suited to parent our daughter. Recognizing that a relationship that was a good fit during one part of your life is not a good fit in another part really doesn’t have to be filled with rage, mutually denigrating accusations, and lawsuits. In fact, it seems crazy to me that any two people can love each other enough to commit to marriage and not end up as at least being friends. Anything less seems like a failure of civilization. 

I love the way that the recently deceased editor, Louis Howland, put it: “It is not that divorce is necessarily bad. It is that loving people for long periods of time is good.” You don’t have to have an affair, you don’t have to break down into physical violence, or create any kind of a crisis to bring a toxic relationship to an end. You can at least try to have a civil, honest, meaningful conversation, real communication, in which you respectfully work out how to go your separate ways while leaving one another intact with mutual friendship as a minimal goal.

Look, I am not single now because I couldn’t have gotten married a dozen times over the past few years. I’m single because I would like to have a meaningful match that is intellectually, spiritually, politically, and romantically a meeting of equals. I have never had that opportunity. And until that opportunity comes along, some of you guys are going to have to keep making a place for a fifth wheel in our social settings.

But just because I have a firm idea of what my expectations are does not mean that my expectations are normative. Just because you know what is right for you in your marriage, does not mean that your marriage is the standard by which all other relationships are to be judged. 

James Carville and Mary Matalin have been married for 28 years. I couldn’t share a home with Mary Matalin for a 2-week vacation. But more than that, Kellyanne and George Conway are married, and I am not sure that I could be alone in a room with Kellyanne and not wind up being charged with homicide in matter of minutes. . . I am not a violent man; I just have a passion for honesty.

So, what I said about symbiosis earlier . . . even that has boundaries.

Both the church and our society have been very prescriptive about how and where love and marriage take place. I think that we can safely say that both have been wrong, especially since they have tried to impose a patriarchal, heterosexual, monogamous relationships into a once size fits all pattern which is clearly a kind of emotional and sexual terrorism for most people. 

There are a few things that apply to all love relationships no matter how the family lines are drawn:

1)   Everyone should take care not to hurt anyone and to try to foster the growth, health, and happiness of the other or others.

2)   There should be honest and open communication and where there are formal agreements about a relationship contract or commitment, that contract or commitments should be held sacred and changed only through honest communication. 

3)   I might add a third observation that is something of a corollary to the communication issue: be prepared to renegotiate your contract. People change. The world changes. What fits in one decade might not fit in the next one. So, talk about it. How you are married when you are starting out in life will not be what your marriage needs to be when you are raising children. And how you are married with you are both working and how you are married when you are both retired is not the same thing.

Marriage is not static. Change is not bad, it is inevitable. 

The list of things that can bring a relationship to an end remain: dishonesty, addiction, violence, infidelity, or any kind of child abuse or neglect. The world and our understanding of marriage and family are changing but this rule remains: don’t be a jerk. 

Love is only easy in fairy tales. The real thing requires a magical combination of hard work and dumb luck. If you had enough dumb luck to have a chance at the real thing, then don’t fail to do the hard work. 

I will leave you as I often do on Valentines’ weekend, with the wise counsel of the poet, Langston Hughes: 

“Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.”