My relationship with Kate Walsh, a singer songwriter from Brighton, wasn’t real, except to me. She seemed to write songs which consistently resonated deeply, perhaps because of all that was going on in my life at that time, like a coincidental unexpected alignment of the stars. Whatever it was her impact on me was deep and enduring even though she had no idea that it was. Then one day, without any warning, she announced on her Facebook page that she was to take an indefinite sabbatical from music. As far as I am aware she has never returned. Her “departure” from my life left me feeling absurdly bereft considering that we have never met and that our one sided connection was through nothing more than my interpretation of her music. Relationships can matter to one person regardless of what they mean to the other or how they look from the outside, and they can matter not so much because of their length but due to something far more nebulous and elusive.
Why do short relationships still affect us so deeply when they run aground? We mourn their loss but then berate ourselves when the insignificant length of them suggests we should not, as if somehow it is impossible to make a meaningful and deep connection in anything other than a period of years. We all know from experience that this idea is nonsense.
Clients sometimes appear in my room visibly heartbroken about a relationship which has come to an end but which had lasted only months. They will proceed to describe how ridiculous they feel, clear they must “snap out of it” and “move on”. When a relationship has been important it is so, and no amount of negotiating over the weeks of its duration changes the depth of the sadness. It is the haste with which we try to move on away from hurt which both maintains the sense of being stuck, and denies the opportunity to really appreciate what’s going on. Sadness does not respect our arbitrary notions of “how long” it takes to feel connected, and draws its strength from places we may not have thought of, so it is a state best accepted and sunk into, because only from within the eye of sadness can we can see outwards onto a vista which surely offers something different and more comfortable. We stop hurting by allowing the hurt.
Perhaps the irrelevance of time in a relationship is illustrated no better than in the one between a therapist and client. In my own experience I may have worked with a therapist for only a few months, visiting each week and unpacking whatever I choose to bring with me. I may have spent less than what amounts to a single day in her company but she has become critical to me in the blink of an eye. It is through the depth I have been willing to explore and the openness to my own rawness that makes this such a special union, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with time, but everything to do with what I am finding in me reflected by her.
There are times we meet someone whose role is essentially to awaken something within us. These people are mirrors illustrating things in us that we need to see but cannot do so alone. The duration of this connection is an irrelevance because the aspect of us that is awakened extends far back beyond the start of that particular relationship and can be traced through the length of our own years, sometimes further back than we are even able to see. To be surprised at our sense of loss and bewilderment when these connections are lost is as absurd as to be shocked at the literal loss of a part of ourself.
In romance too time is of less significance than we might think. When love lays a hand on our shoulder the future is full of promise and expectation. We see what is to come through a lens made from the object of our affection and, if that relationship falters, we do not grieve what the relationship was, we don’t miss the past because we already lived it, it is the imagined future we have lost and this is what we mourn. So the time in a relationship is absolute, but the time out of it endless, and it is endlessness we grieve for.
That stage of limerence when we are first in love is a snapshot of what we desire, how we want to feel all the time but simply cannot (as Woody Allen once said “If I keep up that level of charm I’d have a heart attack”). When we fall in love we are open, we will forgive almost anything in our new partner and we feel sublimely accepted in our own strange ways. But through time, as we sense that something precious is building, we can develop a greater fear of its loss, and so we start to close up and so lose the freedom and ease with which we once communicated, the very essence of what made us fall in love in the first place. So, perversely, the length of relationship can be detrimental to its depth unless we are willing to hold our nerve and risk the pain which becomes less likely the more we are willing to acknowledge its possibility.
Every relationship we have felt significant, however brief, leaves a footprint on us. As time passes the prints that people leave in our lives do not disappear, they are just joined by other footprints which dilute attention. Once we have experienced someone we cannot inexperience them and all that we learned about them and ourselves from that union.
As I write there is a play on the radio about the statistical probability of love at first sight. It is easy to fall in love quickly, what is much harder is remaining open and honest enough to sustain it.
Humans are born to connect, we thrive on relationships. Just this week I was reading about a Harvard study into happiness which has extended beyond 75 years, one of the most extensive and enduring pieces of research into what makes us content. Ask young people what they most crave in their lives today and money and fame will come close to the top. But all of the research shows that it is relationships which keep us happy, healthy and content. They don’t have to be long, they just need to matter and we need to see them as having the importance that they do.
So don’t deny the depth of relationships however short they were, however young they are, and even when they only really existed in your own imagination. Kate Walsh was a conduit, a catalyst, but regardless of that I am glad that she inadvertently left her footprint alongside all the others which I find I treasure more deeply with every passing day.
Out of the blue I heard from a good friend this week, and I was reminded of something she wrote in a card to me some years ago when she moved half way across the world, a distance which has had no impact on the importance of that relationship to me. It emphasises that what we learn about ourselves from others is at least equal to everything we learn about them.
“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to show your riches but to reveal to him his own” Benjamin Disraeli.
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