IN SICKNESS, AND IN HEALTH
Identity-based and Relational Discourses of Intimacy in the Early 21st Century
Diana Borinski BA (Hons) UNSW
Thesis submitted to the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
November, 2007
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ABSTRACT
What ways of being and knowing constitute the experience of healthy relational life? Ontologically, what takes place in the experience of meeting a loved one, face to face? What is ‘good communication’ in an intimate relationship? What does commitment enable in relational life, and what constitutes healthy dedication in marriages?
This thesis addresses the above questions through a conceptual analysis of the dual nature of social life: identity-based, self-reifying, object-focused, atomised and oppositional, and dialogical, relational and present. It does so with the help of qualitatively analysed interviews of respondents talking about their experiences of committed intimate relationships.
The first part of this thesis discovers that current social theory links the increased fragility of intimate relationships to the individualisation of social experience, and the rise of discourses that encourage reflexivity and personal responsibility. I discuss specific funding strategies the Australian Federal Government employs in seeking to manage the risk of marriage breakdown in the community. I argue that while a complex mix of rational-instrumental reasoning, the neo-liberal ethos of self- enterprise and some Christian norms of family life underlie much policy, the actual practice of marriage education in Australia has a community basis, and has much potential for real relationships. I offer a critique of risk-preventative discourses in marriage pedagogy, and show that the key terms used by clinical researchers draw on the same methodological individualism as the economic model of relational life. I argue that often, social theorists also reduce relationships to dyads of competing individuals exchanging themselves as goods, or bargaining for the best deal while using their investments as threat points. I suggest that the identity struggles that ensue from such alienated relations in intimate lives can be understood through the Hegelian binary oppositional model, and also, through some psychoanalytical theory on differentiation.
This thesis suggests that on examination of couples’ relationships, we find a different ontological structure in relationality. Relationships have the potential to transcend their total, additive, atomised form and be experienced as wholes. Couples teach us that love is not just self-directed action; that choice can burden, but responsibility to what is present can be freeing; and that relational ‘success’ is more complex than simply staying together for life.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... i
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS...... 1
INTRODUCTION...... 3 Experiments in living ...... 5 This thesis ...... 7 Empirical research...... 10 Recruitment ...... 10 Sample and selection criteria...... 10 The interviewing process ...... 12 Processing...... 13 Centacare data ...... 14 A poetics of methodology ...... 15
1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION: INTIMACY IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY .....18 Liquid modernity...... 21 Pure relationships...... 24 Personalities on display...... 26 Risk theory on relationships ...... 27 The politics of self-productions...... 29 Weber and the Frankfurt School...... 32 Rationalising marriage and family ...... 34
2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA ...... 40 Legislation ...... 40 To Have and to Hold ...... 42 Solutions ...... 44 Marriage is ‘good for you’ ...... 48
3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION: PREPARING FOR LIFE TOGETHER OR PREVENTING DIVORCE? ...... 58 History of marriage education in Australia...... 59 The Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP)...... 65 PREP in practice ...... 67 Premarital Personal and Relationship Evaluation (PREPARE):‘Failing to prepare is like preparing to fail’...... 69 Jack, Jill, but no crystal ball: Some problems with ex post facto problematisation...... 73
Terminology...... 75 ‘I think we started to have problems really early on’: Natasha’s story ...... 77 ‘I just don’t want to be a statistic’: Bella ...... 80 Risks, trust, faith...... 81 On pathologising change: The Legacy of Divorce reconsidered ...... 83 Implications for marriage education...... 86
4 HOMO ECONOMICUS IN THE FAMILY HOME ...... 88 Homo Economicus in modernity: The amazing self-selling product ...... 88 Some history of exchange in marriage ...... 92 Gary Becker and the economics of marriage and family ...... 95 Who is to benefit?...... 97 On garbage and those damned dishes ...... 99 ‘Brain explosions’: Corey...... 102 On totals and choosing the best deal: Nathan...... 104 The Faustian predicament of homo economicus...... 108
5 DESIRE ...... 113 Isabelle’s tale...... 113 On playing masters ...... 118 Flirting, teasing, trapping: Strategies of control in relationships ...... 120 On objects and the paradox of autonomy...... 125
6 ‘BEING THERE’: BETWEEN COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNION ...... 132 Half sick of shadows...... 132 ‘This is where your relationship starts’: Natasha and Isabelle, again ...... 136 Dialogue ...... 141 On ‘becoming’ ...... 142 Rogerian pedagogy in marriage education...... 147 ‘Being there’ ...... 148
7 LOVE ACTUALLY ...... 152 Two relationships: Nathan...... 152 The erotics of passion: I-It ...... 154 The Eros of dialogue: I-You...... 156 From identity to relational logic...... 160 Decisions: Responsibility and response ...... 162 The chrysalis and the butterfly...... 165
8 MEETING ...... 169 Meeting Bill...... 169 ‘All of me’: Lily ...... 171 Masks and faces, totals and wholes: Levinas and the face...... 173 Diagnosis and self-care: Marcus ...... 178 Wearing sunscreen, taking medicine: Jane...... 183
9 STAYING...... 188 Marriage as contract...... 189 ‘We are as good as’: Corey ...... 190 Marriage as a ‘symbolic representation’: Nathan...... 193 ‘Superglue’ marriage ...... 195 Marriage as sacrament...... 202 ‘I am a better person’: Jane...... 203 Grace ...... 206 The pathos of the ordinary ...... 208 Akedia ...... 210
CONCLUSION ...... 214
REFERENCES...... 221
WORKS CONSULTED ...... 239
APPENDIX A ORIGINAL QUESTIONNAIRE ...... 241
APPENDIX B REVISED QUESTIONNAIRE...... 243
APPENDIX C CENTACARE INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE ...... 245
APPENDIX D Centacare Sydney Marriage and Relationship Education Evaluation Q.6 (Extracts)...... 247
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank my family for their support and love. Brother, thank you for the music, and believing I could do it.
I am deeply indebted to my supervisor and mentor, Associate Professor Andrew Metcalfe, for his intellectual precision, care and painstaking attention to his students’ work.
Thank you, William, for trusting in my potential and giving me a wonderful chance five years ago; and for your ongoing mentorship. Your trust in couples’ potential is truly inspiring. The work of educators, the courageous women and men who help couples make things grow, never fails to amaze me.
I thank the couples whose interviews form the foundations of this thesis. Any errors of interpretation are my own, and I apologise if they occurred.
I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW for providing research and conference funding, and making it possible for me to attend the ‘Future of Marriage?’ symposium at the Social Capital Foundation in Brussels, in May 2004. Heartfelt thanks go to my teachers in the Department of Sociology, who sharpened my ‘sociological imagination’; and to the administrative team of the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, for their help and cheer.
Mila, Serge and gorgeous Daliah - thank you for helping Auntie Dina stay sane. Kyung-Ae, thank you for your green oasis in a dark time. Many separate thanks to friends must be given in person.
The use of PREPARE/ENRICH materials was generously permitted by Dr Alan Craddock, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sydney, and national coordinator of PREPARE/ENRICH in Australia.
The image on page 168 is by fine artist Jason Benjamin, titled ‘Staring down the Past’ (2005), oil on linen, 180 x 240cm. The painting won the 2005 Archibald Exhibition Packing Room Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I thank Jason wholeheartedly for the endless inspiration his work had given me over the years, and his kind consent to the inclusion of the reproduction in this thesis.
Lastly, my love to Duncan, for putting up with the last birthing pains, while he tenderly washed and dried.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics
AIFS Australian Institute of Family Studies
AWA Australian Workplace Agreement
BSRF Building Strong and Ready Families
CBT Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy
CIS Centre (for) Independent Studies
CSME Catholic Society (for) Marriage Education
DAS Dyadic Adjustment Score
FaHCSIA (Department of) Family and Housing, Community Services, Housing (and) Indigenous Affairs
FLA Family Law Act
FOCCUS Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding (and) Study
FRC Family Relationship Centre
FREST Family Relationship Education (and) Skill Training
FRSP Family Relationship Services Program
MAREAA Marriage and Relationship Educators’ Association of Australia
MRE Marriage Relationship Education
PREP Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program
PREPARE Premarital Personal and Relationship Evaluation
SPRC Social Policy & Research Centre (UNSW)
UNSW University of New South Wales
VET Vocational Education and Training
Trop penser me font amours
Love makes me think too much
6thcentury song, Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
INTRODUCTION
A man’s umbrella catches mine accidentally in the early morning rush to university. He asks my name, and whether I would like to have lunch with him, ‘Now, this afternoon, today, soon?’ He is a foreign postgraduate student. I pause, and agree to a coffee. When we meet, he insists we go to his usual café, on lower campus. He chooses a dish for me, pays for me, and insists I try some homemade Pakistani dessert. He tells me he does not want to be with a Pakistani girl, because it is too difficult. Traditional girls would not speak to a man, let alone join him for lunch. He tells me about his friendly Australian neighbours, and his family back at home. I am slightly uncomfortable, but I do not want to appear rude. We go our separate ways. On my way back to the postgraduate lab, I wonder what this lonely stranger thought of me. I wonder whether conventions, were I a traditional Pakistani girl, would have made it easier for me to politely refuse his advances. I cannot help but ponder, also, what kind of a husband this man will make to someone back in his home country. ~ Three women, in their late twenties, enrol in postgraduate study in order to follow their academic partners taking up jobs at universities overseas. In order to make organising paperwork easier, they get married. ~ A man in his mid-thirties tells me he has recently separated from a girlfriend, because he was too busy with work to have a relationship. He says he is happy to be single, and he now has time to windsurf. To my question about what he likes to do for a pastime, he answers, ‘Fuck’. ~ A man in his mid-twenties, from a religious migrant family. He has a university degree, hopes to work in a professional field, and has had a string of relationships. At his church he meets a young girl, from the same cultural and INTRODUCTION |4 religious background; a girl who (his family knows) is a virgin. They hastily plan a wedding, buy a property near his family home, and he begins to labour in the family business to pay off their mortgage. They have a child nine months later. His family is very happy. ~ I am at a seminar about postdoctorate fellowships. A senior academic in chemical engineering speaks. She uses terminology such as ‘track record’ and ‘mobility ratings’. She emphasises that staying in the same university, in the same field of research, with the same supervisor, spell career suicide for an aspiring academic. If one wants to be taken seriously, one needs to ‘diversify one’s skill set’, through gaining experience in institutions overseas. She tells the audience that she worked in a number of labs across Europe, for five years. I want to ask her how she negotiated having a committed relationship, or possibly even a family, with constant moving and writing job applications. But this question simply does not come up in her talk. Fearing that my question might open a can of worms, I hold my tongue. ~ An academic man in his forties, upon hearing about my topic of research, eagerly volunteers to tell me about what he calls his ‘modern and progressive’ marriage. His wife is Japanese, and lives permanently in Japan, because all her family and friends are there. He does not speak Japanese, and finds it difficult to be around her friends who are ‘strong passionate individuals’. He considers this living arrangement a strength of their marriage. When I ask him to explain, he tells me that he and his wife have ‘implicit trust’. That is, he says, if his wife asked him to kill someone, he would do it for her. They do not have any immediate plans to have children, and are irritated when people ask. When they recently met overseas, for a holiday, they found it difficult to adjust. They are resourceful individuals, he concluded: he relies on his support network of family and friends in Sydney, and she, in Japan. ~ ‘I want someone good value, who will fit into my life plan.’ (A comment from an ex-partner of a friend, an investment banker in his early thirties).
