I was talking to an old friend a few days ago, and it occurred to me how amazing it is that any of us have survived our love relationships at all. For most of us, falling in love and stepping into a first serious relationship, is somewhat akin to putting two trains on one track, facing each other, building up a head of steam, and throwing off the brakes. Fast, exhilarating, and ending in a big and inevitable crash. Sometimes, we then are able to find a few cars from each that are still intact and we can put them together to form a single train by which we two may be able to move together down the track.
In our culture we just aren't taught anything useful about relationships. We have lots of ideas. We are overburdened with ideas about what a relationship is supposed to be, how it should work, what it should look like, what I should expect to get from it, what I should expect to have to bring to it. How it should make me feel, how I should make the other person feel, what it should make me want to do or not do, etc. etc.
Our ideas may have little bearing on reality, and yet we hold onto them as if they were hard-fought lessons forged in the fire of our own experience. Most of them aren't. When we look at them, we see that most of them aren't ours at all. Where do they come from?
From our parents, from pop culture--People Magazine, Real Housewives, Jersey Shore--from our peers, from our desires and projections.
The number and the kind of misconceptions all of us carry about love and relationships makes it, I believe, virtually impossible to have the kind of relationship we start out thinking we can have. I'm not a cynic. I believe in love. I believe in relationship, in the healing power it can have, in the strength it can bring to the individuals involved. But my ideas of what is possible have changed. My idea of what I can ask for has changed. My idea of what a good relationship is has changed.
For someone like me, someone who has been through a few different lives here in this one incarnation, who has sometimes done it well, but seemed for the longest time to do nothing but fall short, what we can hope for is this: that we find a partner who is enough like us that we can feel we know them, and enough unlike us that we can feel we have something to explore; someone whose life and behavior will bring up our shortcomings, and who then has the patience to stay around as we work through them; someone who is willing to work through their own shortcomings as our behavior in turn triggers them. Someone for whom we are willing to surrender preferences. Someone who at least occasionally makes us smile, and who lets us make them smile. Someone who treats us nicer than we treat ourselves at least some of the time. Someone who is willing to change, who wants to change, who insists on changing--not for me, but because of their own personal experience of evolution. Someone who is willing to learn how to love and be loved.
Today I will see the miracle in my willingness to love, and in the willingness of someone else to love me, however inadequately we may seem to be doing it.
Two Pair of Feet, Unnamed Film Set, Hollywood, CA
