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Chapter 19- Alone Together
Freud talked of the two most important issues in a man's life being love and work. I have talked of work and purpose. I have talked of the separation from the problems of uninitiated men in relationship. I now talk of committed love, that love two people must learn for them to find the wonder of loving community, and support each other in their missions. Notice I have talked of initiation and mission first. The order is important. Mission before marriage holds the best hope for life and relationship happiness. Yet this culture holds the opposite. Most often boys and girls, adolescents, marry and often divorce.
However, all is not lost. Boys can become men and girls women within a relationship if they both understand the necessity of their personal initiation. That they cannot be initiated together. That their partner cannot initiate them. That there is a time when they must be alone together.
Tomme
Before Tomme, our protagonist in the Emerald Forest, could marry, he had to go through initiation. His indigenous culture took marriage too seriously to let immature boys marry. As Tomme emerges, finally, from a deathly dunk in their river of life, his father as elder yells, "The boy is dead. The man is born." Tomme is now ready to marry.
Most of us, unlike Tomme, enter into a committed relationship before we realize that we haven't done the emotional work of maturing. We find out after commitment that the initiatory work of finding our calling and true identity still needs to be done. Since we are not in an elder culture, we usually discover this more toward mid-life, if we find it at all. I mentioned in a previous chapter the dilemma of becoming initiated while within a committed relationship. I want to talk more fully in this chapter about the complexity of dealing with that dilemma.
Most of us look at relationship as a cure for our loneliness, a salve for our lonely hurts. To most in our culture, loneliness is the symptom of a disease. The disease is aloneness. The medicine prescribed is romantic connectedness. Psychologically, many of us see a committed relationship as life's goal and the cure for diseased aloneness. Certainly the entertainment media portray the romantic love relationship as the focus and goal of life.
For example, many people still feel embarrassed to sit alone at a movie theater, haunted by the romantic ideals in the very movies they wish to see. A romantic relationship seems the obvious cure for this disease. Anyone who suffers from the disease is assumed to be a failure, not having what it takes in the most important endeavor of life. A man who has this magic relationship is assumed to be initiated, automatically reaching manhood, just as the damsel brings manhood to her knight. This relationship then relieves a man of the fear and challenge of facing his initiatory aloneness.
A Second Chance
Most men who come to counseling have been ambushed by strong feelings they never knew they had. The relationship that they thought would give them happiness has betrayed them. Separation, or the threat of separation, has triggered the initiatory archetype inside. Buried feelings of abandonment rush to the surface, where they erupt into consciousness. The boy is being yanked from the village in an initiatory movement, away from nurturing mothers. He is overwhelmed by being thrown into the wilderness alone. His aloneness is frightful and shocking. The initiatory depression is overwhelming.
It is entirely understandable that most men in this extreme condition will instinctively look back, pulled by regressive forces. Many a man will feel a deep nostalgia for the very relationship that bored him the month before. A man will feel the tenderest feelings for a woman he has been angry at for years. In his desperation, he will look at this disintegrating relationship the same way the boy looks longingly back at the village.
Some men get a chance to go back to a separated relationship. Others have the relationship permanently taken away. Most yearn for a second chance. If a man who is given another chance will not discard the memory of his initiatory terror, he can start to take his initiation seriously. He can use the relationship to further his growth and the growth of his partner. A committed relationship can be part of a path to initiation and maturity. However, this path still involves all the initiatory pain and loneliness of the solitary man.
The realization that relationship is not a shortcut to happiness is one of the first realizations of the initiatory path of relationship. It is also one of the hardest initiatory losses to face. Adolph Guggenbuhl-Craig, a Jungian psychiatrist, speaks to this issue when talking of the purpose of marriage. In his book Marriage, Dead or Alive, he says that "the central issue in marriage is not well-being or happiness; it is ...salvation." By salvation he means the sense of wholeness and maturity that comes from the inner journey.
