Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

 

 

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

Torrey Orton

March 6, 2013

 

Only you can make this world seem right…

The Platters, 1953

Intimate aspirations

This resonant anthem to love has a popular culture life of great resilience and duration. Its underpinnings are the Western romantic vision of another (the One) who will perfectly reflect our own imagined goodness as a person – somewhat as the good-enough-mother does with unconditional love for her children. Perhaps the spiritual anchor is the One God, perfect in all respects, who we are encouraged/told to aspire to. Psychologically these may be the same foundation in different dress(es).

Here’s a thought for beginners on the life road to a coupled future of one kind or another: the One you are looking for, believe exists out there and cherish as “who I am meant to be with” cannot be ‘found’. He/ she has to be co-created, jointly built over years of shared work in  marriage, partnership or cohabitation  -  something exclusive for some large percentage of a life’s time. The happiness research is on my side here. Among the happiest people in industrial cultures are old people in stable relationships of long duration. Modernity has been attacking that paradigm for a century or three. The One is a cheap, cosmetic imitation, but just about all there is on offer…oh, I forgot religious fundamentalists’ straitened marriage gates.

How do you become a One?? You can’t. You can be deemed the One by another and you’ll know if he/she tells you, though that’s unlikely because to do so would reveal the perilous state of the relationship: still being measured up for the suit of engagement according to standards which are both wholly transparent (the public ones imagined by all to be what they are straining to attain) and totally private in the judge’s suite of fantasy needs.

There’s no One...many could do

The imagining of the One is a defence against the uncertainty which is one major feature of intimate living. It is fired by the blind energy of infatuation – one of the few life emotions which is best savoured at its finish.  But, “maybe we aren’t meant to be together” comes to the aspirant’s mind. An expression of powerlessness… being in the hands of fate(s). If the fit isn’t perfect the game can’t be played?? But if you don’t play how can you know the game.  One aspirant confronted the M sex columnist (Sunday AGE, March 3, 2013 pg. 6) with:

…Then a man I really liked said he wanted us to be “friends with benefits” because “how else can you find ‘the one’? Now if I meet someone I think, “another one to treat me badly”.

She was not a beginner; rather more a culture warrior tired of the fight with no finish. How commonly are variations of the ‘friends with benefits’ path to relationship wholeness traded on as the married or partnered future recedes into the faint light of the biological clock’s hands??

Accessorise – everything can be verbed and what can be buffed can be matched. But can it? What is the central theme, colour, shape, sound, smell which defines everything else in the One package as accessories. How would a beginner know? By buying matching sets from approved providers of recognised One costumes…those available in financially appropriate versions… so the One is ultimately democratic. You can put them on and still not know where / who you are.

The inner One

Yourself as the One is expressed in “that person” who you do / do not want to be. E.g.  “I don’t want to be that person who….”;  “I don’t want to be that person in the anger position” – the disempowering judgment against expressing strong feelings to others. We can only wonder what the boundary within her between “too extreme” and the rest of her life might be for Anna Guy.

“…But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn’t marry that person. I didn’t know that type of person. I wouldn’t have thought I’d choose that type of person…”

Anna Guy reflecting on her husband having recently been arrested for murdering her brother. THE SATURDAY AGE, GoodWeekend Jan. 19, 2013

The public One

The One has history. For example:

… from the mid-18th century onwards, and particularly with the advent of Romanticism, a different problem presented itself: the glorification of the suicidal person as a romantic hero. In 1774, Goethe published the literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a painfully earnest young man, tortured by unrequited love, who ends up shooting himself. All over Europe, other young men started to dress up in yellow trousers and blue jackets, following Werther. They also began to imitate the manner of his death, and Goethe's book was banned in several countries. The roots of the poisonous connection between suicide and the romantic hero began to form at the very same time as the development of modern celebrity culture.

There's no shame in suicide. And there's no glory, either

Giles Fraser  The Guardian, Wednesday 30 January 2013

 

Branding as the pursuit of a corporate One. You have arrived when your company name is the generic name for the product – e.g. Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Kleenex for tissues (USA), etc. The individual person equivalent would be iconic (see archetypes) male and female, a brand changing roughly with the fashion cycle (30 years for Ray Ban aviators, for an instance of a cycle). For archetypes try the gods of old (Viking or Greek identities) or the One God, promoted by the competing owners of its serial revelations, in whose image we are made and always fail to live up to…So what’s left are celebrities. Brand names change a bit more quickly than they used to.

