Pain & Joy in Intimate Relationships

Our essential narcissism usually dictates that we prefer others who reflect back to us our own image, mostly in terms of coloring, shape, and size. We are all probably also attracted to general robustness and other characteristics associated with the survival of the fittest.But the turn-ons that excite us most - the psychological parts of our responses to others that overlay our basic animal nature - are all informed by our conditioned selves.

Simple physical orgasm is not a patch on ‘the real thing’, which is uniquely, for human beings, a physical response compounded with emotionality. Freud subsumed the resultant variety of sexual possibilities under the general headings of sadism and masochism, for there are pleasures in our pains and pains in our pleasures, and the compulsive nature of our responses to those we are most intimate testifies to this truth. While we are all capable of relating from the rational and animal parts of our being, it is our conditioned emotional responses that determine with what and whom we will be passionately involved.

In our early childhood, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, we make sense for ourselves of the pains and joys we are experiencing in our family lives, and we make vital decisions about what is to be our lot in life and how we will respond to it. We then go on to repeat and confirm our chosen meanings in every experience of pain and joy we have for the rest of our lives. Our childhood meanings become our life sentences.

Insofar as this is true, the pains we experience in our relationships neither ‘happen’ to us nor are imposed on us by others. Like it or not, we fall in love with someone for the immediate (albeit largely unconscious) knowledge we have that this is a person who, in his or her way of being, will cooperate with us in confirming the validity of our childhood decisions. On some level, we know every potential between ourselves and any other person we meet in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. And our intimate partners are deeply and knowingly chosen for the particular pains and joys that relating to them brings us. Notwithstanding the superficial and facile observations and judgments people may make about any couple, all intimate relationships are, by definition, between colluding equals. We are never truly misled. In every ‘bad’ that is done to us by our intimate partners we have colluded.

One way to look at these relationships is that we play ‘games’ with each other by adopting roles, and all the ‘moves’ we make in playing a game are from one of three possible roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim. Each individual tends to start a game from his or her typical stance, switching roles (few or many times) in the course of the game, but always ending up in the role which is appropriate to the painful, but familiar, existential position he or she is seeking to reach in playing the game.

‘Why don’t you? …’, ‘Yes, but…’, which is probably the most commonly played game of all, is a good example. Typically, A (Victim) asks B (Rescuer) for advice. B offers several suggestions, each of which is rejected by A with a ‘Yes, but …’ eventually, B realises that A is not going to accept any of his suggestions and becomes very angry and accusing (Persecutor) towards A (still Victim). A then switches to the Persecutor role, accused B of not being a real friend after all, and slams the phone down on B (Victim). At this point, A may well re-affirm a deep decision he made in childhood that, ‘Everybody wants to dominate me’ and B that ‘No matter how much I do for people I’m never appreciated.’

The attraction to being victimised is just as strong as the desire to rescue or persecute; the need to be needed is as powerful as compulsive neediness. The only genuine mistake we make in seeking an intimate relationship with another occurs when we infer from some false evidence that another is a character in our personal myth when he or she is not. A mild, short-lived disappointment is the worst consequence of this error. But in every other touch between one person and another that binds them, the touching surfaces, by definition, adhere equally to each other. If and when this equality no longer applies, the couple becomes unstuck and parts; but as long as they are together they become equal in their attachment, whether the attachment is essentially based on creative loving joy, the agonies of hell, or something in-between.

There is bound to be some pain in all intimate relationships because we have all experienced some pain in our childhood relationships, and we are attracted to re-experiencing it in an attempt to exorcise it. Essentially we seek out the painful situation because it is familiar, and we hope against hope that this time it will end differently. And if in our childhood pain predominated over joy, it’s likely that we will need more than one long term intimate relationship to heal ourselves.

Pain in our intimate relationships challenges the fixity of our personalities; and joy in our intimate relationships is the fulfillment of our ideal self in the other and the other’s ideal in us. The alternative to having pain and joy in our intimate relationships is deadly stasis.

It’s only by bravely facing the knowledge of those childhood pains which we and our partners are compulsively seeking to repeat that we can find the means - in equal to equal awareness - to appreciate our flawed and fragile humanity and, through love, slowly but surely mutually heal each other’s childhood wounds.

Mavis Klein

www.milkywaybooks.co.uk

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