INTRODUCTION |5
Experiments in living ‘Marriages down, divorces up, and selfishness gets blame.’ Geesche Jacobsen, Sydney Morning Herald
The vignettes introducing this thesis, gathered from informal conversations and meetings over the course of my candidature, are examples of real responses to the questions that had preoccupied me for the past five years. How do people understand and experience relational intimacy and commitment in a contemporary Western society like Australia? What are the broader structural conditions and cultural trends, in reference to which people construct their intimate relationships? How do people treat others, and what role do they assign to potential partners and possible parents of their future children?
The lives and deaths of our intimate relationships have been a regular subject for polemical debate in the media (see Arndt, 1996, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Cloud, 2007; Corliss, 2004; Horin, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2005, 2007; Horin and Morgan, 2002; Jacobsen, 2002; Maley, 2003a, 2003b; Margo, 2005; Peatling, 2006; Smiley, 2001; Stevenson, 2004; Taffel, 2006; Tetsch, 2005; Thavis, 2003; Reddy, 2004; Wade, 2007). Marriage and family life had also been under scrutiny of state policymakers, clinical researchers and academics.
Demographers and popular social commentators often ring alarm bells at people’s increasing reluctance to settle into long-term life arrangements: a steady career or a committed intimate relationship. A whole new range of terms – ‘adultescents’, ‘twixters’, ‘kidults’, ‘generation Y’ – pertains to this deviant group. The average age for Australians getting married is taken to confirm the problem at hand: the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests that in 2005, the average age of men when marrying for the first time was thirty- two years, and for women, almost thirty.
Sociologists join the debate by clarifying that the broader cultural, political and economic circumstances often dictate how people can construct INTRODUCTION |6 their lives. The conditions of tenured, award-wage, guaranteed employment are no longer a reality in the Australian job market. The type of occupations in demand changes with rapid and constant technological change, and the ever- evolving demands of the market place. Tertiary and trade qualifications that people obtain often become redundant. Flexibility and change are the core principles of the new world of work. Such conditions do not support orderly, predictable life-stage transitions. The labour market favours readily mobile young workers, not those burdened by obligations such as elderly parents or a young family. The radical reconsideration of roles assigned for men and women irrevocably changes the nature of intimate heterosexual relationships. While previously, the wife and children followed the husband and a man’s pay accounted for ‘dependents’, today’s relationships often contain two workers, with two career trajectories and individual incomes. A family must negotiate this difference and the various responsibilities in running a household, if it is to remain intact. Work schedules and even geographical locations are potentially divergent, and there is no cultural norm to make one subordinate to the other. Relational equanimity and cooperation become a challenge, and the subtle skills of dealing with difference become essential, yet are often absent.
Many values necessary to survive in the new world of work cross over with the consumerist ethos dominant in our society: the prioritising of self- interest, looking out for ‘better offers’, and relentless objectification of self and others into commodified traits, assets, skills and attributes. We are urged to accumulate experiences: travel, have multiple sexual relationships, change workplaces, and develop varied interests. Our sense of being is often reduced to that of identity: a catalogue of exchangeable qualities. We proceed to initiate intimate relationships as though these are sites for exchanging our selves, for bargaining. As this thesis will show, economists and sociologists collude in advocating such strategies.
Meanwhile, lifelong intimacy with one partner remains an enduring Holy Grail in our culture. Studies of young Australians show that marriage is desired and intended at some stage of their life (McCabe & Cummins, 1998). Prominent Australian demographer David De Vaus suggests that despite INTRODUCTION |7 falling marriage rates, surveys consistently show that the vast majority of people do not believe that marriage is an outdated institution (De Vaus, 2004:163). Industries catering for weddings are booming: on average, an Australian couple spent a staggering 28,700 dollars on their wedding in 2004 (Cuming, 2004). Whether it is an older and financially secure couple, most likely already living together in their own home, and paying for their own wedding, or it is a younger couple, whose families are helping with this cost, the wedding is obviously more than just the vows of lifetime commitment. It is a celebration of the taste of individuals in an affluent society, an exercise in extravagant consumption on a grander scale than people are ever likely to experience in their lifetime. Even more so, the lavish white wedding is an expression of the enormous hopes and expectations vested in the institution by today’s couples.
Our culture paints marriage as a romantic haven that promises much to the self: a soul-mate partner who reflects what we want to see of ourselves, praising us and seeing us in the most favourable light. Couples fantasise about a perfect, sweet, cosy ‘together forever’, without the moments of doubt, fear and hate that accompany the risky business of being open and vulnerable to another human being. The combination of this fantasy with a culture of calculation, choice and the constant desire for the new often proves lethal. As the confetti settles, the dishes, annoying habits and shocking differences re-emerge. Couples may then seek solutions to the inevitable disappointments and frustrations of a real life with an imperfect person by looking for ‘flaws’ in their partner, or ‘issues’ in their relationship; they may try to rationalise and ‘fix’ relational disjuncture. They may try to become better accountants of what they give and get. And ultimately, they may separate.
This thesis This thesis addresses the above themes through nine chapters. In Chapter 1, I examine contemporary sociological theory addressing the broader socio-economic and political conditions of life in late modernity in Western societies, and the influence of these conditions on how people construct their understanding of themselves and their social responsibilities. INTRODUCTION |8
Chapter 2 examines the rhetoric underlying the former Australian Coalition Government policy of funding marriage education. A complex collusion is revealed, of traditional norms legitimated by the epistemology of science and rationality, by a government apparently concerned about pressures on couples and families - many of which were created by its own policies.
In Chapter 3, I describe two risk-preventative marriage education programs looked favourably upon by the Australian Department of Family, Housing, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA): PREP and PREPARE. I examine their potential and their limitations. Chapter 3 introduces interview material, from my interviews with Natasha and Bella, to ground my critique of some conceptual assumptions of risk-preventative marital research and pedagogy. 1
Clinical and training literature dealing with marriage uses key terms such as ‘satisfaction’ and ‘success’, which bear a close resemblance to economic vocabulary. Chapter 4 looks at the problematic adoption of marketplace concepts such as gain, exchange and bargaining, by couples and social theorists alike. I argue that the promise of individual justice seemingly proffered by the economic discourse closes our eyes to the extreme individualism implicit in these strategies, which precludes the possibility of exploring the non-finite qualities of relationships.
What are the psychic dynamics of engaging with others in ways suggested by theory and programs in the first four chapters? In Chapter 5, I argue that identity logic, underpinned by binary oppositional Hegelian desire, underlies many of the ways in which we engage in intimate relationships. Isabelle’s account provides material to examine this theme. I offer Winnicott’s theory to facilitate a deeper understanding of self-strategies that substitute for the ‘holding’ space of intimacy.
All respondents’ names have been changed, to preserve their confidentiality. INTRODUCTION |9
In Chapter 6, this thesis makes an ontological shift to a relational model of thinking about intimate experience. It does so by comparing the transactive model of communication in relationships with the dialogical model. Extracts from interviews with Isabelle, Nathan and Natasha provide fertile material for this chapter. Carl Rogers’ profoundly social insights are offered as a conceptual framework.
The relational model requires reflection on the role of agency, identity and responsibility in loving relationships. A pair of terms from the philosophy of Martin Buber - I-It and I-You - provide us with the language to discuss these concepts in Chapter 7. Nathan and Jane’s stories provide the empirical data for this chapter.
In Chapter 8, I look closely at the notion of ‘meeting’ of otherness potentially experienced in the I-You relation. Levinasian theory on the face provides me with the conceptual tools to analyse perception and the creative and destructive ways in which we apprehend Otherness. Here, the ontological notions of ‘totality’, which underpin exchange and calculation, and ‘infinitude’, a being beyond categorisation, are explored.
Chapter 9 helps the reader understand the various possibilities of relational commitment. Corey and Nathan show us how the pressure to ‘do justice’ to the self can reduce marriage to an alienated dutiful undertaking ‘for others’, or an abstract, hollowed out ‘thing’ that is supposed to bring satisfactions. The contractarian model of marriage is explored and compared with the immanent, lived, necessary commitment offered by the ethics of response. The absolute necessity of a loving unsentimental Other to teach us about ourselves, and make us aware of our self-delusions, is revealed in the stories of Jane and Oksana. When conceptualised accurately, commitment can be seen as more than tradition or ‘superglue’. It becomes a discipline that facilitates a relaxation of self-defences, and a creative holding space for growth. INTRODUCTION |10
Empirical research The conceptual concerns of this study are examined through material from twenty-six semi-structured interviews recorded between 2003 and 2005.
