Tags: From Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”
“All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.”
The feeling of falling and being in love is like no other feeling in the world. For many, it can be the height of pleasure to lose themselves in another person. The rush of hormones keeps the flooded sensory systems awash in feel-good chemicals. There is a feeling of finally being able to open up to someone else, and vice versa. Suddenly life has a very clear purpose: to keep that feeling going—and to please the other person enough for them to keep the feeling going, too. And if that means ignoring certain truths, so be it. It’s going to “work,” they tell themselves, as they use their feelings to override their common sense.
The average length of a first marriage in the US, according to the US Census Bureau, is 8.2 years. (Roughly half of first marriages are terminated, 60 percent for second marriages, 70 percent for third.) For many Americans, first marriage (or first committed relationship) can occur as a teenager. And what teen could resist the culture’s rewards of gifts, a wedding party, and acknowledgment of adulthood, not to mention community-sanctioned sex and partnership? However, when the 8.2-year alarm bell rings, the urge to individuate again and find someone new will have overcome about half of these people.
Several people I know have been going through a “divorce,” legal or otherwise, after a 15–20-year relationship. These people had the luck, if we can call it that, to have met a long-term partner very early in adulthood, some in high school or college, and paired up right away. Is it a plus or a minus, we ask ourselves, that they missed having to go through the whole dating rigamarole. However, post-divorce, these folks embark on their new dating voyage without those 15-20 years of experience in the dating world. Without having learned how the dating world changed, how they’ve changed as people, or what it feels like to get to know someone new at a reasonable pace, they look for one thing: to fall in love again.
Even if that were enough, it takes years of frustration in the dating world to learn that it is your work on developing yourself that attracts others to you. Too many of my clients want an “other” to come fix them, entertain them, and love them when they don’t put in the work to fix, entertain, or love themselves. When they do pair up and troubles ensue, they may even be bold enough to ask their partners to change but are unable to hold them to it owing to their own unwillingness to change. As the breakup is finalized, they are already looking for the next “other” without doing the work of examining the reality of their wishes, wants, and needs in a relationship.
Even when a committed partnership is begun later, in our 20s, 30s, or 40s, with all our self-proclaimed knowledge and maturity, the focus on the relationship can still prevent the growth and maturation of emotional intelligence. The more we fuse with our partners, the more emotional intelligence remains stuck where it was when we went into the relationship, The more we maintain an emotional engagement with the world, the more our emotional intelligence gets to practice in the arena of feelings from anger to empathy. Like a prize fighter, it needs the real-world “pummeling” to get fit and be ready for the next match.
As Rilke tells us, in relationships we must work to strengthen our “neighboring solitudes.” To do that, we must first tend to our own.
David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.
Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash