Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion by Gregg Levoy

Author:Gregg Levoy [Levoy, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Life Stages, Aging, Self-Help, Later Years, Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9781101608890
Google: XAzlAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2014-12-26T20:55:15+00:00

The Other in Another

Were we to make our partner, too, “an object of contemplation,” we would quickly discover that the closer we get to another, the more apparent it is that they are indeed an other, with needs and agendas that often run counter to ours as well as boundaries that no one can put asunder and no amount of merging can overcome.

Maybe love is like the moth to the flame, or the mortal to the god. You can circle around the beloved all you want, but if you dared dive straight into the light, you’d perish. You have to keep your distance.

The hunger to merge with a beloved works directly against another of the goals of love, which is to preserve and protect the beloved, whether partner, child, sibling, or friend. If we were to succeed at complete merger and become One, the very otherness of the other would disappear (as would your own). “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people,” Rilke once said, “that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”

Psychologists call this highest task differentiation and consider it the basis for healthy intimacy. “It’s not as cozy as togetherness, but it’s not as sticky either,” says David Schnarch in Passionate Marriage. “It can be as warm as you want, and it’s psychologically clean.” It’s also the basis of evolution itself, which aims for diversity, not sameness. Survival depends on it.

This lesson of differentiation is one I learned a bit earlier in life than most, given that I’m a twin, and it’s served me well in my other relationships. The born rivalry and entanglement that characterizes twinship is a good case study in the push-pull dynamics between any two people who are very close to each another—the wrangle between autonomy and union, competition and cooperation.

Indeed, if there’s a hankering to stand apart among all people, among twins the heat is turned up, the stakes are higher, and the connection between competition and intimacy is more pronounced. After all, the closer two people are, the more likely they are to be standing in each other’s shadows. And I’ve come to see that my brother and I compete—we all do, I think—to tell ourselves apart, and we do so precisely because we’re so much alike.

For Ross and me, competition started the moment the lights winked on in the womb, though it was a competition marked by accommodation. If we weren’t two gladiators tied together for a fight to the finish, we were two gymnasts attempting a trapeze act in an upended bottle. (Either way, the management never approved of our struggle for comfort.) From the very start, though, every inch he gave up was another inch for me. His losses weren’t just his losses; they were my gains. And of course, my losses were his gains.

There are even medical experts who believe that as many as a quarter of all those born as single children began life as twins, and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.