Salvation is a good word to convey the soul work of the initiatory path. If the reason for a committed relationship is indeed initiatory, then a healthy commitment involves initiatory suffering, not instant comfort and identity. If relationship is initiatory, the initiatory suffering involves death and loss. The first, and perhaps hardest loss, is the death of many of our romantic ideals of relationship itself. This is beginning of the stage of disillusionment that all long term relationships inevitably go through.
Probably the hardest ideal for a man to lose is the assumption that the romantic relationship, itself, will automatically and immediately bring happiness and satisfaction. The right relationship is assumed to cure all life's wrongs. Honeymoon stage will last forever.
The next hardest loss is the ideal that the right relationship is a shortcut to manhood, and the path to instant self-esteem.
If Only She'd...
Our cultural answer to the problem of an 'unhappy' marriage is to assume there is something wrong with the relationship. Many reasons come to mind. The timing was wrong. The two people are not suited for each other. This was a case of mistaken identity. An uninitiated man will often start fantasizing about another woman at the first signs of deeper dissatisfaction in his present relationship, feeling that the right relationship should not be this much trouble.
Even if a man feels he is with the right person, an uninitiated man will assume that any problems lie with his partner. His partner obviously doesn't understand or accept him. His partner has serious problems. His partner is being irrational or hysterical. For whatever reasons, the answer lies squarely in the other person's domain.
This is the typical feeling in a marriage counseling situation. Usually each member of the couple will feel that once his or her side is understood the counselor will straighten out the partner. Each partner is sure they are being unfairly treated. Each partner feels the other has some serious problems. This is typical of thinking before initiation. The uninitiated man will always look outside himself for an answer. And he will always see the problem outside himself.
If a man continually feels that the problems are mostly with his partner, and concentrates his energy on changing that partner, he is really trapped in the village. For he will be unconsciously acting like the spoiled boy looking for the right parent, really the mother, to finally understand him and treat him right. He will also be stuck in a fantasy of the perfect relationship. He will be stuck with the notion that the right woman, in effect, can initiate him.
For most men in our culture, a committed relationship is not an initiatory path but a Grand Detour. It is a way to stay in the village while seeming to be a mature and initiated man. Who can question a man who is a 'good provider', having a good job and sharing his fortune with his family? In our culture a committed relationship, especially marriage, has become a pseudo-initiatory rite. It is shake-and-bake manhood. It is a 'responsible' way to avoid the painful initiatory path. Because of the lack of elder consciousness, our whole society unconsciously believes this.
Mark Gerzon underscores this theme when he talks of young men having sex and getting married. He talks of young men asking "young women for more than companionship, or sex, or marriage. They ask women to give them what their culture could not-their manhood."
Separation
As I have said before, often a man will come to some dim realization of an initiatory need, beyond a relationship, at the time of a relationship crisis. His 'normal' world has been taken away. Sometimes his partner has withdrawn any positive feeling, possibly talking about separation or divorce. She may say she no longer loves him. Perhaps he has already been kicked out of the house. Or maybe his partner has been indifferent for some time, with no blowups, yet no ups at all.
Sometimes, the initiatory archetype has started to stimulate him into realizing his need for inner fulfillment. The elder voice within becomes more compelling. A man starts to change enough inside to see his relationship differently. In other words, he has started to look inside, while withdrawing regressive expectations from his partner. He is moving unconsciously toward ordeal.
This is where a man finds himself in a dilemma. The unhealed 6 year-old boy in him, especially if the woman is separating, will go about trying to please the partner, most often the wife, as a way of getting her back. He will be frightened of mother separation and in need of comfort. He will long for the village of his former life. He will be desperate, and pull a man strongly in the wrong direction.