Recruitment UNSW Human Research Ethics Approval was granted for the project. Originally, I advertised for participants in UNSW publications such as Blitz and Uniken, and through flyers around the Kensington campus. This method of recruitment yielded few respondents directly, but as the project became known to fellow postgraduates, an informal method of ‘snowballing’ developed, with colleagues approaching acquaintances on my behalf.
Sample and selection criteria Nine interviewees grew up in migrant families in Australia, and seven were living in Australia temporarily. Some cited interview material touches on the cultural themes and elements in interviewees’ relationships. For instance, Jane referred to her husband’s silences early in their relationship as a ‘typical Scandinavian male trait’, and spoke of Icelandic cultural norms of emotional expressivity in personal relationships. Kayla spoke about the demanding expectations of wives and daughters-in-law in Korean traditional families, and her own struggles fitting into her husband’s family, after she had lived in Western countries for many years. Sarit and Rajiv were introduced by friends and married quickly, as was customary in India. They spoke of their struggles early in their married life, having little prior mutual knowledge and no sexual experience, while living in Western countries where for most people, marriage follows an extended period of dating or living together. While these insights into the role of culture in our understanding of intimacy offered rich possibilities for further exploration, the material was not sufficient for a representative sample, and I focused on more generalisable dynamics of relating.
The majority of couples interviewed were tertiary-educated, and proficient in self-reflective and critical thinking. Some interviewees readily referred to conceptual frameworks from the social sciences. The challenge such interviews presented was bringing the respondent back from abstract INTRODUCTION |11 argument-style reporting, to a more experiential description of relational dynamics. This process required refined facilitation and dialogical interview skills.
Unfortunately, no same-sex couples came forth to be interviewed. The original interview questionnaire included questions specifically targeting perceptions of gender roles in relationships, and Bella, Andrea and Lily spoke at length about the way they dealt with their partner’s reluctance to share adequately in the household tasks, despite the men’s overt commitment to the principle of mutual responsibility. While this thesis addresses some aspects of the gender patterning of certain relational dynamics, it is not a focal point of this project.
While it is difficult to give a definitive explanation of the selection criteria of material that ended up in the final thesis, some general observations can be made.
Respondents ranged in age from late teens to late forties, and the duration of relationships ranged from one year to twenty years. Twenty-two people were in intact relationships: two married couples, one engaged couple and living together, and two couples living together, of which one separated shortly after the interview. Four couples were not living together, and of these, one couple became engaged while this thesis was being completed. Two respondents were interviewed without their spouses, who were overseas. Two respondents were separated, and the other party was not contacted for interview.
The interviews that ended up being used most extensively were selected because they possessed internal contradictions that shed some light on the complex emotional journeys, and unpredictable paths of people’s lives together. The richness, depth and honesty of insights of the selected material show a full range of human responses: of self-subversive tendencies, of most well-intentioned efforts to love and care for others that can nevertheless be self-centred, but also flights of tenderness and open-hearted connection. INTRODUCTION |12
Some of these respondents have left their partners, and returned; some were no longer with their partner and yet continued to draw lessons from the experience. There was a sense of the ‘real’ about all of them precisely because there were no attempts by the respondents to tidy up their stories. Their trust of me as the researcher was essential in this process.
I did not use material from the interviews with Greg and Leah, Mooks and Jo, David and Rachel, Jasmina and Star, Huneif and Holly, Kayla, and Tasia. While certain themes in these materials echoed strongly with those in the interviews used in the thesis, when I started working on such materials concurrently, this diluted the analytical focus of the writing and prompted either finding a common denominator of the experiences, or using them superficially as illustrations or examples of a theme. Omitting the weaker material gave me a chance to focus on the internal complexities of selected accounts, instead.
Some interviews suffered from my initial lack of skills as an interviewer, and as a result generated statement-like answers. Jasmina’s and Tasia’s interviews in particular were not used for this reason. Their interviews, as well as those with David and Rachel, also revealed that it was easier to work with material which contained some relational problems. As some relationship studies also suggest, relationships that work actually do not lend themselves easily to logical analyses, perhaps because they do not generate nearly as much self-dramatising narrative.
The interviewing process Participants were interviewed in an environment that suited their needs. Some interviews were recorded on campus, and for some, I was invited into the homes of the respondents. Where a couple was participating, each person was interviewed separately. This was done to facilitate relaxation and comfort, and avoid collusion. It was emphasised that no information provided by the person would be disclosed to the partner, unless the couple would specifically request this. INTRODUCTION |13
The first two pilot interviews followed a structured questionnaire (see Appendix A). The interview was taped, using a small portable cassette recorder. I took notes also, to create a more complete record of the conversation: gestures and environmental factors that did not register on tape. I made quick journal notes immediately following the interview, to remember elements that stood out as significant at the time. After transcribing these initial recordings, I discovered that while the material generated was sufficient, my questions were closed-ended and elicited statement-like responses. Less articulate respondents were especially disadvantaged. My initial lack of confidence and experience also meant I could not comfortably tolerate the intermittent pauses inevitable in conversation, and rushed to the next question on the questionnaire. When transcribing such passages, I noticed rich points of interest that could have been explored, had I been guided by what the respondent was saying rather than by set questions and thematic aims.
I decided to change the questionnaire, to include open-ended questions that encouraged discursive engagement (see Appendix B). The next set of interviews started by allowing the respondent to remember a time when they felt happy in their relationship, and to describe it in as much detail as possible. I found that it relaxed the participant, and allowed them to stay with their own experience, rather than appeal to some norms or values that perhaps they thought I, as a researcher, was adhering to, or looking for. As the interviewer, I picked up on frequently occurring words and themes, and asked participants to elaborate or explain such points further.
Processing I transcribed the pilot interviews and a few where recording quality and respondents’ accents would have been difficult for a transcriber. Other interviews were transcribed professionally, and I thank the UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Affairs Committee for funding this part of the research.
All names have been changed immediately after transcription to preserve confidentiality, and only the pseudonyms were used thereafter in any INTRODUCTION |14 analysis and discussion, verbal or written. Interviews were analysed for significant terms that related to the thematic concerns of this project. Exploratory conceptual analysis was applied to each transcript. As the theoretical part of the thesis developed, some interviews became more relevant than others. In the end, fifteen interviews were used in the final dissertation.
I quoted interview material in its original form, grammatical errors and verboseness included. Where abbreviated, I used […] to indicate missing text between the joined extracts. The same convention was used in quoted text from publications, to be distinguished from ‘…’ which indicates original text ellipsis. Where the interviewee paused, laughed or was muffled, this too was indicated in square brackets - [pause] - to create a more complete record.
Centacare data The direction of my research necessitated more detailed information about the nature of the field of marriage and relationship education. I obtained a second Ethics approval in 2005, to conduct interviews with the Coordinator, and Manager, of the Marriage and Relationship Education program at Centacare Catholic Community Services Agency in Sydney (see Appendix C). Most of the material gathered is used indirectly, to explain the aims and practice of marriage education in Australia. No names were used, by request.
Before beginning this project, I was already working as a relationship educator at Centacare. I took the job to supplement my APA scholarship, after noticing it advertised on the UNSW careers website. My secular personal background was never an impediment to exercising my role at Centacare. My supervisors have been aware of this project from its inception.
In my capacity as an educator, I have talked to more than 1000 couples over the past five years. While I have not directly used material from this experience, it has undoubtedly broadened and shaped my understanding of the issues faced by people in intimate relationships.
INTRODUCTION |15
A poetics of methodology We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
I initiated this thesis partly in response to my frustration with the sensationalisation of the ‘divorce problem’. This framed the major methodological challenge of this thesis. The discursive form of the ‘problem’, at first, was a powerful lens that narrowed and distorted my capacity to appreciate the breadth and complexity of people’s experiences of intimacy and commitment. Weighed with an apparent ‘problem’, I was looking for a ‘solution’, while in fact getting caught in the very discursive tradition I was trying to query. The insight that shifted my thinking occurred during an informal conversation with a colleague in the Morven Brown Arts and Social Sciences postgraduate laboratory. She suggested querying if the ‘problem’ form was, in fact, a problem.
Following that conversation, it had occurred to me that it helps to think of the work of an academic researcher as that of an angler. We throw the nets we’d been given, and the size of the holes in the weave will determine what we catch. If we plan for big fish, the smaller ones will get through. Fishing is not just capturing all that is out in the ocean; it is a differentiating, and therefore, a productive, creative process. An insightful researcher finds out that the ‘solution’ to the fact that no small fish is being caught is nowhere else but in their choice of nets. A qualitative researcher’s nets are the questions s/he asks, the themes s/he explores. As Hastrup writes, ‘People do not speak in truths. They answer questions which we ask’ (1992:31). Thus, I must show my nets.
The term ‘intimate committed relationships’ is one of my nets. I defined these as relationships that shared a sense of permanence and exclusivity, and at some point, a shift in relational ecology had brought the couple together in a way that no other relationship at this stage of their life did. The relationships in the eventual sample used in this thesis vary from those of lovers who lived separately but saw each other regularly, to married couples. I mostly use the word ‘partners’ (even though some of my respondents disliked INTRODUCTION |16 it), because it is less specific than ‘spouse’ which did not apply to most of my couples, and more weighty than ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend’.
A lot of the research this thesis refers to is on marriage officiated by religious institutions and the state, and it is marriage education that gets most funding and attendance in Australia. I do not privilege these forms of commitment, but use ‘marriage’ to refer to the idea of relational fidelity beyond the immediate present, and necessarily embedded in a broader social context.
Since this thesis is not written from the position of an economist, demographer, politician or religious advocate, it seeks to explore the potential of human relationships. The relationships of my respondents were different – at times, much darker and more complex, and at times, more awe-inspiring, than I anticipated. A skill of a good angler, I was to discover, was not rely too heavily on the typologies of fish in dusty textbooks, and release what I caught because it did not match existing description. I puzzled at the surprising life- forms the sea threw up, instead of lamenting, as some social commentators do, that another ‘mutation’ had occurred.
