Inter-Personal Inter-ruptions

Do you have a long-term primary love relationship? Can you remember that moment when your heart felt so full to bursting that you just had to volunteer, "I love you" for the first time? Can you remember the moment when s/he first said it to you? Do you remember a moment when, in front of people who really mattered to you, you told the world that you'd commit yourselves to one another? If you can truly recapture any of the romance and magic of those moments, how did you envision your future together then? Let yourself remember. Now look at your lives together and take a good look at how it actually turned out. What turned out better than you'd expected? What didn't?

I think that everybody believes that they have what it takes to weather the storms that come with intimate relationships. 'For better or worse' seems so simple to say. I also think that everybody gets surprised to discover that they don't. The unforeseen barges into everybody's love life at some time or other, and that unwelcomed guest repeats its visits and extends its stay to a greater or lesser degree depending on the life skills that each partner has developed (or is willing to develop). The fact remains that. the longer you stay together as a couple, the more (and more serious) challenges you'll have to face as a couple. Intimate relationships are, sadly, one of the most frequent casualties of the infamous 'midlife crisis.'

What can you do when you're faced with some midlife disruption in your most intimate relationship? Like every significant life event, you have a fundamental option: how are you going to look at it? What meaning are you going to assign to it for yourself? I believe that we have to be constantly reminded not to assign unrealistic meanings to the random painful events that pepper the otherwise smooth flow of life events. Can you remember that 'pain is necessary, but suffering is optional'? Once you've gotten over looking to assign blame for whatever pain you may be experiencing, then you can get on with the work of dealing with the message that pain is there to offer you. Every painful event of midlife can serve to foster your personal growth, if only you'd give it the chance.

I've often written that all the challenges of midlife have but one purpose: to shift our attention from the superficial to the significant, from external expectations to inner purpose and destiny. The same must be said for truly intimate relationships. As midlife slowly scours away the superficial, what's left is what really matters. All too often, when life's challenges remove the superficial, sometimes the essence of the intimacy goes with it. At those times, when the profound void at the core of these relationships is laid bare, the partners are faced with the decision of whether to invest much more of their personal resources to fix what's broken, or just to move on, chalking the whole thing up to what we call AFGE ('Another Fun Growth Experience').

Those nuclear relationships that survive the challenge of exposing their cores without experiencing a meltdown do so only because each person has attained a level of maturity that allows him or her to set the ego (with all its self-preoccupations) aside and to focus on the other's needs. When that can happen, the partners experience a marvelous revelation: that as each discovers his or her personal destiny, that destiny necessarily includes the other. For some, that revelation only comes when some crisis has stripped away the superficialities; for others, it gradually emerges from the fog of the daily routine together. Either way, the revelation — and the concurrent realization — of the essence of who they are as a couple must (and will) emerge like renewed life breaking out from its seed.

In psychologist James Hillman's (The Soul's Code) terms, the mature couple, having received the full revelation of their destiny and purpose together, has successfully called the first stirrings of their love into the fullness of its potential. It happens in the same way that the strong, mature oak has succeeds in summoning its acorn to become that creature that was always there in its genetic possibility from its first instant. In relationships, as in every other aspect of midlife, the apparent challenges are but their growing pains out of infancy and into maturity.