The unhealed 10 year-old may not be so afraid of mother separation, but more afraid of the social disapproval of the patriarchal father voice. 'Responsible' men don't divorce and leave their children or their fortune. 'Responsible' men keep commitments. According to the patriarchy, a 'responsible' man must play by the rules of duty, the patriarchal mission that cannot see beyond the traditional father role. He will not be able to bear society's disapproval if there is separation for any reason. (He is also ripe for an affair as long as he continues to support his family. The patriarchy actually winks at this behavior, as long as a man is not caught.)
The unhealed early adolescent, possibly the one having the affair, will be looking for a friend, without the commitment and responsibility of an exclusive relationship. He wants his freedom, yet he is not yet ready to find the freedom that only initiation can bring. He sees the possibilities of commitment, yet he is missing the emotional tools of manhood. He also has not had his vision yet of what his manhood will be. He is not yet ready for true emotional commitment, yet he is still in a committed place. He will be terribly afraid of any new commitment, yet he will constantly be in some relationship, fearing aloneness.
On the other side of the dilemma, the emerging man, who is now in the older adolescent stage, starts hearing an insistent elder voice of fuller consciousness. This voice speaks of the need for a whole new way to relate to the world. The voice talks of an answer within himself beyond the patriarchal responsibility of the village. This new consciousness also beckons to a new way of being in a relationship that he used to call romantic. The elder voice will always send a man within first before questioning his partner.
When a man listens to the elder voice, and goes within, he instantly realizes he is putting all his relationships at risk, especially the committed relationship he is in. He intuits he will be changed profoundly by initiation. Like any initiate, he wonders if his relationships will survive these changes. He wonders if he can bear the separation involved. He wonders if his partner will stay loyal. He will start to experience the terror of all new initiates, as he waits for the elder to surprise him one very early morning.
The elder voice tells him he must separate from the old relationship in order to really test his motivation and his commitment. It also tells him that most of the reasons he has stayed in relationship will no longer work. The voice starts to question the reasons any man stays in a committed relationship. The uninitiated man has only old, outdated answers. The initiate starts looking for new ones.
Recontracting
Most of the time when I do marriage or relationship counseling, I talk about the need to recontract the relationship. Recontracting involves uncovering the expectations and assumptions that each partner has of the other. The original honeymoon expectations and assumptions, the clauses of the contract, are universally unconscious. They are assumptions that are not verbalized or understood. Yet they affect every day of a couple's life. One of the first steps in counseling is to try to make these unconscious agreements conscious, in order to see if they still fit the marriage after disillusionment has set in.
Kim and Betty were married for 24 years. This was Kim's first marriage. Betty was married before to a man who was a narcissist, a perpetual boy. Betty's first husband did not support the family well, drank a lot, and was generally looking for the world, in the form of Betty, to take care of him. He finally left Betty for another mother object after Betty got tired of that role. Betty realized later that she fell into the same role with her first husband that she had with her father.
Betty came from a poor family. Her father was depressed most of his life, seriously enough that he could not keep significant jobs. He settled into the life of a semi-invalid, expecting Betty and her mother to take over the family responsibilities. Betty felt, from a very young age, the overwhelming burden of mothering a depressed, hopeless man. She had lost her own adolescence, just like the adolescent boys I have mentioned.
After her father and her first husband, Betty swore she would never take care of another man again. She yearned to dance through life with a partner who could lead their dance well. Then Betty met Kim. Kim was never married. He came from a well-to-do family with a hard-driving, alcoholic, successful businessman for a father. He had good breeding, he could take care of her, and he could dance.
When Kim first started dating Betty, she was in bad straits financially, with two small children. Kim had lots of practice rescuing the needy. He had been called upon often by his tearful mother to search for his father, who was drunk in some desolate bar.
Kim suffered unknowingly from a terrible father wound. His father had little time for him, yet had high expectations for Kim's success. Kim's father rarely taught Tim the skills that he would need to gain that success. As a result Tim had a very strong negative father voice, the Vader voice, reminding him of strong father expectations and Tim's many personal shortfalls.