This sensibility for the unique did not preclude me from asking, when I opened my new nets - what helped some of my fish cope better with the rough seas? What ailments afflicted some? Why did some self-destruct by beaching on the shore – was it something about the seas, or their own health? In other words, what made some relationships more fulfilling and enriching, and what made some difficult and prone to dissolution?
My angling allegory has corresponding lessons for actual relationships, also. Just as there are no pre-existing self-evident ‘problems’ in social reality, there are no pre-existing relational truths outside of language and perception. Whenever a couple discovers ‘issues’, ‘problems’ or ‘obstacles’, we may need to look at the net they are using, and their angling methods. This is precisely what this thesis sets out to do.
INTRODUCTION |17
The most complex lesson of the allegory echoes the frequent observation of anglers, that while in the meditative process of fishing, they lose the capacity to say with full certainty who catches whom. The angler, the angled and the rod become a nexus; hierarchy shifts. In a similar way, the researcher is caught by the very net they use, and must necessarily be so, if they are to offer a real account of sociality. This is the deeper reason for my slight suspicion of sociological work such as that of Bauman, or the work of ‘relationship gurus’, who make derogatory comments about struggling ‘moderns’, while pretending to be outside of the social reality they study. Negotiating how the themes and questions discussed in this thesis played out in my own life was one of the most challenging tasks this project presented.
1
THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION:
INTIMACY IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY
Once you step with someone else hand in hand into the dark forest, one of you risks getting lost or abandoned or slaughtered. Victoria Glendinning, Flight
In 2003, the established British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman published a book titled Liquid Love.
The hero of this book is ‘Der Mann ohne Verwandtschaften’- the man with no bonds, and particularly no bonds as fixed as the kinship bonds. […] Having no bonds that are unbreakable and attached once and for all, the hero of this book - the denizen of our liquid modern society – and his successors today must tie together whatever bonds they want to use as a link to engage with the rest of the human world by their own efforts with the help of their own skills and dedication. Unbound, they must connect… None of the connections that come to fill the gap left by the absent or mouldy bonds are, however, guaranteed to last. Anyway, they need to be only loosely tied, so that they can be untied again, with little delay, when the settings change – as in liquid modernity they surely will, over and over again. (Bauman, 2003:vii)
The terms Bauman uses in this foreword: steely ‘bonds’ of traditional society, the temporary and feeble ‘connections’, the necessity for personal ‘skills’, capture the terrain of Bauman’s view of the conditions of life in late modernity. Yet when was there ever a time when human relationships – marriages, families and communal connections – were set in steel and unbreakable, as Bauman suggests? Are autonomy and agency in social relationships wholly problematic? Is Bauman’s attitude towards his subject, the ‘liquid modern’, altogether in good faith? How does the idea of an autonomous enterprising individual, tying personal connections, come about in the first place? What cultural practices and social institutions take on the idea that rational calculation can help individuals make sense of their world? Examination of 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 19 these questions in connection to contemporary social theory is offered in this chapter.
Terms such as ‘intimacy’, ‘relating’ and ‘connection’ are conspicuously absent in David Morgan’s classical Social Theory and the Family (1975). Instead, the more traditional sociological tropes are offered – an array of structural and functional analyses of the social institutions of marriage and family life. The functional approach, advanced most famously by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, considers the sexual, economic, reproductive and educational roles the family plays within the broader social context. While it holds family to be a universal social arrangement, it recognises that its functions depend upon, and change according to, its relationship to society as a whole (Morgan, 1975:19). Marriage is argued to historically establish the institution of social fatherhood, and facilitate legitimate transfer of rights and property. Families ultimately ensure the reproduction of society through producing new members, and socialising them to fulfil adult roles through the internalisation of the given culture. Structuralist analysis, instead, focuses on the structuring effect of processes of exchange and interaction between members of kin networks. Classical anthropological studies by the British and the French Schools of social exchange theory, discussed later in Chapter 4, examine how marital alliances both enable and are recreated by flows of land, property, labour and of new family members. Again, the focus is pragmatic - the survival of the particular kin group, the reaffirmation of its social status. In the determination of marital alliances, these considerations are of foremost concern.
In Intimacy (1998), Lynn Jamieson traces the historical developments in Western culture that enable a paradigmatic shift away from the economic and political imperatives dictating the formation of long-term committed intimate relationships. Medieval tales of courtly love begin to imagine the possibility of intimate dedication is self-justifying, lacking in the pragmatic necessities of arranged alliances. The chivalrous lover idealises his unattainable mistress and pledges to defend her honour. Jamieson argues that courtly love redefines sexual love as a noble spiritual and moral force, 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 20 contrary to the Christian ecclesiastical dogma of the time, which proclaimed sexuality separated from procreation to be unholy. With its idealisation of personal, private piety between individuals, courtly love gives growing space for a germinating individual consciousness, even if still largely bound by overarching social institutions. Romantic chivalrous love is later popularised in nineteenth century Europe, perhaps as a cultural counterpoint to the Victorian ideal of marriage, where suitability is still the guiding principle in the choice of a spouse for middle-class Victorians. Courtship is a formal and public statement about intention to marry, not a process of testing a relationship by getting to know each other intimately (Jamieson, 1998:23). Until the later part of the twentieth century, marriage is ideally supposed to precede sex, and not to be an outcome of a sexually active relationship.
What ‘personal’ and ‘individual’ mean is complex here, already. Critics have suggested that the women are often a set of idealised stock criteria: golden tresses, rosy cheeks and the like; and that there are formulaic stages of romantic courtship. Jamieson suggests that romantic love is love for love’s sake, an infatuation with a projected fantasy, with little of the personal reciprocal knowledge we presume of passionate love today. As this thesis will show, the meaning of our synonyms for ‘personal’, unique, or different is, in fact, always complex in social relationships.
Jamieson argues also that our contemporary notion of romantic intimacy that evolved from courtly love holds contradictions. Intimacy is supposed to be a very specific sort of loving and being close to another person, based on continuous revelation of the ‘inner’. It is not just cognitive knowledge and understanding, but a degree of emotional attunement and understanding. Being known is a privileged access to the inner self only permitted to those who are trusted (1998:9). However, concerns with self- satisfaction and self-protection render impossible the necessary compromises involved in commitment to another. As a result, ‘women and men are envisaged as becoming equal in selfishness’ (1998:40). Lillian Rubin, cited by Jamieson, argues that lovers who seek self-realisation through others can never have absolute control over what they receive unless there is absolute 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 21 sameness, and this leads to antagonism and angst. Ian Craib, in turn, suggests that disappointment in close relationships is due to the two contradictory desires sedimented in the human psyche: the need for solitude, and the yearning for companionship. The persisting gendered division of labour in relationships reveals the ideology of permanent emotional intimacy in relationships to be unrealistic. The equally idyllic options of complementarity of men’s and women’s contributions, and absolute numeric equality, fail to recognise the ingrained cultural memory of patriarchy, and the inescapable tensions real relationships experience.
Intense passions are inevitably eroded by familiarity and the daily routines of life. However, with the reification of personal growth and fulfilment in late modernity, moral significance is sought in acts of choice: the ‘attempts to discover, clarify, or deepen the self, whether or not these choices lead to or remain within a commitment’ (Swidler, 1980:143, in Jamieson). Due to the heightened expectations of marriage, people are not settling into unsatisfactory relationships, and keep searching for the perfect life-partner. It is precisely this that leads social conservatives to lament the loss of the economic, religious and normative underpinnings of marriage, and the mass consumer culture that promotes a self-obsessive, self-isolating individualism which is incapable of sustaining anything other than kaleidoscopic relationships. Love, care, empathy and understanding are not sustained when long-term projects of marriage-like relationships and parenting are in constant jeopardy. (1998:19)
Liquid modernity Zygmunt Bauman, introduced earlier in this chapter, is one amongst many contemporary social theorists concerned about the contingent nature of intimate relationships built exclusively on self-centred need-fulfilment. One of the central themes of Bauman’s life’s work as a social theorist is the waning of civic virtues accompanying the rise of individualism in late modernity. People become preoccupied with their contractual obligations to labour-providing and profit-returning organisations, and primarily identify themselves as consumers and shareholders. Ideologies of individual gain, capital accumulation, enterprise and self-promotion, gain hold on the popular imagination. Autonomy and self-sufficiency are posited as civic virtues. 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 22
The ties provided by traditional obligations become loose. Lifetime marital vows are replaced with ‘relationships’, and job tenures, with ‘contracts’ and ‘projects’. Irrevocable intimate unions become temporary and conditional, constantly re-evaluated and dissolved if they do not deliver what individuals want. An example Bauman provides from the popular press is ‘top pocket relationships’ - relationships people use at their convenience and control, so that they do not become emotionally dependent:
First condition: the relationship must be entered in full awareness and soberly. No ‘love at first sight’ here, remember. No falling in love… No sudden tide of emotions we call ‘love’, nor those we soberly describe as desire. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed and shaken off your feet, and above all don’t let your calculator be torn out of your hand. […] Convenience is the sole thing that counts, and convenience is a matter for a clear head, not a warm (let alone overheated) heart. The smaller your mortgage loan, the less insecure you’d feel when exposed to the fluctuations of the future housing market; the less you invest in the relationship, the less insecure you’d feel when exposed to the fluctuations of your future emotions. (2003:21)
The modern person becomes an autonomous, competitive, calculating economic actor, homo oeconomicus – ‘the lonely, self-concerned and self- centred economic actor pursuing the best deal’ (Bauman, 2003:69). S/he is also now homo consumens - ‘a constant shopper treating other people as objects of consumption’, judged by how much pleasure they can provide (Bauman, 2003:75). When relationships demand more than one bargained for, it is time to move on to another such arrangement. People want to ‘cream off the sweet delights of relationship while omitting its bitter and tougher bits’, to have power without being disempowered, to be fulfilled without being burdened (Bauman, 2003:ix). However, precisely because genuine relationships contain such qualities, relationships start to ‘vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare’ (Bauman, 2003:viii). As soon as problems occur and genuine engagement, compromise and growth are required, people want to move on. In other words, a fundamental paradoxical human tendency is amplified and is allowed free rein as sociality morphs into individual exchange. People are desperate to connect, yet are fearful of the burdens of obligations and the possible losses and pain of relationships.
