Becoming Whole by Bruce Alan Kehr

Author:Bruce Alan Kehr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626344006
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

SESSION EIGHT

What Makes Commitment So Challenging?

In the previous session, we determined what makes a mature (as opposed to narcissistic) romantic relationship and what the pitfalls of maintaining that relationship may be. In this session, I aim to dive deeper into the most mature commitments we will ever enter into: marriage and other long-term committed relationships. Marriage is one of the most challenging of all human relationships. It can also be one of the most emotionally rewarding. True intimacy—including friendship, compassion, empathy, sharing and realizing dreams together, advising, comforting and supporting each other through life, sexual satisfaction, and deep love and affection—is attainable, but it can feel far out of reach. Feeling emotionally safe with one another may come and go. Marriage and other long-term committed relationships are characterized by highs and lows—times of joy and times of despair, tender intimate moments and periods fraught with conflict and emotional distance.

Your wedding is typically a time of joy, love, and tender feelings toward one another. What happens to these feelings over time? What makes any intimate romantic bond so complicated? To begin with, we need to understand what tangles up our human hearts when we engage in deeply intimate human relationships.

Emotional and sexual intimacy stir up deeply felt and largely unconscious1 conflicts, feelings, and fantasies. Dependence and independence, loyalty and betrayal, satisfaction and disappointment, commitment and fear of abandonment, trust and mistrust, narcissistic love and mature love, freedom and self-sacrifice are just some of the conflicting emotions that characterize any romantic bond and are most intensely experienced in a marriage or other committed long-term relationship. These conflicts, if they remain unconscious and unresolved, can damage a relationship and create emotional distance.

In addition, our early emotional experiences with our mothers and fathers become significant determinants of how all of these unconscious emotional issues are played out in later intimate relations. Disappointments in the love affairs of adolescence and young adulthood also shape our feelings and expectations in adult relationships, as can a prior separation or divorce. Biological, social or environmental, life stage, and existential issues can also come into play. If your spouse has ADHD, depression, anxiety, or a substance abuse problem, additional burdens are placed on what is already a complex relationship. Despite these complications, many of us feel internal and external pressure to get married and then to remain committed to the marriage. Social convention, the values we are taught, and “encouragement” by family members may all add to one’s sense of burden.

Session Soundtrack

Carly Simon’s “The Way I’ve Always Heard It Would Be” expresses the sadness felt by an adult child over the state of her parents’ marriage, portraying a scene where her mother and father are emotionally estranged from one another. As a result, she no longer dreams her sweet dreams. Without question, our childhood experiences of our parents’ marriage (or separation and divorce) shape our emotional outlook toward our own marriage. If we are unmarried, they shape how we feel about the prospect of getting married and how that marriage will go or how we may come to feel in any long-term love relationship.

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