Kim's mother was never able to do much more than collude with her husband in his expectations and treatment. Yet she looked to Tim for the emotional warmth she missed from her husband and other children. Kim's mother had expectations and hopes for Kim, too. She needed a hero in her life that really loved her. Kim unknowingly became that hero. He became another white knight, unseating his father, following the hero role toward the illusion of manhood.
Kim followed his father voice as much as he could by getting a college degree and securing a mid-level management position. He also followed his father voice by getting a professional job, yet never being a big success. He actually honored his father in his failure, keeping both expectations and labeled shortcomings.
When Kim met Betty, both were smitten. Both found a fantasy partner. Both also sealed an unrealized contract at the time of the marriage. The contract read as follows: Kim would be responsible and take care of Betty financially and socially, introducing her to the dance of the upper middle class. In return, Betty would admire and respect Kim, making him feel like the successful and mature man Kim wanted to be. The contract also read that she would be 'understanding' of him and he would be protective of her. Understanding included her acceptance of a nervous problem he had. Protection included financing her social life. Kim could continue to be a hero in his woman's eyes, while Betty was finally rescued.
Problems arose at mid-life after many relatively happy years. Their children, Betty's children from her first marriage, were grown, and grandchildren were on the way. Betty had more time to socialize, moving in higher and higher circles, learning to navigate on her own. However, Kim was finding the hero role quite uncomfortable. Kim never really enjoyed Betty's circle of well-to-do friends. They reminded him of his critical father's world. He found himself less willing to accompany his wife in those circles. He also found himself less willing to work an executive job which he found less and less satisfying, especially for a boss of the Vader philosophy of management.
By this time he was in counseling for his dissatisfaction. His elder within had started to question his life assumptions and his ideas of success. As second father, I tried to support him in his strengths and counter his insidious patriarchal voice. I supported him in starting to recognize and separate from his father's script. He started considering quitting his job and starting over. He started listening to elder voices within. He started to think seriously of taking risks on his own. He was starting on an initiatory path.
When he broached the subject of quitting, he felt a deep betrayal. Betty became very anxious and upset. She felt he was taking away the lifestyle they both somehow agreed upon. She was not willing to risk a change. But most of all, she was frightened of having to again take care of an 'irresponsible' man, out of a job, who was supposed to take care of her.
Kim, in turn, felt abandoned by Betty. He felt she didn't love him for who he was, but for what he could get her. He felt his worth to her was measured in terms of his net worth. He no longer felt her understanding and resented her respect. He didn't have the 'unconditional love' he thought he should have. He felt that Betty's love was dependent on his job and success, just like he felt his father's love was.
Kim started to resent the conditions of their unconscious contract without knowing how he originally negotiated it. Neither member of the couple realized that the old contract was falling apart. This contract disintegration caused the greatest of stress for both. Neither realized that they were at a crucial point in the marriage. They were at an initiatory crossroad, one of several that modern marriages inevitably go through.
Recontracting would involve a great deal of initiatory pain for each one. Tim would have to give up the boyish need for unconditional love from a woman. He would have to continue separating from his needs for manhood through a woman's validation, and self-esteem through being a hero. He would have to face his life choices in the context of initiatory aloneness.
Betty would need to take more responsibility for her own lifestyle. She would have to face her fears of not being taken care of and protected. She would have to face her neurotic pain, by refusing to take responsibility for a depressed, out-of-work man, while working to heal the trauma of her adolescence. She would need to realize that no man or woman can protect her from her initiatory pain.
The couple had to first realize and accept that an unconscious contract existed between them. Then they had to find out which clauses they could live with, and which fears of change they could handle. They both had to face their own initiatory pain, as all partners in any relationship must.