1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 23
Bauman argues that to deal with the ambivalence and paralysis that accompany such conditions, people turn to a new set of ‘experts’ who promise to solve all problems:
If you feel ill at ease in that fluid world and are lost among the profusion of contradictory road signs that seem to move as if on castors, visit one or some of those expert counsellors for whose services there has never been a greater demand and of whom there has never been a richer supply. (2003:58)
He argues that this discursive field is symptomatic of, and colludes with the individualist culture. In his view, ‘counsellors’ (and he uses the term broadly), ‘pass the buck to their confused and perplexed clients’: by telling them that they don’t have enough self-assertion, self-care, or self-drilling; they are insufficiently flexible, embrace old routines, lack enthusiasm for change. Bauman thinks that counsellors ultimately advise their clients to have more self-care and self-appreciation, and conversely, to learn to pay less attention to others’ demands for care, to have more distance and more sobriety in calculating reasonable hopes and gains against losses (2003:58).
Bauman’s argument resonates with much of what goes on in popular culture. It is very tempting to side with his caustic, chiding comments about the manically hyperactive ‘liquid moderns’:
When the quality lets you down, you seek salvation in quantity. When duration is not on, it is the rapidity of change that may redeem you. […] Your mobile phone always rings (or so you hope). One message flashes on the screen in hot pursuit of another. Your fingers are always busy: you squeeze keys, calling new numbers. […] You are the sole stable point in the universe of moving objects – and so are (thanks to you, thanks to you!) your extensions: your connections. (2003:58-59)
One of the central themes of this thesis is the paradox Bauman captures: the centrifugal drive for autonomy and the centripetal pull of sociality in human relationships. I hope what makes this thesis different from Bauman’s book is the respect with which this complex problem is examined. Bauman’s moralising remarks about the passing of the virtues of ‘true relationships’ do not give justice to the struggles of present-day relationships. His labelling of ailments such as allergies and post-natal depression as narcissistic modern 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 24 afflictions is disrespectful to the human suffering with which he apparently sympathises. His simplistic understanding of the human service professions fails to acknowledge the real and rich possibilities that skilful helping practices can hold for human growth and development, and their profoundly social dimension. His nostalgic reminiscence about the time when steely bonds apparently held things overlooks the unacceptable gender roles that supported the traditional institution of marriage; the generations of women who could not get out of oppressive marriages, and wrote in their diaries that their husbands’ drinking and abuse were ‘a cross to bear’ (Coontz, 2005:312). Essentially, Bauman reminisces about an idyll that never was.
Pure relationships Bauman’s book falls in a long line of sociological examination of relationships in contemporary Western culture. A well-known work in this body of literature is Anthony Giddens’ Transformation of Intimacy (1992). Giddens focuses precisely on the ontological implications of the discursive shift from marriage to ‘partnerships’ or ‘relationships’. Giddens coins the term ‘pure relationship’:
[a] social relation entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it. (Giddens, 1992:58)
The purity of contemporary relationships consists in the fact that they are not ‘polluted’ by the foundations and very substance of traditional marriage and family as paramount units of social activity, reproducing successful kinship alliances, status and wealth. A ‘pure relationship’, on the other hand, is based on the centrality of reciprocal knowledge by partners: ‘[l]ove here only develops to the degree to which intimacy does, to the degree to which each partner is prepared to reveal concerns and needs to the other and to be vulnerable to that other’ (Giddens, 1992:62).
Giddens offers a story from Julian Barnes’ Before She Met Me, to illustrate the difference between a ‘pure relationship’ and traditional marriage. Graham’s first marriage to Barbara is a ‘state of affairs’, a not particularly rewarding part of life ‘like having a job that one does not especially 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 25 appreciate, but dutifully carries on’ (1992:5). The unheroic routine nature of this relationship is stifling with its mundaneness. Graham’s relationship with his new lover Ann, on the other hand, is a complex series of active interactions that have to be constantly negotiated and worked through. Personal life for people like Graham and Ann becomes an ‘open project, creating new demands and anxieties’ (1992:8). This falls within the narrative of self that, in conditions of modernity, is disembedded and highly reflexive:
Where large areas of a person’s life are no longer set by pre-existing patterns and habits, the individual is continually obliged to negotiate life-style options. Moreover – and this is crucial – such choices are not just ‘external’ or marginal aspects of the individual’s attitudes, but define who the individual ‘is’. In other words, life-style choices are constitutive of the reflexive narrative of self. (Giddens, 1992:75)
Lynn Jamieson had pointed out that Giddens seems naively optimistic about the potential of this new form of intimate engagement, and chooses to disregard the inherent tensions in attempting to reconcile mutual trust and commitment with the knowledge that the relationship is only good ‘until further notice’. Modern intimate relationships are still plagued by structural inequalities that cannot be explained by individualising them (Jamieson, 1999:484). Modern romanticism sees relationships as quests for self- validation, but the constant re-working of boundaries and conditions to suit the partners can also get tiring and the fantasised goal can recede like a horizon, as one of Giddens’ interviewees in a lesbian relationship suggests:
Sometimes I get tired of going through life negotiating relationships and working it out. Like, will I ever arrive at some kind of plateau where I finally get the results of my labours? Once you’ve run the last mile, they may still leave you for a younger, or more intelligent, or older, or whatever woman – or a man! (Giddens, 1992:137)
Intersubjectivity turns into subject warfare, with all the nasty complexities of identity struggles. Because present-day relationships are never beyond reconsideration, personal resources and trust are being ceded to a partner who may already be planning their exit strategy. The prudent rational subject, therefore, is likely to retain some reserve, holding back in defence, because anyone who commits without reservation risks great hurt in the future. To trust 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 26 the other is to gamble upon their ability to act with integrity, which leads to continual scrutiny of their motives and actions.
Personalities on display Richard Sennett drew his dark conclusions about the cultural trends that structure modern relationships back in the late 1970s. In his 1977 book Fall of Public Man, Sennett wrote about the erosion of the notion of the public or civic in Western culture. Civic and political participation is no longer about fulfilment of duty, but identity production. The social concept of character - one’s socially mediated profile - is replaced by personality, a makeshift and constantly elaborated self-sustained construction. Self-disclosure becomes ubiquitous, and in the extreme cases, exhibitionist. We only need to look to the phenomenon of celebrity in today’s popular culture for confirmation of this observation.
Sennett argues that in an inwardly focused society, the pursuit of self- knowledge does not facilitate meaningful action in the world, but instead, makes individuals narcissistic to the point of being unavailable for any non- self-related activity:
Each person’s self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world. Masses of people are concerned with their single life-histories and particular emotions as never before; this concern had proved to be a trap rather than a liberation. (1977:4-5)
Relationships built on such principles are ultimately contests for personal legitimation. Intimacy between people becomes continuous exchange of information: everything needs to be revealed for ‘authentic’ connection to occur. A sense of finitude underlies the idea that the self can be unpacked; the self starts to be perceived as a knowable and therefore limited object. This means that when information is exhausted, restlessness and boredom give rise to the desire to explore new liaisons that promise fresh information. New lovers always hold the promise of novelty, while
[t]he sheer fact of commitment on a person’s part seems to him or her to limit the opportunities for ‘enough’ experience to know who he or she is to find the 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 27
right person to complement who he or she is. Every sexual relationship under the sway of narcissism becomes less fulfilling the longer the partners are together. (Sennett, 1977:9)
There is a constant need for more stimulation, more knowledge: ‘[i]f only I could feel more, or if only I could really feel, then I could relate to others or have “real” relations with them. But at each moment of encounter, I never seem to feel enough’ (Sennett, 1977:9). People are under a ‘tyranny of intimacy’, whose promises of individual fulfilment and stimulation stand in stark contrast to what Sennett paints as the banal and burdensome everyday reality of life.
Risk theory on relationships The tenuous and uncertain nature of modern intimate relationships prompted the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, in Risk Society, to talk bleakly about the ‘deep insecurity and hurt with which men and women confront each other in the everyday reality of marriage and family (or what is left of them)’ (Beck, 1992:104). People are assured that they can ‘choose’ what kind of a relationship, marriage or family they can build, and that they can leave their family and social histories behind, yet many discover that affairs of the heart and the hearth are not purely matters of personal choice, but are thoroughly embedded in social structures. Couples are assured they can do away with patriarchal gender identity roles, and lead fulfilling professional and personal lives, simultaneously, but reality often does not match this equalitarian ideal. Beck argues that this happens primarily because the Western family form (a breadwinner male with a co-mobile housewife and family with no interests of their own) is most suited to the industrialised male-dominated capitalist social arrangement. The gender roles we inherit are not sentimental relics peripheral to our lives, but are structurally integral to the patterns of work and life in modernity. The contemporary heterosexual household, which now often contains two educated professionals exercising their prerogative to individual accomplishment, is bound to become a stage for settling the ‘conflicts of the century’ between the sexes (Beck, 1992:104-05).