And there’s the ‘history’ of the latest One which solves all previous failures to solve the fat, addiction, ageing...problems. The only resounding evidence for most of these is that they fail, One after another, yet the failures never cease to promote themselves as the One of their respective domain. Fat comes to mind as the most resilient loss-leader of self-improvement fantasies. How many of these are still in play: the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Dukkan diet, the 5-2 diet (the latest, latest diet)? Such Ones are also known generically as “the real deal” or “real thing”, out of which spins an unending breeze of real “real things”.

Borderlands – there are ‘bad’ Ones, too

Two weeks before the Australian Open opened in January , on a billboard at the corner of Punt Rd and Swan St. in Richmond facing towards the Tennis Centre, I saw “Don’t be ‘that guy’ at the match”, the drunk and disorderly one in the photo front and centre. Interestingly, on reflection he was scarcely the model D and D type; more drunk and sleepy, foolish, clean cut kid who just went too far for his own system – that is, the wrong one to bother fearing.

In a similar vein, there’s Madison Eagles reflecting on her lady wrestler self-image. She says there’s a joy in being a ‘bad’ One, and that there’s a market for it, proven by her winning ways on the professional mat.

“I’m just drawn to being that horrible person everybody hates and I really enjoy it…”

Madison Eagles, “the Punisher”, 28 yr old woman professional wrestler in TheAGE GoodWeekend Jan 19, 2013

What’s the psychology of this: Do you get a whole picture and then seek items to compose it - a vision thing rather than a tick-a-box thing? The closest to becoming One thru your own efforts is to acquire socially approved features (kardashianisation? Beiberfication?) of the look. It’s not surprising that ours is an age of body dysmorphias and binges. The One is a deeply evaluative and moral construct (ethical…maybe, maybe not) of cardboard thickness.

Another e.g. - “get the garden you’ve always wanted...” Imagine how you would get to recognise the garden you’ve always wanted. How does it get “populated” with plants, pathway(s), vistas…?? Can you choose these components when your source of taste is already set by exposures well before you are choosing such things…much as choice for junk food is primed almost irremediably by junk food childhoods intentionally designed to bond you to junk …?  Can you find a human partner in the same way?

The Game of relationships in a world of Ones

 

The Game has two objectives: to determine who would want to be your One and to determine if they are suitable to be your One. A dilemma leaps out. The other’s desire for you (thru which you feel their want to be your One) and their suitability (thru which you send your desire for them) are mutually confounding variables, as psych researchers would say. Want clouds perceptions of suitability making it difficult to have confidence in your judgment of either variable. This brings us to the Game.

The accepted practices in the Game are to be found in the commentary (gossip?) of interested same sex others about your relationship progress. Sophisticated players draw on the resources of the target sex as well. Everyone knows the rules, with a leaning towards their own sex interests. But do they work in finding a suitable One? Well, if the national relationship failure rate (40+% for marriages) is any indicator, no. And this does not count the myriad of failed efforts which many go through on the way to the supposedly committed versions, both binding and bonded, etc. And we rely on co-gamers to shore up our judgment of the process of discovering whether a possible One wants us and is suitable. There’s a book in the Game, as in the One.

Where to for any one, but especially therapists?

… While the date is ultimately unimportant, what is important is the arrival of systems that support rapid reconfiguration of every aspect of human life, from our work structures to our family lives to our political processes. To trans-form means to change the shape of (of what? … everything). Because a significant portion of the entire human family is now interconnected in real-time, the transformational era can take an opinion in Shanghai and within weeks it could dramatically influence purchasing behaviour for certain products in Reno. Our collective attitudes, behaviours, energy, and spending now constitute a complex, global and fundamentally chaotic school of fish. Or perhaps more apt, a flock of Taleb’s black swans.

“The Transformational Life” – Rob Smith on Integral Life.com 18/02/2013

This sounds like the culture of the One on steroids, where it has become loosened from its mooring culture of origin trappings and converted into a globally portable cloth (among those cultures with a ‘middle class’, defined as anyone with enough disposable income to look at adverts of wannabe approved self-presentation).

Why does all this matter for relationship therapists? Because, if this scant analysis is somewhat right, the conditions for relationship consistency, reliability and certainty are declining, perhaps at a rate well beyond our capacity to adapt. The breakdown rate is one datum. The start-up age is another. The single living rate for over 30’s, especially women, is another. Should increases in family violence rates count as another??

What does it mean to help patients navigate this world, be they 20 or 50. I have ones across that spectrum struggling with the challenge to be someone’s One and find a suitable One, too.

Stay tuned.