Householders
Most relationships in our culture were originally contracted with insufficient information and limited self-awareness, both members of the couple being elderless. In other words, there was not the maturity needed to follow through on a healthy commitment. Nor was there sufficient information about the identity of the partner the make a healthy decision. Most decisions for relationship are made in the honeymoon phase of a relationship, which is always a regressed place. From the male perspective, the boy's fantasies and dreams are projected onto the loved one. So the boy, not the man, ends up choosing a mate. Psychologically, the child ends up making the adult decision.
Sometimes the original contract, though childlike and unconscious, meets the immediate needs of the couple. It did for Kim and Betty. For example, in most traditional marriages each member of the couple takes a stereotypical role. The woman becomes primarily a mother, both to the children and to the man, even though she might have a job. A man becomes the father, both to the children and the woman. The couple relates as mother and father, rarely as husband and wife. In this arrangement, the boy acts out his father script and his masculine persona while getting his mother needs met. The girl becomes a mother, while getting her father needs met by a protector/provider.
This contract works well during the family, or what I call householder, stage. At least it works enough to keep the relationship fairly intact. And it often works well for young children. As long as neither grows or regresses significantly, the marriage endures. These are the traditional marriages that have worked by society's standards for thousands of years. This is the patriarchal marriage, and still the dominant model of marriage in our society.
In the case of a working patriarchal marriage, the couple is psychologically ready to make a lifestage commitment, not a lifetime commitment. For the lifestage of householding and family building, each partner is clear about the expectations of the contract and has the emotional capability of following through. The couple can often accomplish one life stage together. They can keep their commitment because of clear expectations going in. Their contract is clear because it is the model contract of the day. And up to about 100 years ago, this was the type of marriage that was the model of a total committed relationship.
The householder stage is still the lifestage most people are taught to accomplish. The boy in need of following a father, and of being a father, reaches patriarchal manhood in this stage. Marriage is seen as initiatory by going through this stage. Job success is the most important male accomplishment in negotiating this stage.
By the time most men were at the end of this stage, they were into old age, or dead. In this case the traditional adult lifetime, and marriage time, spanned two life stages, householdership and old age. In very few marriages did both members of the couple reach the end of the householder stage together. Many women died in childbirth, or from complications of childbirth. Men often died in war or from overwork.
The traditional marriage worked for centuries for the patriarchal man. Men lived and died within the father paradigm, finding success with being a provider to wife and children. Men also enjoyed whatever pleasure there was in having social and political control in the marketplace. Success had little to do with finding emotional intimacy with a partner. There was no vibrant next stage of married life after the householder one.
The negative side of this paradigm, today, is the pseudo-initiation that the patriarchy promises. The illusion of manhood is no substitute for manhood itself. The positive side of the paradigm is that in our culture this is the time a man can get father needs met, and ego strengthened, by being a good father. During this time a man can unconsciously father himself and, thus, provide a foundation for the next initiatory step. He, sometimes with the help of other fathers, can ready himself for the elder's call.
The patriarchal marriage still works for many couples today through the householder stage. This is true even if it is a second marriage, as it was with Kim and Betty. Then something new happens. The marriage becomes very fragile and often falls apart, often at the time when the youngest child reaches adolescence. The something new is modern midlife. The waning time of householdership is the time a man reaches midlife instead of death. Marriage then often loses its patriarchal meaning to a man. The man is no longer an active father. He is often exhausted or disillusioned by his provider role. Patriarchal motivation is lost. The illusion of manhood starts to become clear.
The marriage mother also loses her attractiveness as life partner. Neither he nor his children need a mother as much. Even the young adolescent can become tired of female fantasies, either through pornography or affairs or a rich masturbatory fantasy life.
This is the time the elder voice starts more insistent questioning. The existing marriage contract starts losing its meaning on many levels. The marriage and the man are at the crossroad between village and wilderness.
Recontracting In The Wilderness
Today, the marriage commitment calls for a true lifetime commitment rather than the lifestage commitment of our forebears. Cultural and religious expectations have not changed, even though practice has. Most marriages must go through several more adult lifestages if they endure to death, many more than earlier marriages. Each transition to another stage has the seeds of a crisis. Each crisis carries the possibility of initiatory transformation.