1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 28
There is another point Beck makes here. Predominantly, the workplace today still favours career-driven employees who do not need to balance their working obligations with the needs of a partner or a family. It rewards virtues such as individual enterprise, competitiveness, mobility and a sense of entitlement to getting what one ‘deserves’; to being ‘satisfied’. Families and relationships, on the other hand, often require sacrifice, or thwarting of individual ambitions. This means that ultimately, the current global labour culture (especially in the more socially prestigious lucrative corporate sector) demands a society of singles:
If thought through to its conclusion, the basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single person. […] Those who demand mobility in the labor market in this sense without regard to private interests are pursuing the dissolution of the family – precisely in their capacity as apostles of the market. (Beck, 1992:122)
The career-driven individual enjoys his or her professional position, income and social recognition. Their ‘cosmos of personal life’ is fashioned around personal sensitivities and idiosyncrasies (Beck, 1992:122). But the ‘architecture of the life of one’s own’ that was deliberately constructed to protect oneself against loneliness (workaholism, hobbies, travel, ‘socialising’ in networks of acquaintances), becomes a prison as ‘the circle of individualisation closes’ (Beck, 1992:123). Potential lovers disrupt one’s living habits and schedule. As control becomes equated with freedom, others’ inevitable influence is now a threat to one’s liberty. Yet paradoxically, at the same time, love, marriage and parenthood are idealised and fantasised about more than ever before.
Beck argues that the ideology of conservative neo-liberal governments is self-contradictory. Such governments often blame divorcing individuals for being selfish and destroying their marriages with individual demands. They fund marriage and family education courses and counselling to teach couples how to build familial harmony (Beck, 1992:121). But at the same time, some of these programs buy into the individualist rhetoric of personal responsibility and choice, that fails to account for the fundamentally social nature of such 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 29 institutions, and the reliance of couples and families on forms of social support that such governments are known to dismantle. Couples and families end up shouldering the responsibility for the social, political and economic conditions they live in, and to top it all off, feel personally guilty and inadequate, ‘failing’ their children, society and the state (Beck, 2002; see also Blackman, 2006:209).
Beck also explores the risk-preventative strategies couples employ to negotiate the contradictions of promises and the actual roles they inherit and that society supports, in their own relationships. In what he calls ‘objective preventive strategies’ (2002:108), men simply start marrying women of lower educational level or from cultures where their responsibility for the home and the children are still taken from granted. Women, conversely, look for open- minded men. However, as there are not enough of either traditional women or mature sensitive men, both genders end up single for longer periods of time, or choose not to marry because they find that de-facto arrangements do not readily invoke patriarchal gender roles (Beck, 2002:109). Alternatively, couples employ what Beck calls ‘intersubjective preventive strategies’, seeking to communicate and negotiate roles (2002:109-110), or choose to turn away from problems by underplaying their importance through ‘subjective preventive strategies’ (2002:110). The latter echoes with the concept of pseudo-mutuality, used by the Australian researchers Bittman and Pixley to analyse the way Australian families negotiate the division of domestic responsibilities.
How do the therapeutic and educational discourses which Bauman, Sennett and Beck critique come about? In tracing the historical development of the helping professions and their integral role in the production of identity as a category of social experience, the work of Michel Foucault and Nicholas Rose is useful.
The politics of self-productions The theme of identity-production runs right through Foucault’s work, from the 1954 Madness and Civilization to his last series of lectures given at the 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 30
Collège de France in the late 1970s. Foucault argues that autonomous subjecthood is the complex product of governmentality – a modern ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population’ (Foucault, 1979:20, in Rose, 1996:68). Government is the milieu with the capacity and privileged access to defining concepts, arguments, justifications, and then offers strategies for solving the problems that now appear self-evident. The modern autonomous individual and the discursive epistemological practices of modern sovereign state co-determine each other’s emergence (Lemke, 2001:191).
Early modernity creates a new object of political rule – the ‘population’: a social body with a set of measurable, definable characteristics such as birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation (Foucault, 1990:25). Special focus falls on the moral cleanliness of the populace, with medical discourses of public sexual health trying to ‘eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized populations’ (Foucault, 1990:54). Nikolas Rose writes that this form of power emerges in pre-Enlightenment eighteenth century Europe. Before this, monarchic rulers accumulated wealth and defended or colonised wealth-producing territory through armed effort and the promulgation of laws to maintain power (Rose, 1996:68). Now, the population is the entity that needs to be controlled, monitored, and administered, ‘in the form of regulations governing the good order, education, habits, and security of persons in various towns and regions’ (Rose, 1996:68). Thus, in nineteenth century British and North American cities, the focus of philanthropic public projects fell on ‘delinquents’, exposed to the morally corrupting influence of metropolitan life, and in need of moral pedagogy and a new environment of regulated routines and social practices. Moral campaigns of the time encouraged the poor to marry, to limit the ‘breeding’ of deviants (Rose, 1996:71). Good public order rests on a healthy free-market economy sustained by ‘proper family regimes’ and ‘responsible citizens’ that engage in the market as workers, savers and consumers (Rose, 1996:69). We will return 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 31 to this rhetoric as it is revived in Western neo-liberal state rhetoric in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in the next chapter.
Foucault famously argues that one of the key rituals in Western culture that mediated the birth of the modern subject is the discursive practice of Christian confession. Codified into the Sacrament of Penance by the Lateran Council of 1215, it was designed to draw out impure thought that could potentially lead to sin, and to transform such impulse through the ‘endless mill of speech’ (Foucault, 1990:21). As a ‘specialist in meanings, hidden from the subject’, the confessor judged, absolved and reconciled (Metcalfe, 1992:623). Confession is more complex than the extraction of already pre-existing truth from an already pre-existing subject – it is a generative practice: ‘[t]he truth was incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it’ (Foucault, 1990:66). The Western person becomes a ‘confessing animal’, relying on ‘discursive orthopaedics’ to tell, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell: One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses – or is forced to confess. (Foucault, 1990:59)
In his 1983 essay ‘Subject and Power’, as well as in the seminal Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the settings in which the individual is thus normalised through mandated reflexive procedures (Metcalfe, 1992:622). The traditional education system, Taylorist factories, state and corporate bureaucratic organisations, prisons, hospitals and the army perform the role of the secular confessor. In particular, psychiatry makes a name for itself by becoming a powerful system of terms and practices absorbed by popular imagination. Its vocabulary forms ways of speaking and thinking about our lives. Confession is also secularised into the practice of keeping diaries, the literary genre of autobiography, self-portraiture. Its latest incarnation in popular culture is ‘reality television’, or the multiple contest shows built around the self-presentations of participants judged and corrected 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 32 by panels of ‘experts’. The confessional modus operandi is internalised by modern subjects, who now self-monitor and perform according to given sets of norms.
Even Jürgen Habermas, who is often perceived as an intellectual adversary of Foucault, concurs that the rise of surveillance as a form of social control becomes pervasive in late modernity. Habermas argues that capitalism entrenches the means-ends instrumental orientation that is absolutely essential for its success – the ‘technocratic consciousness’. In his 1971 essay ‘Technology and science as ideology’, Habermas is especially concerned about the proliferation of ‘new and possibly pervasive techniques for surveillance, monitoring and control of individuals and organisations’, ‘new and more reliable educational and propaganda techniques affecting human behaviour – public and private’ (1971:117).
Weber and the Frankfurt School The growth of external and internalised normative discourses is underpinned by a particular ethos inherent in modernity. Max Weber is classically cited as a social theorist whose life’s work examines the historical progression of the increasing instrumental rationalisation and bureaucratisation of modern life (Brubaker, 1984; Weber, 1948). Substantive rationality is bound in concrete social situations and informed by consideration of broader moral and ethical questions of fully human existence in a good society. This kind of rationality is crowded out in modernity by formal, technical rationality, concerned purely with efficient organisation and control of material resources. Weber argues that the constraints of pre-modern society, such as tradition and superstition, are replaced in modernity by the ‘iron cage’ of instrumental technical criteria and a means-end orientation of action (Brubaker, 1984:91-113; Weber, 1948:136-156). Weber is especially critical of the replacement of value integrity by the normative ideal of ‘healthy personality’, which defines ‘mental health’ as a moral achievement (Brubaker, 1984:97).
In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who are commonly seen to be carrying 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 33 on Weber’s intellectual legacy, argue that social life in late modernity becomes a series of subject-object relations (Arato, 1978; see also Calhoun & Karaganis, 2003; Ramsay, 2000). They argue that qualitative difference is reduced to functional and quantitative distinctions. Social phenomena: people, social relations, events, are ranked according to common denominators. The implicit sense of equivalence opens the way for exchange rationality. Exchange logic and calculation become universal, natural, and self- legitimating. Herbert Marcuse also argues that the problem-orientation becomes ubiquitous in social life: ‘the problems to which science addresses itself must first be translated into this manageable form – i.e. into technical problems – leaving the substance of the “problem” untouched’ (in Arato, 1978:374). Social life is configured to fit the techniques invented to manage it. The business of living becomes a series of ‘tasks’ to be managed, and life itself, a set of ‘challenges’ that good problem-solving skills should resolve.
Indeed, this is the ethos of cognitive-behavioural theory in its most radical. CBT became a major force in psychology, education, psychotherapy, psychiatry, business, industry and child rearing from the 1970s onwards, and in the 1980s, it was being applied in preventative mental health programs. CBT aims to identify debilitating behaviours and cognitions or beliefs that restrict people’s lives, and work on these to enable increased choices (Corey, 1996:285). The ‘client’ formulates goals for his/her therapeutic process, and these are continually reassessed. CBT strategies generally involve some form of self-awareness and self-monitoring skills. Its key instrument is a ‘behavioural diary’, where the patient records daily activities to have an illustration of his/her progress towards a particular goal. ‘Self-contracting’ also allows the patient to self-condition, using positive and negative reinforcement. Three famous CBT programs are Albert Ellis’ rational-emotive behaviour therapy, Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy and Meichenbaum’s cognitive behaviour modification. They all seek to ‘rationalise’ perceptions and beliefs in varying ways. Ellis, for instance, holds that people have the potential for ‘rational, straight thinking’ and ‘irrational or crooked thinking’. REBT can help people ‘straighten out’ the latter (Corey, 1996:318-320). With the right 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 34 procedures and guidelines, potentially, all negative human emotions and behaviours can be done away with:
Practically all human self-destructiveness and serious neurotic turmoil are unnecessary. […] Because we can be self-aware, we can observe and evaluate our goals and purposes and creatively decide to feel different in a situation, stubbornly refusing to make ourselves severely anxious or depressed about anything. (Corey, 1996:321)
Human tendencies such as catastrophising, selective abstraction, overgeneralisation, magnification and minimisation, personalisation, labelling, and polarised thinking, are defined as logical errors, or cognitive distortions (Corey, 1996:339). In a similar way, Beck uses ‘collaborative empiricism’ to help the client test cognitions against reality. Meichenbaum focuses on the client’s negative inner self-narration.
