And finally …
10. Advanced lessons: how every event in your life – even the disasters – can open you up to a deeper and more fulfilled life.
THE TWO BATTLES OF MODERN LIFE
The battle for childhood
Today a big battle is raging, perhaps the most important struggle of our time. On one side are economic rationalists, including many in departments of Early Childhood at universities, who believe childhood can be professionalized, streamlined and mass-produced to fit the modern world. On the other side, there are those of us who think that love cannot be bought, or hurried, or squeezed into ‘quality time’, but must be hard won, eyeball to eyeball, skin to skin, between every parent and every child, over years and years of loving and learning.
The battle is for a loving, timeless, individualized and whole childhood. The danger is that kids become lost in our materialist quest, caught in our competitive madness, homogenized into crèche-raised, insecure yuppie rugrats; the shopping centre fodder of an impersonal and conformist world where you are measured by your designer labels, and love, commitment and sacrifice are forgotten.
The debate about putting young babies into long daycare is an obvious aspect of this, as is the battle for parents – including fathers – to be given family-friendly working hours. Corporations – not governments – run the world now, and ‘love’, ‘community’ and ‘family’ are not often in their vocabulary.
Young parents haven’t got the time to BE parents – caught up in a roundabout of earn-and-spend. In the Third World it is even worse: workers sleep at the factory; children become prostitutes to save their families from eviction from their land.
We have to link up our energies and give each other encouragement and ideas. Parent power is gradually rising, with the realization that we have to fight for the right to parent our children and for a society that puts people before profits, community before convenience. It’s a battle that starts at home, with the decisions we make, but that is linked to the destiny of the whole human race.
The battle for marriage
There’s another battle raging too: the battle to save relationships. Over 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Our belief from counselling hundreds of couples is that around 70 per cent of these marriage break-ups are preventable. That is, they are caused by people panicking; not having the skills, the support, or sometimes the maturity, to push on through a layer of difficulty which, if it had been faced, would have led to considerable growth. It has been found that people once separated, usually re-partner, then encounter the very same difficulties four or five years down the track – plus all the stresses left over from the first marriage: access, support, and so on. The idea that ‘If I could just find the right partner everything would be wonderful’, while certainly good to pursue as an ideal, is often flawed because it’s the same us that we take wherever we go!
Separated people frequently admit – in the privacy of the counselling room – ‘If I knew what I know now, I would have stayed and worked on my marriage’. While there are partners whom are worth leaving: intractably violent, patently untrustworthy, abusive or addicted; the great majority of us marry people with hang-ups very similar to our own, and from whom we could learn a great deal if we were to persist. This doesn’t mean putting up with what you don’t like, but learning how to negotiate change.
Whoever you are partnered with, it’s still the same task. To thrive in love means learning some skills – which this book will help you with. It means putting a priority on having healthy relationships. This means not getting caught up in the pressure of an insane society – the rush to earn and spend – but realizing that time is the most precious commodity in life and investing it in ways that will maximize the love in your life. This might actually mean increasing your own reflective time (sometimes the best thing you can do for your marriage or your family is take a long walk in the countryside – by yourself). And of course increasing the time you spend with each other, to give love the chance to grow.
Time is the central issue of modern life. We no longer walk down grassy lanes to visit our friends, or work in the fields with lots of time to think, so we have to deliberately set aside soul time: time for peaceful reflection; the opportunities for deep and wandering conversations which were once an everyday part of human life. The enemy of love in the modern world is not hate, but hurry. The good news is that whenever we invest time and effort between any two human beings, parent and child, friend and friend, then love will grow.
So these two battles – for more loving lives for children; and more committed, resilient and erotically charged relationships between men and women – are entwined. Our kids don’t need us to stay stuck in bad marriages or to leave our difficult marriages behind but to get in and sort out our problems so they can see their parents in a living, yet secure and strengthening union. We owe this stability to ourselves and to them.
To assert the importance of love and people is to hold a bright flaming sword up in the snarling face of economic rationalism, the cancerous culture of get-and-spend. More and more people are doing this. More and more people are choosing love as the central principle of their life. It is important to make this choice and let it be the heart of every action.
2 Compatibility: The Ways We Connect
| She: | We just never agree about anything … kids, money, jobs, where to live, what to do. |
| He: | That’s not true! |
| She: | See! |
| We: (laughing) | So how did you two get together? |
| He: (sits back and smiles) | We … eell. That’s another story! |
| We: | Tell us about that … |
Three Kinds of Attraction: Liking, Loving and Lust
The family cycle begins, naturally enough, with ‘boy meets girl’. It’s the attraction of opposites that sparks the explosion that kicks along the whole wheel of life. But attraction is a complicated thing. It has many levels to it, and understanding these levels is vital to a happy love life.
Not everyone gets together in the same way. For instance, some couples are first attracted at the mind level – liking the other person’s ideas, finding him or her funny, interesting, stimulating. Other couples may find that they connect initially from the heart level; that warm affection and loving feelings arise easily between them. And of course many couples begin with an obvious sexual attraction, that tantalizing tingling excitement that is pure lust! To complicate it more, the way you feel about the other person is not always mirror-reflected – you can lust after someone who only likes you, or love someone who is only capable of lust, and so on. It can be tricky, especially when you are young and inexperienced (or, for that matter, old and stupid).
Levels of attraction are especially important to be aware of in the early stages of finding and choosing a partner. It’s important, especially for teenagers, to distinguish these three levels of need and, in handling personal relationships, to be honest with yourself about which is what. Knowing yourself well enough to tell love from lust, liking from loving, is the real sex education and can help avoid countless problems.
It’s tough being young,