#44 - on great love
#44 - on great love
And self and collective actualization
There is a moment in the 2014 interview between Oprah and singer/songwriter, Alanis Morsette, where they both acknowledge how Getting The Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix, changed their lives. ‘I would not still be in a relationship with Stedmen, had I not read that book,’ Oprah shares. Not shockingly, I immediately bought the book on my Kindle, and devoured it in 24 hours, highlighting half the text.
Hendrix was the first person I had come across that laid out what it takes to enter into a conscious partnership. Most relationships, he contested, are stuck in a power struggle, which is the phase that comes after the period of romance begins to wear off. While cloud hopping on romance and getting hammered on endorphins and adrenaline, we tend to deny the more grating traits of another person to pursue intimacy. Given how manically pleasurable and intoxicating this phase is, I am really happy we have evolved to essentially see what we want to see. Even if there is a come down.
In the power struggle phase, where ‘reality’ hits, couples can find themselves either living parallel and disconnected lives to avoid the undercurrent of conflict or in an endless cycle of explosive fights and reconciliation. The first pattern, Hendrix argues, can appear like contentment on the surface, and the second pattern can offer an illusion of closeness and intimacy, until the pattern resets. Those in intimate relationships, romantic and non-romantic, all seem to end up on a similar relationship trajectory, because as Hendrix puts it, we are typically attracted to ‘familiar love,’ which are people that reflect the particular nature of the love you did or did not receive from the adults in your life as a child.
While reading the book, I distinctly recall taking note that according to Hendrix’s research, ~70% of couples will either stay in the power struggle or break-up. At the time, I had just gone through a break-up and in trying to make sense of it all, I realized I was the statistic. In the SuperSoulSunday interview, Alanis went on to share how after reading the book, she would get excited when her relationships would enter the power struggle - because that was where there was an opportunity to be an active participant in each other’s healing. Yet, few of her partners were willing to meet her there.
It’s not really a surprise that we would seek partners that provoke some of our deepest wounds, and that still doesn’t make it any easier to confront and heal them. This past weekend, I saw two my dearest friends, Shilbee and Adil (#Dilbee), commit to each other in a 3-day ceremony on an island in Muskoka that left me with the sense of having participated in the blessing of a great love. What I saw was a partnership that has transcended the power struggle into a conscious one in pursuit of actualization. Said not woo-woo - I saw two people who have worked to create the safety for the other to be the most honest and alive version of themselves. Our friend Steve called them a ‘masterclass in love,’ and I could not agree more.
I say great love not to suggest there are fireworks emanating from Dilbee at all times, even though they are mad sexy, and not to create a false dichotomy between expressions of love, but rather to acknowledge that greatness often comes from the continuous act of confronting what can feel really bloody hard. If love is seeing all of someone for who they are and what they have lived in and through, absent of our ego’s projections, needs and expectations, then Dilbee has taken the course. Having a bit of insider knowledge on their relationship, I know pieces of the personal reckoning and near-death levels of vulnerability it has taken to lower their defenses and be seen and known in their brilliance and messiness, in their shame and terrors, and their dreams and desires. Their shared commitment to healing the ways they and their ancestors did not get the love they wanted or needed created the conditions for a wedding that put up a mirror to our own relationships and expanded the hearts of everyone who attended. I left inspired partly because I know I still need to lean in more.
There is sort of this evanescent quality about great love, where you can tell that a couple, friendship or partnership has gone through things, even if you don’t know exactly what. You can tell in the way their bodies and gaze find and lock into each other that when faced with the throws of hurt, harm and fury, and an inner child whose safety was deeply compromised, they found a way to return to each other. Return to love. Often better.
Last year on Father’s Day, when Will Smith took the Red Table with his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith to reflect on parenthood and address her self-described entanglements with August Alsina - we saw two people with different ideas of marriage, and the harm caused in the process of finding a shared definition. In the September 2021 GQ cover story on Will Smith and his upcoming memoir, he shares insights of the conflicting values that led to a breaking point on Jada’s 40th birthday party, after she described a documentary he created for her over three years to mark the occasion as 'the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life.’
“Our marriage wasn’t working,” Smith references in his memoir.
“We could no longer pretend. We were both miserable and clearly something had to change.”
Taking the Red Table to address the public certainly had its PR benefits, but the vulnerability displayed and the ownership of their truth felt genuine, and reflected their commitment to authenticity, which they describe as the antidote to the ‘shackles of fame and public scrutiny.’ Now more forthcoming about their open marriage, Will describes the freedoms that they have given to each other with unconditional support, as ‘the highest definition of love.’ In their relationship, I see love as holding space for the other to reckon with the stories, conditioning and politics that keep them from their version of freedom - physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, creatively and politically - even if it does not directly involve or include them. Given their financial success and not having to worry about survival, their pursuit is not without its privileges.