The task of correction through self-management and scientific knowledge is taken to a hyper-rational level through using statistical techniques to manage the future. Generic attributes are synthesised from populations using multivariate analytical procedures; longitudinal studies trace the correlation between the distilled attributes and the events that happen in the subjects’ lives. If it can be known what features of the present lead to consequences in the future, future catastrophes can be avoided. Auguste Comte’s original mission statement for sociology: ‘savoir pour prevoir, et prevoir pour pouvoir’ – ‘to know to envisage, and to envisage so as to act’, comes back to haunt us (Comte, 1975). American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch (1977) explores these developments in the context of the American experience of the social sciences correcting and normalising families and marriages, in Haven in a Heartless World (1977). His analysis is pertinent to this thesis.
Rationalising marriage and family Lasch studies the adoption of secular confessional practices during the ‘world- wide mobilization of psychiatry’ in the 1940s and 1950s. Social scientists posed as ‘physicians to society’ (1977:97), and the medical model replaces the old normative framework of morality based on religious norms. The 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 35 psychiatrist translates everything human into medical terms of illness: ‘sick society […] needed the same therapy a doctor gave to his patient’ (Lasch, 1977:98). Psychiatry sees itself as mass preventative medicine, when transposed onto educational discourses. The standard of individual ‘good health’ replaces the ideal of pre-modern society – moral uprightness, spiritual cleanliness. The search for salvation and dealing with the ‘crippling burden of good and evil’ is replaced by seeking ‘peace of mind’; the fight against sin and ‘cure of souls’, with the pursuit of ‘mental hygiene’ (Lasch, 1977:98-99). Critics at the time, like Kingsley Davis, argued that the discourse of psychologism ignored the social determinants of mental life, instead, entrenching the punitive philosophy of private initiative, personal responsibility and individual achievement’ (1977:101).
Lasch argues that social science grew concomitantly with the ideology of scientism and rationality in modernity. Whereas in the past, power was legitimated through apologetics and philosophical defences, he argues that the new social scientific discourse ‘appealed only to the unmediated authority of the fact’ (1977:23). The infinitely more invidious power of the discourse of science was in its appeal to submit ‘to reality itself’, claimed to have been uncovered through scientific measurement such as statistics. Conversely, pathologies or non-conforming behaviours were ‘unrealistic’ (Lasch, 1977:23).
Research on the family beginning in the 1940s, Lasch writes, overwhelmingly focused on the attempt to define, measure and predict ‘marital adjustment’ (1977:40). Social therapists like G. V. Hamilton and Katherine Davis focused on trying to measure marital happiness, and conversely, finding the causes of marital conflict. Their ultimate object was ‘the prediction of what will happen in family relations under a given set of conditions’ (Lasch, 1977:41). One major assumption underpinning such studies was that marital success equated with simply staying together, and so various factors: educational status, gregariousness, tastes or attitudes were correlated with this fact, to make prescriptive conclusions (Lasch, 1977:41). Class and cultural influences were consistently left out of such studies. The main hope of the new nomothetic science was precisely Comte’s injunction – 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 36 to predict and control what happens in future, by changing current conditions (1977:42-43). As we will see soon, this ethos is still strong and has much weight in social policy.
A rational, cool headed-approach was now asked of marrying individuals – that they approach their decision maturely, and not like ‘impulsive, unstructured individuals [who] were more likely to marry early in the first place, having fallen in love at first sight’ (1977:42). At a 1946 National Conference on Family Relations in the US, it was declared that there was an urgent need for a vast preventive psychiatry program disseminated by educational institutions, churches, synagogues and community centres, so as to create a generation of better spouses and parents (1977:102-103).
A new wave of marital counsellors from the 1950s onwards started changing focus from keeping marriages together or fixing ‘broken-down marital machinery’, to raising happiness, improving mental health and providing a climate for healthier personality growth (Lasch, 1977:107). But Lasch still emphasises that this is a norm, albeit a different one. The new rules of open and creative relationships inspired by Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Abraham Maslow, in Lasch’s eyes (similarly to Bauman), instilled an ideology of non-binding commitments, self-expression and freedom from social expectations such as gender roles, even at the expense of marriages:
The ideology of nonbinding commitments and open-ended relationships […] registers so faithfully the psychic needs of the late twentieth century – [because it] condemns all expectations, standards, and codes of conduct as “unrealistic”. […] The therapeutic community insists that only equals can enter into satisfactory interpersonal relations (“peer-bonding”); but equality in this connection means simply an absence of demands. (Lasch, 1977:140-141)
The normative assumption that the intact conventional middle-class family, albeit enriched by better relating skills, is a fundamental social unit, remains alongside therapeutic discourses in the American public sphere, and Lasch offers an example that retains relevance for the late 1990s and early 2000s both in US and in Australia. The 1965 Moynihan Report raised inquiry into the ‘Negro Family’ in urban ghettos. Daniel Moynihan argued that broken 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 37 homes and matriarchal families without stable fathers reveal a complicated ‘tangle of pathology’: juvenile delinquency, crime, academic failure and general disorganisation (Lasch, 1977:1958). While Moynihan did not underplay the debilitating effects of American black slavery on this situation, he did suggest, in the manner characteristic of a social scientist, that the problem could only be understood and fixed by social pathologists. Social action was redefined as a form of therapy, and it was the job of the government to administrate change, through increased funds enabled by its bureaucratic channels. Lasch’s argument is that such help was still paternalistic, rather than facilitating autonomous change in the community through its political empowerment.
A very strict delineation of public and private underlies this argument, an assumption very similar to that of Sennett: that self-focused change has a very different character to agency exercised in the public sphere. Lasch also shares Sennett’s and Bauman’s belief that the therapist or educator is purely a normalising confessor. While norms changed, the new norm is still oppressive, as ‘freedom’ is nowhere to be seen:
Today the state controls not merely the individual’s body but as much of his spirit as it can pre-empt; not merely his outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination. […] Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weakened the capacity for self-direction and self-control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal and political freedom. (1977:189)
While this thesis will show that Lasch’s argument is valid in relation to certain legitimating claims behind marriage pedagogy, it will also argue that the relationships between the traditional and the new norms can in fact be more complex. It will also strongly challenge Lasch’s dark conclusions about the role of the helping professional.
Similarly to Lasch, Australian sociologist Kerreen Reiger (1985) addressed the rationalisation of domestic life too, in the context of Australian 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 38 households between 1880 and the 1930s. Reiger studies the charitable and educational organisations that set out to reform the domestic sphere in line with the principles of Weberian rational, industrial, scientific society. The Victorian ideal separated the private and public spheres: the public sphere was governed by values of rationality, calculability, science, of civic duties unblemished by personal or emotional concerns; the private and domestic was a ‘feminine’ domain of motherhood and the location of the incalculable, irrational, innate, ‘natural’ aspects of human life. Modernisation extended the principles of instrumental rationality to this domain (Reiger, 1985:3). Daily life was to be treated as a series of skilled tasks that could be assessed against a system of standards. The home is now a site for ‘domestic science’ experts: ‘the kitchen was to be a laboratory, children’s play a training ground for business and the marital bedroom the site for family planning’ (Reiger, 1985:214). The discursive terms come with the growth of a broader educational and professional field informed by the scientific and rational disciplines of psychology, medicine, education and social work. As opposed to Lasch’s pessimistic indictment of the passivity of people being treated and corrected, Reiger gives much more agency to the people being helped by the charitable practices. She suggests that innovations were embraced according to circumstances – leading people to be ‘accepting, rejecting or modifying experts’ decrees’ (1985:217). Crucially, Reiger argues, it was precisely the loss of mothercraft knowledge through rural isolation that brought women into experts’ hands (1985:217) – and such help was often welcome. This rings true for the field I will discuss in the next two chapters that developed concurrently with the movements Reiger describes.
Interestingly, in a later article, Reiger turns directly to the ‘coming of the counsellors’ to middle class post-war Australia (1987). Family-life education encompassing marriage preparation and family planning was to curb the rise of family breakdown after World War II, and to strengthen national life. Reiger focuses on the role of Marriage and Family Council formed in Sydney in 1948 by an Anglican clergyman, Rev. W. G. Coughlan, as well as the expansion of marriage guidance from its church-affiliated beginnings to a more therapeutic framework, informed by humanistic psychology. 1 THE CIRCLE OF INDIVIDUALISATION | 39
In the next two chapters, I proceed to examine the former Australian Liberal Government’s policies funding marriage education, as a strategy to curb the growing breakdown of marriages. A number of thematic threads converge: the attempt to hold marriages together at all costs by reference to religious principles and the state’s preoccupation with the civic and economic role of strong relationships in society; the way science and reason are now used still to underpin traditional ideals; and the general concern with the emotional and physical wellbeing of individuals. I am interested in seeing whether Lasch, Bauman, Beck and Sennett were quite right in the view that relational pedagogy must always be tainted with the neo-liberal individualist ethos of self-enterprise, and the economic rationalist ideals of calculation of self-benefits.
The more complex question that this thesis poses, however, is about what we mean by ‘personal, or ‘individual’ in intimate relationships. It uncovers the atomist bias of traditional social science, built on the assumption of the primacy of subjects and objects, agents and predicates. Whether it be theories of social exchange or desire, this thesis shows that mainstream social theory easily oversees a third sphere in which a lot of our social life resides – the sphere of the between, in-relation.
2
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA
‘Revealed: the battle plan to save marriage.’ Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald
Sociological theory introduced in Chapter 1 suggested that while neo-liberal ideology in some ways embodies the zeitgeist of individualism, it also relies on a vision of a mythical past of firm familial arrangements. In this chapter, I examine how the former Australian Coalition Government addressed the conditions of marriage and family life in Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, through its funding of specific initiatives in the Family Relationship Services Program.
