How Can I Get Through to You? by Terrence Real

Author:Terrence Real
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2003-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Recovering Real Passion

I visualize the obscure process of mate selection … as largely based on unconscious signals or cues by which the partners recognize … [opportunities] for joint working-through … of still unresolved splits or conflicts inside each other’s personalities, while at the same time, paradoxically, also sensing a guarantee that with that person they will not be worked-through.

—H. V. DICKS

When I speak of the journey back to real passion I do not mean a return to that state of uninterrupted erotic bliss the promise of which screams out at us from the headlines of women’s magazines and the shelves of the self-help section of bookstores.

Sorry.

When I talk to couples like Judy and Dan about the return of passion, I mean a rekindling of passionate engagement with all of the seasons of their lives together, all the nuance, the multitude of feeling, that comes with being fully present to one another. The state of passionate connection they once knew as children, and found again, briefly, in the first flush of love, must be reintroduced into their everyday lives.

The utter joy Judy and Dan describe in their initial months together is one of the great human experiences. Few things thrill us as much as that deep recognition of the early stage of a relationship. The problem for couples like Judy and Dan is that the patriarchal romance story freezes this early phase and turns it into a static ideal for the whole of the relationship. In much the same way that we have come to hold only one standard of physical beauty and health—a lithe, strong, and above all youthful body—we have only one standard of a good relationship—erotic, intoxicated, and, again,youthful. Our ideal of relationship is youthful in two senses of the word: youthful in that our standard captures a loving relationship in its earliest stages, the youth of the relationship, as it were, and youthful in the sense that our picture of romance fits the life-stage of a young person—innocent, inexperienced, eager to surrender all of herself in ways more mature people are not. These lovely images capture a beautiful time in our lives, but they exert a monopoly on our thinking that marginalizes the rest of our experience. No real relationship rests in a state of uninterrupted bliss, nor would I wish that for anyone I cared for, even though a part of me yearns for it as much as everyone else does. Real intimacy is a deep engagement with the whole dance, the endless dialectic of harmony, disharmony, and repair. By holding up only the first of these three states as desirable, we cripple couples like Judy and Dan in their capacity to negotiate the rest.

I speak to couples about three phases of healthy relationship—the promise (harmony) disillusionment (disharmony), and deep love (repair). While I call them phases, in fact each facet of a relationship can occur over years, but could equally occur over a single dinner conversation. A couple can move from promise through disillusionment

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