MIND MOVES:A truly intimate relationship is an adventure that requires courage
‘LOVE HAS sacred power not because it makes us high . . . but because it helps us relax the struggle between self and other that is at the root of all human suffering . . . The profound question love poses is: ‘Can you face your life as it is; can you look at all the pain and darkness as well as the power and light in the human soul, and still say yes?’” John Welwood, Journey of the Heart.
We are never as vulnerable as when we love someone. When we connect deeply with another person, our heart naturally opens toward a whole world of possibilities. Yet this breath of fresh air also makes us aware of ways in which we are stuck.
Intimacy inevitably brings to light our most painful emotional conflicts, facing us with fears and needs that we may have been able to deny in ourselves when we were alone.
Intimate relationships are as tough as they are adventurous. John Welwood is a psychologist whose writing on intimacy is commensurate with the richness and complexity of the experience. His book, Journey of the Heart, remains for me, nearly 20 years on, matchless in its field.
We all recognise the traps we can fall into to gloss over the challenge to grow that any close relationship offers. We can try to lose ourselves in the relationship, believing that this newly-found love will solve all our problems, magically exorcise our fears and worries and save us from ever having to struggle within ourselves with our own pain.
Becoming too attached to this aspect to the “heavenly” side of love – what Welwood calls the “bliss trap” – sets us up for a rude awakening when we inevitably have to deal with the real-life challenges of making a relationship work.
Or we can decide to do whatever it takes to make this relationship secure and safe – what Welwood describes as the “security trap”. We can avoid conflict, align ourselves as best we can to the other’s wishes and needs, and end up living a life which is utterly predictable but which lacks any kind of edge or sense of adventure.
Gradually the fun seems to drain out of our life together, only to be replaced with a diffuse feeling of resentment that begins to ferment inside us.
Of course we could begin to talk about things and what’s been lost along the way. But it’s so easy to avoid talking. Easier to ignore the void that’s growing between you and try to fill it in by creating a cosy life, where you watch TV, accrue material comforts and generally keep up appearances for the neighbours. Gradually you drift apart, until perhaps one of you starts looking outside the relationship for what has been lost.
Being afraid is a natural part of any close relationship. It’s natural to fear exposure of those aspects of yourself that you are not comfortable with: you want to appear confident, but you are crumbling on the inside.
You feel your public persona is that of an easy-going attractive person and you would like to keep it that way. But this relationship threatens to expose some truths that don’t seem to fit this picture. And so a big part of you wants to “get out of Dodge” before your cover is completely blown.
There is nothing wrong with feeling this way. The point that Welwood is making is that intimacy is the place where wounds like these can be healed. A healthy relationship, in his view, is one that brings these different sides of ourselves – the fearful side that wants to keep things just the way they are and the more open expansive side that wants to grow – into direct contact.
It is precisely the difficulties of intimate relationships that hold the greatest rewards: relating to our partner fully demands consciousness of, and a willingness to respond openly to, the ever-unfolding situation between the two of us – “dancing on the razor’s edge”.
This is radically different from the superficial notion of “romantic love”, which often seems to be the only model for relationships that we have in our culture. Welwood proposes in contrast a “conscious love” that has as its foundation a mutual, explicit commitment to stepping onto new frontiers.
Genuine intimacy is, according to Welwood, “first and foremost, a journey into [the] unknown. Relating to an other of the other sex faces us with the great other inside us as well – a whole range of unexplored qualities and dimensions of our being, beyond the familiar ‘me’.”
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)
