I. You did not choose to enter into your relationship. Nor will you decide when it ends.
When you decide to live with someone, it is not you who decides, but love – in whatever form it takes. It may take the form of adult love for yourself and your partner. Then you are at peace with yourself as you are, and so is your loved one. It may be the childlike love you feel for your mother or father. Then you project their image onto your loved one and love your image. Perhaps your hormones are applauding the reproductive mission of life. Your loved one is there and smells so good. Wonderful!
It might work for a long time, in the sense that you like each other, sex is fun, you don’t just meet formally in the details of everyday life, but also find each other in spirit. You may even have children, and you may survive a few crises. Until then, everything you have learned in your life so far, in your families of origin, with friends, lovers, former partners, will help you.
At some point you will realise that everything you have learned is no longer helping you. You feel increasingly misunderstood, unseen, pressured or left alone by your partner. Sex is no longer what it used to be. So you begin to suffer in your relationship, more or less willingly. Those who were raised more selflessly may initially look for the fault in themselves. Others look for it more in the other person. You begin to fight with yourself or with the other person. You look for ways to escape, such as an affair, an inner exile, a project or a new hobby.
II. If you are suffering in your relationship, you are suffering from yourself. Your partner feels the same way, only with themselves.
Inner adults can be happy, sad, desperate, cheerful or who knows what, depending on what emotions the situation requires. But they have forgotten how to suffer permanently, even when something causes them pain.
If you go to the root of suffering in a relationship, you will find either a desperate teenager, a powerless child, or an unborn baby who feels as if he or she is still in the womb. They all love those on whom they depend, and at the same time, unconsciously, they love life itself. When the two come into conflict, they suffer. They cannot help it. They cannot leave, they cannot escape their dependence or their vitality. So they have no alternative to their feelings and behaviour. When they see no way out, they pull the emergency brake. This can mean the end of the couple’s relationship, whether it is consummated or not. Again, love decides. An embryo, a child or a teenager feels it has to save someone, sometimes even itself. This means that no one is to blame for the suffering in a couple’s relationship. There are simply no guilty parties. There is only love, albeit in very different forms.
How do these often desperately loving embryos, children and adolescents come into your relationship? You bring them, each of you your own. Each person carries their previous life stages as an inner state, as physical memories, as emotional patterns, as habits of thought, as prejudices, as a basic mood and much more. Almost all people identify with this to a greater or lesser extent. Identifying’ means that you confuse yourself and your current experience with your experience as an embryo, child or teenager, and you are not aware of this confusion. You take everything you experience in your inner state to be real, present and genuine. But it is not real, it is not reality. It is a film from your past that feels real, it is a dream, nothing more. It was real life then, but now it is an illusion that is keeping you from real life.
In general, you confuse your present with your past. So do I, every day. When you suffer in the presence of your partner, you feel something from the distant past: perhaps the abandonment of the embryo in favour of the mother’s body, perhaps the powerless pain of the neglected child, or the helpless anger of the teenager. As inner guardians, they try to protect you so that you are not hurt again as you were then. But how can this be? Your partner is behaving in a way that causes you suffering!
III. Because of the special closeness between them, the couple’s relationship activates all the threats to which they have ever been exposed, consciously or unconsciously.
Your partner is who he or she is. You are who you are. No one can change themselves at will. We are, in part, the sum of our survival achievements, i.e. what we have learned in previous threatening situations. On the other hand, we are also unique individuals, shaped by what life has given us to bring into the world. Neither of these things can be chosen. Free will is a fairy tale and the longing of the young; it is the horizon of their consciousness. By the way, the fulfilment of all wishes through good behaviour is a fairy tale of childhood, and paradise is a fairy tale of the embryonic stage. Each stage of life has its own world of experience, its own stories and its own desires within the limits of its consciousness. It grows until it is shattered because it no longer fits into real life.
For adult men and women, the new world of experience, real life, means I am responsible for something I have not created, namely myself. At first this may sound like a miscarriage of justice with a ‘life sentence’, but it is not. On the contrary, it is a first-class acquittal. I am only responsible for myself. I am not responsible for my partner. Period. Anything else would completely overwhelm me, and always has. I am the only one responsible for myself, because nobody else can take anything away from me. Certainly not my partner.
And what about the teenager, the child or the embryo inside you that keeps screaming at you? The embryo, the child and the teenager inside you feel and judge your present life with your partner from their world at that time, their physical, emotional and rational status at that time, their possibilities at that time. They still love in the way that was appropriate for them at that time. They believe in paradise, in the fulfilment of all wishes and in free will. They have no alternative, they cannot see beyond that, at least not yet.
But now, in your relationship, when they all feel called to protect you, they could see and experience that now, after so many years, there is something else, other possibilities, real freedom. They could see that it was worth it, that it was worth moving on. Your present is very different from their past. Let them see that. In that sense you are responsible for them.
IV. The moment you both allow yourselves to see yourselves in this way, something completely new begins. It is the beginning of the end of your suffering.
