Relationships
“I tried
to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I
am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”
Frida
Kahlo
Frida Kahlo once said
that in her life there had been two terrible accidents: one was on
the trolly when a metal bar sliced through her body, and one was
Diego Rivera—and by far, Diego was the worst. Relationships are
both our joy and our torment because even good and loving
relationships push us to the limit. I read on Facebook yesterday that
there is a village somewhere on this planet where women have more
than one husband—a reversal of the time-honored tradition of
multiple wives. My first thought on reading that was, “Now we're
talking!” but after further consideration, it was more like, “Are
you kidding me!” How on earth would one woman manage that?
Humans are living longer
than ever, and trying to keep our marriages and partnerships fresh
and positive over a lifetime is, to say the least, a challenge. What
attracted us in the beginning may have changed dramatically, and
other less-adorable traits may have surfaced. As with all
living things, we do change over time. We have different needs
at different stages of life, and our expectations of our partners
change. We often say such ridiculous things as “you aren't the
man/woman I married,” which is true—thirty years later, unless
your partner is dead, they are not the same, and neither are you.
Many of us try Frida Kahlo's solution of drowning our sorrows, or
numbing the pain in some other manner—drugs, affairs. That too is a
dead-end since we are likely to drown ourselves right along with
them. The source of our misery is the pushing and pulling—our
determination that our partner accommodate to our expectations.
I have no particular
insight into this oh-so-human dilemma, but here is what I have
arrived at for myself—learn to simply be, and allow your partner to
be as well. In fact, let the relationship be whatever it is. Just as
there are no perfect people, there are no perfect relationships. We
don't have to force our intimate alliances toward some goal, some
cultural image that is both idealized and impossible. When we learn
to simply be together just as we are, we will come as close to
perfect as it gets. When we stop pushing for conformity to an
arbitrary set of principles, it's surprising what happens. We run
into an almost unrecognizable “decent and good feeling.” Freedom.
Transformation. Our sorrows learn how to swim!
In the Spirit,
Jane
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