The modern committed relationship involves the inevitability of crises over many lifestage transitions, as men and women live through more life stages. Mel and Pat Krantzler talk about many of these new life stages and their commitments in their book The Seven Marriages Of Your Marriage. However, there is a lack of modern elders to mirror this new reality. There is little social support in our society to provide a model for a healthy lifetime commitment. There is little social awareness of the cost and the opportunity of a lifetime committed relationship.
If a man is able to realize that his unhappiness is a result of his lack of initiation, and not the result of choosing the 'wrong' partner, he has passed a crucial test in his initiatory journey. He may have chosen a person unsuited to his path, but he will not know that until after he has passed through several initiatory experiences, and been transformed by them.
In elder cultures marriage is acceptable for men who have been initiated. In our elderless, modern time most men are not ready for psychological initiation until about 35. Yet most of us make at least one lifetime commitment before that age. If men can use relationship as an initiatory experience, then premature commitment takes on meaning and can work.
Age 35-45 is the time that the traditional marriage crisis happens. It is also the time the initiatory archetype becomes a strong inner drive. These dual crises can provide the terrible opportunity for deep initiatory work that can lead to a true lifetime commitment, as well as to the goal of full manhood. As in all crises there is danger in the opportunity. Recontracting, itself, can trigger the initiatory archetype. Recontracting a relationship at a deep level involves participating consciously in an initiatory experience.
Recontracting involves, first, an acknowledgment of the loss of the previous relationship. For the inner boy this often means a separation from a wife as a mother figure. Sometimes the wife in a marriage starts this separation by her own maturing process. A maturing wife or partner will no longer accept the expected role of being understanding and amenable. She might no longer accept the male role as the 'head of the family'. Since she is looking less for a father figure, she will feel less of a need to take the lead from her husband.
Sometimes it is the emerging man who will actively separate. For example, a man will no longer accept an angry, controlling mother/wife and is willing to face the risk of the aloneness of no mother at all. This may be after years of having chosen to 'go along to get along'. Maybe the boy has been so frightened that he settled for peace at any price, just to keep the fearsome separation at bay. Or maybe the boy was addicted sexually, and refused to give up the high of sexual pleasure and union for the aloneness of separation.
One day he might realize that the mother connection is not worth his pain. He will face his fear of anger as separation instead of enduring the neurotic anxiety of worrying about her reactions.
Kim was depressed because he felt that Betty should support him no matter what job he chose. He was hurt by her lack of understanding and support. He was also hurt because Betty would withdraw from him whenever he was depressed or inactive. He felt Betty abandoning him slowly, over a number of years, as he struggled with job and depression.
Soon after Kim came to counseling he was feeling a strong sense of separation. His initiatory depression had been triggered. He was most troubled by a wife who didn't support him. I started talking about boundaries and the need for separation. I talked of making his involuntary separation voluntary. I talked of the steps of initiation, and of his need to separate from Betty as a mother object. He needed to set healthy boundaries in terms of making decisions about his life that were most authentic to him, which meant risking emotional as well as physical separation. He had to learn to face her anticipated anger without losing himself or withdrawing behind village walls. He had to go his initiatory way and face his aloneness, even in a marriage.
I had to explain to him that feeling alone in a marriage is not always a bad sign, but can signal the onset of initiation. I told him he would have to be alone together for a time if he were to grow. I told him that Betty was not his elder.
When I saw the couple together, I had to explain their unconscious contract. I told them that their marriage was in jeopardy unless they could recontract. They already knew that the marriage was floundering. They were both scared and unsure of their strength to follow the recontracting course. Yet they knew they wanted to stay together. They were two people with dedication to each other. They realized they had to grow individually or their neurotic pain would never go away. They tentatively started to take initiatory steps.