Your present is actually very different from your past in the womb, in childhood or in your youth. There are two main differences: Firstly, you have survived and are now relatively safe. Secondly, you are an adult (over 40?), so your life is no longer dependent on your parents or other powerful figures in your life as it was then. You are free. What are you going to do with that?
Dependence creates direction. There is nothing wrong with that from the point of view of the dependent person. The embryo orientates itself by physical sensations, the child by feelings, the adolescent by thinking. Where does all this go when dependence no longer exists in reality, i.e. in terms of ‘what is the case’ (Wittgenstein)? How do I explain to the agitated adolescent in me that he is not in danger if, for example, I reveal myself completely to my partner? How do I convince the panicked child in me that it is now safe for me if my wife does not understand me or I do not understand her, that this is not even possible and not particularly important because men and women experience themselves and others in different ways and also communicate differently? How do I show the inner embryo, hungry for symbiosis, that separation and being apart does not mean death, but the continuation of life? It knows nothing of life after birth.
Where do I find orientation when I am no longer dependent on anyone but the life that beats and breathes within me? It can make you dizzy. How can a partnership be maintained when the other person is no longer to blame (a popular orientation) and I am no longer to blame (even more popular)? When we realise that in our arguments, in our silence, in our abandonment, in our cruelty, in everything else that the arsenal of suffering in a partnership has to offer, it is simply panicked embryos, children and adolescents fighting for their lives, i.e. for our lives?
When we realise this, the only thing left to guide us is our vitality, this breathing and beating and stubborn stirring within us, always from moment to moment. It is now up to us to serve as a guide for our disturbed inner embryos, children and adolescents. We can do this by agreeing with them without following them. They need a clear distance, they need the impression: ‘OK, I would never have thought this, but there is an adult who sees me. Someone who doesn’t judge me, who doesn’t pity me, who doesn’t flatter me, who just looks at me. And that person obviously has opportunities that I didn’t have. They can move freely and they do. They no longer sacrifice their lives for their mother or limit their happiness for their father. They simply follow themselves, without blaming their partner.
You will breathe a sigh of relief. We ourselves as adults, as grown men and women, are the only useful guides for our earlier stages of life. Not our partners.
V. The art of living together as a couple seems to consist of letting oneself be, letting the other be, and otherwise: letting love be.
When I’m tired of letting a tormented younger version of myself drag me into her long-past suffering over and over again, it just stops. It’s not fun. Sometimes it feels like dying, except that you come out more alive than before. For example, I am beginning to observe my inner teenager and what he does when my partner behaves in a certain way. He feels threatened every time my beloved seems to turn away. He knows nothing of my now quite relaxed masculinity.
He doesn’t need to know better. It’s enough that I, the adult, know. I watch him (i.e. myself) perform his rescue manoeuvres (withdrawal, hurt feelings, clinging, shame, anger, etc.). I tell him that he’s okay with me because he protected and preserved my masculinity during the time of (perceived) threat. I wait for him to look at me and show him who I am today. A man in his fifties. That’s all. Then he relaxes. And sees, together with me, the adult: his beloved had not turned away at all, it only seemed that way. She was just preoccupied with something else, which is her right. I was free to approach her. What a surprise!
The teenager had suffered terribly; there was no way out for him at that time. Today, when I am ‘controlled’ by him, I have no way out and suffer like him. From his point of view there is no solution. He has to leave, at least inwardly, in order to go on living. He is right to do so. Not me, I can stay.
What can I do with that? I do nothing. I let myself be. I live it. I cannot exorcise or even ‘educate’ the young person, the child or the embryo within me. That would also be fatal; I would destroy myself. The opposite is possible: I can accept it, respect its experience and value its achievements. Then I can relax and enjoy being an adult. For my life as a couple, this means that we let love do its thing. It doesn’t care about our suffering anyway, it’s just there.
When you let love do its thing, something strange happens: your life as a couple loses some of its security. It is no longer needed in the same way as the child you once were. Security and safety are legitimate needs for a child. Your life as a couple loses its symbiotic nature, the urge to experience the world through each other and to ‘do everything together’. The urge to merge belongs to the embryo; there is nothing else in the womb. Your life as a couple loses the arguments, the battle of wills, the urge for autonomy. The teenager in you needs this; he had to invent his own ‘I’. You no longer do that. What needs to be done in everyday life is simply done by whoever has the time and energy. Whatever moves you becomes an encounter when it happens. What is pleasurable arises naturally from the desires you feel within yourselves and communicate to each other.
The only certainty in living together as a couple is your vitality, each of you, and the connection that love creates between your two vitalities. This love will always feel like a mortal threat to your inner teenagers, children and embryos. It is beyond their horizon of experience. At the same time it is the space in which these frightened inner beings can relax because they are seen. It is simply a matter of not following them into their past suffering, but staying where you are, in the here and now and with each other. If that doesn’t work, it’s not dramatic; you can always come back to the present, i.e. leave the inner cinema. That is the whole art. You may well be surprised, as I am. Again and again.