Still, the Smiths version of union aligns with what Mathura Mahendren describes as contemporary marriage in her design toolkit for long-term relationships. ‘What started as a survival strategy to build cooperation between hunter-gatherer groups, evolved into an alliance for wealth preservation between families, then an access point for love and intimacy between two people, and most recently into an enabler of personal growth and self-expression for individuals,’ she writes in the History of Marriage section.
Though history presents itself as linear, there are several histories being lived concurrently in the present. Perhaps what as made contemporary unions so challenging is that we are all required to take the course on what love means to us, today. In my childhood home, love was having dinner on the table every night, massaging oil in my hair, leaving cut fruit on my desk while I was studying, driving me to swimming classes, coming to my Kathak recitals and staying up with me while I finished essays until 3am. I was physically and creatively loved and encouraged. But there was an absence in my emotional and spiritual life. We hardly confronted the conflict that met us on a daily basis, and those patterns continue to find me in every relationship.
This gap has been challenging to rewrite, but it is also indicative of how love has shifted between our generations - from being expressed as service and stability of the nuclear family to supporting one’s self-actualization. Even my parents relationship, after 42 years, has evolved to focus solely on a version of actualization through a religious path. This cultural wave of love is so influential on our sense of meaning and fulfillment, it is reasonable that relationships not on this trajectory will experience friction and will require support to reorient to a renewed vision of love.
Almost every quarter, Ciaran and I hit a proverbial wall. The wall feels like cement, but it is all things that been left to fester and harden. It is all the things that give us the illusion of self-protection from surrendering to a relationship or a person who might not give us what we want, make us feel what we want, allow us to be who we are, see who we really are in our undeniable messiness and humanness. Maybe we haven’t brought it up because we can’t find or even know the words. Maybe we haven’t brought up because we’ve already decided we aren’t going to get the compassion we need. Maybe we haven’t brought it up because we are tired, afraid, ashamed. Maybe we have brought it up, but we can’t seem to find the way through. But I know that we stay the course because every quarter something shifts, a defense drops, fireworks are lit and our sight and the truth between us becomes clearer. That is really all I can ask for.
Weddings, like relationships, in their highest form, are a portal for getting clear on who you are and what you value, but as a family and community. If we consider how difficult it is for two people to merge and see each other, then the wedding is an invitation to level up. For all the fanfare that weddings are, I am convinced this is why they have endured. They hold a formative role in carrying the family and ancestral identity into a new branch on the tree; a process that culminates in a ceremony that holds space for these sacred values. This is also why weddings can create lasting ruptures between families; because our conditioning can make difference feel threatening. The wedding is a course in seeing, even if you don’t understand, healing through the process of de-attachment and change, and pursuing collective actualization. At Dilbee’s wedding, the intention to make every person in their families feel seen in multiple ways was so evident. After they shared their vows to each other, they turned to face their family and community, all 40 of us, and shared their vows and commitment to us. The slogan for the weekend was ‘we are getting married!,’ and we all left feeling like maybe we had, because we felt closer to love, and closer to who we are in love.
Alanis fell in love with Hendrix’s book because she said it gave her a framework to navigate it all. We all want and can have great love - we might just need some support along the way.
Have a nice week,
Hima xxx
Inter/Innerwebs
Listening: to The Meaning of Mariah Carey - which isn’t a book I would have chosen, but we picked it for my memoir bookclub, and I am loving it. She narrates and sings on the audiobook, and it’s brought me back to the 90s in a way that we all need at least once a year.
Reading: There has been a lot of takes on Dave Chapelle’s transphobic Netflix special but I liked this one by poet Saeed Jones in GQ
Also Reading: Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown — which is sort of an interesting analysis on how the nervous breakdown has been acceptable way to communicate that you’ve hit your limit and need time for restoration without needing a professional to validate it.
It all makes sense: A study recently found that Tetris, yes old school Tetris, can help integrate a traumatic moment or experience within hours of it happening. Tetris is a healing tool yawl! I use to play Tetris for an obscene amount of hours when I was younger and it all makes sense now. It’s still my video game of choice and it all makes sense now.
Fan-humaning: Over therapist Gabes Torres who specialized in racial trauma, decolonization, political somatics ++ and I’m love her tweet game.
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