I talked to them about setting new boundaries in their marriage, with new expectations and different agreements. I talked of grieving the old contract and the old marriage. I talked of doing this recontracting work slowly, and that it would take a good deal of time. I talked of how confusing and painful this would feel.
The initiatory loss of the old marriage will always bring disorientation and a feeling of not having a place. A man will feel married legally but have no sense of a real marriage. This is a very confusing state of mind, a sign one is in the wilderness. A man is in the limbo of the other side, where he is neither married nor single. He is surrounded by the paradox of the other side.
Often both members of the couple will find themselves not acting like married couples 'should' act. Neither will know how to act in the limbo of no contract, with the uncertainty of no guaranteed commitment. Depression will follow. This will be both the depression of loss, and the initiatory depression. This depression will often cause disruption of the process for most men, because they will take depression as a sign that the process is not working. Yet a man and a woman need to stay in this initiatory place, sometimes for extended periods of time, for the recontracting to work.
The limbo between contracts always feels like nothing is happening. All feels lost. There seems no well-being anywhere, since previous sources of nurturing have taken away with the previous contract, and previous roles have no meaning. Both find themselves in the wilderness. This separation is the time of being alone together. Individual initiatory aloneness is predominant.
The separation doesn't need to be physical, though sometimes it is. For the separation is really happening in the soul of each partner. Each member of the couple is already in the wilderness of their own. This is an initiatory time not only for the man, but for the woman and the couple. The couple will increasingly question the paradox of how separation and aloneness can possibly help two people get closer. Yet, If both members of a couple don't go through a transformation, the couple will continue to flounder, and the initiatory paradox cannot work.
I counseled a couple who were separated physically, as well as emotionally, and were trying to recontract. However, the wife could not get past the idea that her husband needed to "come home" before they could work on the relationship. Whenever some progress was made, or things went badly, she would angrily demand that he return to the house as the only way to make it work. She was overwhelmed by separation, and the consequent paradox of initiation. Because she could not be alone, she could not be truly together.
Often one member of a couple will feel too overwhelmed to risk separation and loss. This was usually the member who was most satisfied with the previous lifestage. This member is not ready to move on, too frightened to take the risk. Usually this member sees no need for the major change of recontracting. S/he is not aware of the danger the relationship is in because s/he is looking though uninitiated eyes. S/he would have voted for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Betty was in this position. She was happy with her social life and feelings of security in the marriage. Even when Tim did not come as often to social events, Betty adapted by finding social outlets with friends. She was terrified by the risk of Tim finding another job, possibly with much less pay. She was more terrified by her nightmares of him never finding a job again.
Betty had to face her initiatory pain and aloneness. As Kim was changing, she felt she didn't know him at times. As he set boundaries around social engagements, she felt abandoned herself. As he talked of caring less about money and status and more about meaning, she felt herself sinking into her adolescent depression. As she felt his anger for not understanding, she wondered what was left in the marriage. The uninitiated will always see boundaries as abandonment, separation as tragic.
This is where eldering energy is crucial, for both the man and the woman. If both members of a couple can consciously and willingly endure the pain and paradox of feeling intensely alone, while being in relationship, they will allow the initiatory transformation to happen. Both will usually need an elder/counselor or an eldering group to help them understand and endure. As Scott Peck says, "ultimately, if they stay in therapy, all couples learn that a true acceptance of their own and each other's individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow."
Kim and Betty went through a long time of being alone together. They both felt the pain of their initiatory work. Both came out the other side with a stronger sense of self, as well as a much different sense of what marriage was about. Their new kind of commitment to each other was something they didn't expect. But it was something they very much treasured.
Covenant
Even if one member of a couple is stuck in a previous lifestage, the other, who feels called, should first do his initiatory work before deciding on the viability of the relationship. Sometimes the continued work of one member will ultimately provide some motivation for the other.
