Effortlessness

This has been my couples week. Over the last seven days, I've spent time with five different couples - some long-term friends, some mere acquaintances.

As you know, I don't do this very often. Partly because I feel like a third wheel. Mostly because I squirm at the way some couples treat one another. I can't abide the cutting comments, the subtle silences and, especially, the bizarre coded cruelties. It's why I avoid dinner parties.

Of course, not every couple's like this. Amongst my friends are a few sterling examples of respectful, loving couplehood - but they are not the majority. Nor can I claim the moral high-ground; I know that I'm capable of the same egregious offenses: relentless teasing, barbed innuendo, conversational usurpation, the public settling of old scores, and a wounding abruptness, Regardless, I've become overtly allergic to these inter-spousal misbehaviours, and I resent being forced to witness them.

Remember Thanksgiving dinner at your parents' place? Remember their friends from the coast? I think you barely noticed the tension rippling beneath the surface, but I was white-knuckled by the supper's end. I was probably being overly sensitive, but their banter seemed more like open sparring, despite its smiling surface and seeming humour. My own friends can be just as bad. So can I. And, I know it's naive to expect my growing aversion to, in some way, enlighten or inoculate me. Still, it would it be nice if this were the case. After all, there's plenty to be learned just through observation, and I think that being single makes that observation easier.Actually, it's a pretty good time to take a look around, relatively unencumbered, and figure out what makes some couples' relationships seem so toxic, and others seem so...effortless.

I've been rereading Rilke lately, and what keeps coming to mind is that unlikely evocation of Love from Letter 7 of Letters To A Young Poet:

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

In a way, everything I've learned about love - from my parents, my friends, and from my own experience - is somehow bound within that single sentence...
The first lesson is the hardest to achieve, I suppose, and may have as much to do with temperament and genetics as it does with love or romance. The happiest relationships seem to be between people who at least have a slight disposition to sunny optimism. Those who are easily plunged into despair or depression seem to want to drag their spouses with them. Too often, what seems to be a 'couples' issue is actually one partner's angst injected indiscriminately into any available exchange. In a way, the security of coupledom seems to encourage partners nursing lifelong grievances to externalize their problems, projecting them onto their better half. They behave as though their spouse were the source of the worlds problems, not a soothing antidote. Part of the problem, I think, is an inability to see their partner as a 'solitude', as something legitimately separate from themselves.

I know Rilke sounds cold when he talks about 'solitude', but if you read the quote in context, or if you read his Dragon Princess, you'll see that Rilke sees solitude as the necessary state of affairs for all individuals. More importantly, he sees it as something to be embraced, not feared. By 'two solitudes', I think he means two sovereign, strong, and independent souls. But, yes, he is also suggesting the more difficult idea that, within each of us, lie vast unknown and unknowable territories. Some of these regions remain unexplored, not only by others, but often by own own hearts and minds. Surely Rilke isn't wrong here.

Think of how and when intimacy is first initiated, either sexually, emotionally, or both. Affairs, encounters, friendships, romances, engagements and marriages - even the most cautious and sensible ones - are launched on the flimsiest of pretexts, with a bare minimum of knowledge and experience. Most of our understanding evolves over time and flows out of long experience.