Listening to the radio this morning Griff Rhys Jones is talking about a film he has made for the BBC exploring Great Britain. As I listen he expounds a view I have always held hard, that these shores are full of wonder and beauty of which many of us are unaware, never fully appreciate and live in ignorance of. Whether we are born in the hills or the valleys surely we carry some of them with us, they make us, in some sense, who we are. Knowing our own identity and protecting it is the first step in understanding how to create healthy relationships.
Identity is such a hard thing to define because it is so easily clouded by the myriad roles we play. Parent, child, professional, colleague, friend, lover, partner. When do we get to know who we are and where is that realisation most valuable anyway? Perversely it is probably when we are enmeshed closely with someone else that we are in greatest need of knowing ourselves.
In intimate and healthy relationships there are three lives all playing out at once, all of which need respect and attention. There is “your life”, “my life” and “our life” together and it is easy to come undone when they don’t move in smooth synergy. Furthermore, when a relationship falters this delicate balance has become untenable and, as we are in some way defined by those we connect to as well as simply by our own selves, we can be momentarily lost almost without trace sinking down into the inky depths.
Looking back through my own writing, finding words which have hugged me like a warm blanket when love has run aground, I realise that it is when I have managed to lose myself, uncertain of who I have become through a desire to play the right tune if not simply dance to it, that I am least able to man the search party so critical in locating myself before the darkness falls and the light flickers into a beam so feint as to be worthless.
After that first flush of attraction we are consumed and, when that tide of emotion recedes we can spend the months which follow looking for what got lost, at turns cursing our own carelessness for misplacing it and our partners mischievousness for hiding it.
When these three relationships don’t work properly we might foolishly abandon our own lives in search of bolstering the one we seek with our partner and, inadvertently lose ourselves in theirs. Conversely we might lose ourselves in solitary pursuit allowing the weeds and grass to grow over the once fertile land of “our life” the one we intended to create together.
Recently I wrote about the “push-pull” dynamic in relationships and the trouble this creates. When we experience this “push-pull” we are being constantly pushed towards “my life”, abandoning the one in which we are together, and in the next moment pulled back into “our life” away from the one we had just started refocusing on. We become confused about our status, wonder if it will ever come back, if it was ever there in the first place, whether you were enough or that your partner was. It’s bewildering and disorientating to turn in ever constant circles trying to work out whether the shadow at the door is love with a bunch of flowers or rejection with a hand gun. On an emotional carousel the charm of passing the same view time after time eventually diminishes regardless of how brightly coloured the wooden horse we sit astride. Identity is easily lost in a relationship which has gone missing.
In healthy relationships “your life” and “my life” give us nourishment through our own endeavours, provide a canvas on which we can daub any paint we choose. This is an existence which reminds you that you are you and always will be, that if anything is awry here it is only you that can adjust and control. But if “your life” or “my life” is all that there is no room exists for one we might have together. Drawn as circles the relationship is two wheels which do not touch, yours and mine, no venn, no overlap, and arguably, no point. Many long term partners find themselves with this depiction of their union or, put more precisely, disunion because ironically the longer we spend together the more complacent we tend to come about one another, the more we seek lone pursuit and the further we drift away from one another blindly mistaking freedom for ambivalence as we go. These relationships might be convenient but they are short of what any of us truly desire or deserve.
Building the circle of a life together does not happen automatically except in those first flushes of young love where we both lose ourselves temporarily to the power of mutual attraction. We move our circles inside one another’s with little interest in ploughing a lone furrow, lose our focus on other aspects of our lives sometimes dramatically and damagingly. This constellation cannot last however besotted we feel because there is insufficient energy and fuel to keep the fire burning. It is precisely the going away, the being separate which holds the relationship together. The certainty of love, the dependability, the foundation, the trust, counter poised with the uncertainty and desire fuelled by absence and the spontaneity and spark offered by separation and reunion. These forming weeks and months are so important because they create the foundation of the relationship. As small children we might experience separation anxiety but the regularity and predictability of mum or dad always returning is what ameliorates this anxiety and, over time, we become more secure with being apart holding the surety that it is temporary. This is a critical stage in the forming of identity, realising that we are individual as well as connected, independent as well as dependent, able to leave and return to find that things are still as they were, and intimate relationships require us to go through this cycle all over again.
When we form grown up healthy relationships we carry the learning from our past into them, we cannot help but do so and sometimes this in itself establishes a fracture in the neat arrangement of the three lives. I might feel too uncertain to open myself and so feel happier in “my life” than I do in “our life”, or I might be so disbelieving of my ability to thrive as an independent soul that I just want to exist in “your life” without any interest in “my life” at all. At one end of the scale a level of independence which renders the relationship unworthy of the name and at the other a dependency which will strangle the life from the very tree from which it seeks to pick sweet fruit. This is why identity is so crucial because it not only provides the feeling of being stable on one’s own two feet but also the assuredness that some sense of self will return and restore balance should the whole thing topple over. Put simply, a strong sense of our own identity reminds us that we are at our best in a relationship when we are OK without it.
Perhaps Rhys Jones observation about our understanding and experience of the landscape in which we grow up is not only literally true but also metaphorically as a way of reminding us that the closer we are to understanding the cartography of ourselves the more likely we are to prosper through the undeniable complexities and undulations of human connection and in so doing form more healthy relationships.
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