First I want to remind you of the monomania of Richard Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like him, I think "this"—what I’m writing about—is important even if I don’t actually know what binds the otherwise disparate elements. I’m trying to climb the mountain Dreyfus is building.
Let me start where I think this current run started, with the notion of redemption. I was surprised to learn that the Mosaic Law justified the redemption of your kin from slavery and of land from foreign ownership on the grounds that they belong to God. So you have sold yourself into slavery and your kinsman comes and pays the price and redeems you from slavery because it is not right that a person who belongs to God—that’s you by the terms of the Covenant—should “belong” to someone else.
I knew some of that before, but the thing that struck me this time is that the process had nothing at all to do with the qualities of the actual person who needed to be redeemed. The same is true of the land. God not only promised it to “Israel,” but also divided it among the tribes and it is not right for land belonging to one tribe to be permanently owned by another tribe, or, naturally, by a foreigner either. Again, it’s nothing about the land; it’s not especially beautiful or fertile or defensible. It belongs to God and needs to be redeemed.
Starting with these stories caused me to come at one of my own stories from a new side. The approach Bette and I have taken to compromises between us is that they are fine if they are the last option—not so much as the first option. As the first option, we choose to do quite a bit of work on finding a course of action that does all the things for us that need to be done. This came up first, for us, in deciding where to live. She already lived someplace and I already lived someplace. Either would have kept the rain off—a big thing in Oregon—but each was someone’s home court, so we began to ask just what we, the relationship, the priorities we had established for our health and our growth together, needed in a home. This means that a place could be chosen that was “best for us” without our ever considering whether I liked it or she liked it.[1] So theoretically, I could have said about a place we had chosen, that I was enthusiastic about what it would do for us, how well it would meet our needs—“our” in this formulation not meaning hers and mine, but ours—without ever comparing it to the list of personal preferences I would otherwise have used. Again, it’s not about me: at least, not in any narrow sense. It is about me in the sense that the health and stability of “we” matter to me.
Then there is the question of resources and performance.[2] Most of the time, couples approach the question of who is to do what (performance) in a way that takes a certain resource level as fixed and the performance level as variable. So I might take a look at some upcoming event and say I don’t have the interest or the stamina or the patience or whatever, to do it. There are some things that really have to be done, of course, but very few things have to be done with attention and initiative and generosity. There are some things, and marriage is the setting where I know most about those things, that really have to be done that way or it is better not to do them at all.
So, doing it the other way—taking the performance level as fixed and the resource level as variable—I can say, what additional resources[3] would it take to enable me to meet this new challenge successfully? There is no reason to think of “resources” as only those Bette has access to, but that is the line of thought I want to pursue so I will just leave other kinds of situations (like a long run) and other kinds of resources (like carbo loading) for another post.
The situation I am hoping to use to illustrate this principle—which to this point I have not identified at all except “it’s not about me”—is time I am supposed to spend with Bette’s parents being an attractive, affirming, and very responsible husband to their daughter. This a fairly safe example, since Bette’s parents are both dead. Telling them about what their daughter means to me is something I really want to do. It is a part of being Bette’s husband that is not going to get performed if I don’t do it and performing it halfheartedly would be worse than nothing. What to do?
Now comes hard part #1. I say to Bette, “I really want to do this well and I just don’t have the resources to do it. Will you help me?” Maybe any one, certainly any man, reading this will know why that would be hard to do. I am asking Bette to add substantially to my resources so I will be able to do well this thing that we both want me to do well. What’s so hard? I am asking for something that could sound like a personal indulgence for reasons that really, honestly, aren’t about whether I want those resources. It has to do only with whether I will need them to do what needs to be done. If you don’t think that’s hard, you haven’t tried it.
We will leave aside all the states of relationship between a husband and wife that would make this a form of self-immolation. We’ll leave aside the years of careful teaching by which Bette has taught me what constitutes “resources” for her and how I can add to them and vice versa. We’ll leave aside all the demeaning things she could easily say at this point. What she does say is, “Of course I will.”
Now comes hard part #2. Bette does whatever she has learned to do which will have the effect of helping me amp up for the task to come. She does this, as I am telling the story, without reference to what it costs her to do it or whether I deserve additional resources or whether it really ought to take all that much just to spend some time with her parents. Any of those would be easy, especially if there are submerged conflicts in the relationship.
But she doesn’t do any of those. She does the hard thing instead, which is to focus on the resources I will need to do the things we both want me to be able to do and to provide those resources graciously and competently. What’s so hard? She goes out of her way to provide resources for me because she wants to honor my intention to perform well the task that is there to do and because she believes that the outcome we both want can be attained if she does that and may not be attained if she does not. It doesn’t have to do with whether she wants to. It doesn’t have to do with whether I deserve more resources. If you don’t think that’s hard, you haven’t tried it.
So, after saying “Of course I will,” she actually does provide the additional resources.
The evening or the weekend or whatever goes well. Bette is grateful for what I have done. I am happy with what I have done and grateful for the help she gave me. Both of us have learned something about the relationship. I am thinking of two things. The first is that we did well this task that neither of us would have freely chosen or have done well without cooperation. The second is that we are pretty good at this and can trust each other even more fully than it seemed when we began trying to do things like this.
So I ask for the resources I need. The alternative to asking is performing badly. Hard things to do 1a, b, c, d, e, and so on all have to do with trying to be honest about what I want and what I need, being serious about the resources the task will require, asking plainly for what might be considered an unjustified level of support, and so on. And Bette provides the resources I need. Hard to do things 2a, b, c, d, e, and so on all have to do with whether she can trust my assessment, whether she can unhook the question of what I will need (a functional question) from what I deserve (a personal question), considering whether she can do what I am asking, and so on.
All of that—that privileging of what has to do with us and what is required to achieve the common outcome—is “not about me.” And in this case, I say that for Bette as well. She too would say, “It’s not about me.”
NOTE: I see that I shouldn’t go further today. In the next post, I want to look at how I might be able to go about teaching in this same way. I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.
I will want to say that this idea—whatever it is—is a good conceptual tool for all of those situations.
[1] Not to get bizarre about it, of course. There would have been things that one or the other of us found really unacceptable personally. I’m taking those for granted.
[2] I’m going to ask for a hall pass on “performance.” For those of you for whom “performance” is only a shortened form of the full expression “sexual performance,” that’s not the kind of performance I’m talking about. For those of you who feel that “performance” is too public and too evaluation-laden a word, I ask only that you follow how I’m using the word so you will see that it isn’t either of those.
[3] What constitutes “resources” will vary a good deal from person to person, of course, but very early in our relationship, Bette helped me make use of Gary Chapman’s five categories (The Five Love Languages) of things that might turn out to be resources for each other. They are: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. There are many more, but those five suggest the kinds of thing that might be a resource.
No comments:
Post a Comment