On Ground Hog Day, Phil somehow realized that he had to go his own way, while holding his love for Rita. He had gone through night after night of night ending slaps, in trying to be with Rita in his old, narcissistic way. He had tried to forget her through a sexual addiction with a hairdresser. He had given up trying to manipulate her emotions in order to seduce her. He was stung by her comment that he loved nobody but himself.
He ended up going his own initiatory way, with seemingly no hope of relationship with Rita. In the process of his initiatory depression, he humbly realizes he is 'a jerk'. He also becomes a person who is genuinely interested in those around him. When Rita asks him to have coffee, he hardly notices the attention because he has found compassion. He casually talks of seeing her later.
Phil has found his initiatory direction. He starts to accept Rita with no romantic strings, but as a person and friend. His adolescent is healed. They stay in the same bed. He makes no adolescent moves. He is content with their closeness. He starts to understand what real love is.
Phil has given up the illusion of the Ms. Right and the right and future love. His happiness is in the love of the moment, with no strings and no guarantees. Having grieved so many expectations and regressive needs, Phil is able to love purely in the present. This breakthrough allows the couple to go into the next day with a sense of soul connection that makes for a true covenant.
In fact, any long term relationship will have to go through numerous big and little recontracting times, if it is to be healthy and vibrant. Couples who use their relationship as initiatory experiences are able to see major 'crises' as necessary opportunities for growth. The first major recontracting that a couple goes through will initiate them into a new kind of coupleness. They will come to realize that healthy commitment involves depth of soul not length of time. Soul depth involves a connectedness that transcends many contracts and doesn't rely on the 'sacredness of commitment' to keep it alive. Soul depth turns a contract into a covenant.
The couple will realize that a lifetime commitment is a covenant with a deep sense of soul connection that transcends even marriage. A covenant is open to many transformations and many initiatory transitions that involve risk and change, sometimes even the change of permanent separation. Covenant always respects the individual journey first, but also opens one to the profound affect another can have on that journey. Separation is rare when soul connection has been formed.
A contract works on the status quo. A marriage contract assumes no change. A marriage covenant mirrors life itself, with its many lives within a life. A covenanted marriage welcomes change as a sign of life, and welcomes life wherever it leads. If two people go deep within the wilderness of their own soul, they will also find the key to their coupleness there. After a number of successful recontracting, a sense of covenant will usually form. There will be a sense of calling as a couple as strong as an individual calling. Coupleness then becomes a sacred thing, an intimate part of the personal journey. The question of length of time will seem irrelevant. One lifetime will feel too short.
A paradox often comes into play when one member of the couple starts doing initiatory work, as Phil did. When the initiatory work happens, a maturing person, especially a man, starts needing the other less, but wants the other more. This lessening of need allows an individual to wait on a stuck partner, without the feeling of desperation or overwhelming aloneness. And a man doing his initiatory work will find that he has much less time to obsess about the relationship, because he is caught up in his own work. Time and its meaning change. And goals change. As a result, a man may be led to stay in a relationship for good reasons he will only realize later.
But the challenges for a lifetime covenant are enormous and the pitfalls are many. If one's partner is not able to move to the next stage, including recontracting, an initiated man may feel led to separate physically and go a different way. This means divorce or permanent separation. An initiated man will take an active part in this situation, without being impulsive or vengeful. Upon separation he will feel mostly sadness. Heavy sadness, with little anger or desperation, is usually the sign that the man has worked through this separation as an initiatory experience.
If a couple is able to recontract they will have built a whole new relationship. They will have achieved an invaluable initiatory step that will also be initiatory for each individual. Marriage will then become a true source of inspiration, motivating a man to continue his initiatory journey to completion.
After his initiation Tomme leaves his family to find his beloved. He is now able to marry. He finds her in her family's compound. She lets him take her away from her family with the mock violence of radical separation. They both separate from mother and father. They are man and woman. They consummate their marriage in the wilderness.
All chapters of Toward Manhood are archived.
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