Legislation The original legislation governing family law in the Australian colonies was the Matrimonial Causes Act 1873, which gave men the right to petition for divorce solely on the grounds of adultery, and women to petition on grounds of bigamy, cruelty or desertion, with adultery granted later in 1881 (Donaldson, 2004). The case for adultery required the other party as a co- respondent. Husbands could claim damages from co-respondents against the property of their wife.
The Matrimonial Causes Act 1959 replaced the above, and provided 14 grounds for the grant of a decree of dissolution of marriage, or divorce. These included adultery, desertion, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, imprisonment and insanity, amongst others. Obtaining proof of fault along a ground necessitated a solicitor and at times, a private detective to collect evidence to support the claim. The media reported the salacious and intimate details of some cases, such as those involving celebrities, thereby adding an element of public humiliation to the system. There was only one 'no-fault' ground: separation for 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 41 more than five years, but the court was obliged to refuse to grant a divorce on this ground if the couple consented, as collusion was a bar to divorce. Other bars included condonation (forgiveness of the offending conduct) and connivance (inferred permission to engage in the offending conduct). Except with the leave of the court, a spouse could not bring proceedings for divorce unless the parties had been married for at least three years. In 1975, just four grounds (desertion, adultery, separation and cruelty) accounted for 94 percent of divorces granted (Donaldson, 2004). Although undoubtedly to a lesser extent than today, people could and did separate regardless of stringent laws, and then legalised their divorce if they could afford it.
This legislative tradition was overturned by the Family Law Act 1975, which has been controversial since its inception. The FLA removed the need to prove guilt and introduced one ground for divorce, defined in section 48 – that ‘the marriage has broken down irretrievably’, and that the parties had separated and thereafter lived separately and apart for a continuous period of no less than 12 months immediately preceding the date of the filing of the application for the divorce order. As the Attorney-General Lionel Murphy explained in his 1973 submission to Cabinet proposing reform of family law, one of its aims was: ‘to enable marriages that have irretrievably broken down to be dissolved by simple, dignified, inexpensive proceedings heard in private’ (Cabinet Submission No. 777, in Donaldson, 2004).
Controversy surrounds the impact of the FLA on marriage in Australia. David De Vaus suggests that the sharp rise of the crude divorce rate (quantity of divorces per 1000 population) in 1975 from around 1.3 to 4.5 was due to the simpler and less expensive avenue to legalising effectively dissolved marriages (De Vaus, 2004:211). Other commentators cite the availability and growing acceptance of divorce as the reason for the growing fragility of marriages, and offer solutions such as bringing back fault-based divorce, or the introduction of covenant marriage, discussed further.
The crude divorce rate quickly declined after 1975, and by the early 1980s was around 2.8; settling to between 2.5 and 2.8 since 1996 (De Vaus, 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 42
2004:211-212). The latest figure from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for 2005 is 2.6 (ABS, 2005, web). In 2005, the actual number of divorces decreased by 348 from the 2004 figure, down to 52,399 (which was a significant drop from the 2001 figure of 55,330). The latest statistical estimate of the likelihood to divorce, based on 1996-1997 figures, is 32 percent (ABS, 2005).
To Have and to Hold In June 1999, the Department of Family and Community Services (since re- formed as Department of Family and Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, FaHCSIA) launched a National Families Strategy. This was the result of a two-year Department inquiry into aspects of family services in Australia, entitled To Have and to Hold: Strategies to Strengthen Marriage and Relationships (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 1998). Kevin Andrews, who then held the portfolio for the Department, headed it. Prime Minister John Howard once called the project a ‘personal crusade’ for Minister Kevin Andrews. Minister Andrews and his wife Margaret are active and influential members of the Australian Christian Society for Marriage Education. Margaret Andrews is the editor of Threshold, a magazine for marriage educators, celebrants and counsellors in Australia and New Zealand. Both are actively involved in the field of marriage education. Kevin Andrews began his career as a politician with a focus on marriage and family issues (see Metherell, 2007).
To Have and to Hold frames itself as upholding Section 43 of the FLA: aiming to give ‘the widest possible protection and assistance to the family as the natural and fundamental group unit of society, particularly while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children’, and making available the means for assisting reconciliation between couples.
Kevin Andrews’ report starts with a substantive chapter titled ‘Impact of change’. This chapter starts by outlining the findings of clinical studies that trace a correlation between divorce and physical and mental functioning. William Doherty, a US psychologist, marriage educator and renowned public 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 43 speaker and campaigner on marriage and family life from the University of Minnesota, is quoted to sum the overall thrust of the chapter: ‘for adults, a stable happy marriage is the best predictor against illness and premature death, and for children, such a marriage is the best source of emotional stability and good physical health’ (House of Representatives, 1998:27).
The chapter proceeds to cite US and UK studies that suggest that unmarried people have higher death rates than married (1998:28) and are more likely to commit suicide (1998:32). Unmarried male non-smokers apparently have only a slightly lower risk of dying from cancer than married men who smoke a pack or more of cigarettes a day (1998:28). Marriage ‘seems to protect from contracting cancer and offers better chance of survival after diagnosis’ (1998:29). Frequency of cardiovascular disease and death from hypertension, mental problems, smoking and drinking in divorced men is twice that of married men (1998:28-30). It appears as though being married is treated as a separate, independent variable that affects wellbeing. While undoubtedly, having a spouse or a family is helpful, this causal formulation is clearly simplistic.
Next, the impact of divorce on children is described. Children in divorcing families are told to have been found to suffer from stomach ulcers, colitis, asthma and mental illness, and to experience behavioural problems, higher risk of injury and earlier sexual activity (1998:35). Girls living with single mothers are said to be more sexually promiscuous (1998:37). Judith Wallerstein, a US campaigner, is cited, claiming that children in divorced families become ‘troubled, drifting and underachieving’, are ‘anxious about love, commitment and marriage’, get involved in ‘impulsive marriages ending in divorce and short-term relationships’ and are less likely to attend university and have a higher chance of lower paid employment (1998:40-41).
The third impact of divorce is said to be reduced productivity and general antisocial tendencies of singles or individuals in distressed marriages. Scott Stanley, researcher at the University of Denver and the co-founder of a marriage preparation program called PREP, argues that reduced work 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 44 productivity, especially for men, is one of the outcomes of chronic negative interaction and poorly handled conflict in marriage (Stanley and Markman, 1997; see also Forthofer et al., 1996). Marital distress generally is associated with absenteeism and medical costs (House of Representatives, 1998:199). Linda Waite, past president of the American Population Association, and later, the author of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (2000),2 is cited arguing that unmarried men and women tend to engage in more drinking, substance abuse, drink driving and ‘generally living dangerously among single men’, while on the other hand, the married lead ‘more orderly lives, with healthier eating and sleeping habits’, and their psychological wellbeing is better and they live longer (1998:27). Marriage is a civilising environment.
Lastly, and underlying all three previous concerns, there is the cost of disintegrating families to the State. In 1999, the Australian Commonwealth spent an estimated 3 billion dollars in direct and indirect costs: social security payments, family court costs, legal aid, child support and tax rebate schemes and possibly double of that, if including indirect costs (1998:51-52). John Collins, an educator and researcher in the field, says:
The individual’s right to financial support needs to be balanced with governmental responsibility to the whole of society. In this case, the responsibility is to try to reduce the number of people who are in need of financial assistance and the consequent demand on the public purse. The exercise of this responsibility requires targeted community education and marketing of pre-marriage education and legislation making government funded pre-marriage education compulsory. (House of Representatives, 1998:175)
Solutions The report argues that advances in clinical research in the field of marriage and relationship studies makes it possible for risk factors in marriages to be treated similarly to genetic health risk factors in individuals. To put it in medical language, the marriage can be ‘vaccinated’ or ‘treated’ before symptoms occur. Translated into the language of relationships and marriages,
This publication sparked resistance such as the ‘Alternatives to Marriage’ project, viewed September 6, 2007 at
It is suggested that preventative strategies will have a positive effect on all the critical factors of concern: health, children’s wellbeing, job productivity, welfare expenditure, and even the need for health, social and correctional services (1998:129). Ideally, the report suggests, marriage education should be compulsory for all couples contemplating marriage, as it is currently in some states in the US (1998:153). The report also makes favourable mention of the US phenomenon of ‘covenant marriage’, discussed in detail in Chapter 9 of this thesis. Currently, three US states have this legal arrangement: Louisiana (from 1997), Arizona (from 1998), and Arkansas (from 2001). Covenant marriage bills were introduced, but not passed, in at least 13 US states between 2000 and 2001. The covenant marriage mandates premarital counselling, and makes divorce conditional on extended separation and proof of fault.
The report echoes the existing provisions in Sections 9B, 9C and 9E of the Marriage Act 1961 for the allocation of funds for community-provided marriage education:
The Minister may, from time to time, out of moneys appropriated by the Parliament for the purposes of this Part, grant to an approved organisation, upon such conditions as the Minister thinks fit, such sums by way of financial assistance as the Minister determines for the conduct of programs of marriage education.3
The emphasis in Andrews’ report recommends funding preventative strategies, rather than counselling or therapy for couples experiencing problems (House of Representatives, 1998:154-157). In particular, marriage education focused on risk identification and skill training is suggested as a cost-effective, practical solution. Risk-preventative programs that use
Commonwealth Consolidated Acts, viewed September 8, 2007,
The practical outcome of the report was the increase of initiatives funded through the Family Relationship Services Program (FRSP). The Australian Federal Government has been funding the FRSP since the early 1960s.5 FaHCSIA administers the FRSP through its Family Relationship Services Branch and the FaHCSIA State and Territory Office network. The Attorney-General's Department also contributes significant funding to the FRSP. Over a hundred community organisations currently receive funding
‘The Oklahoma marriage initiative: An overview of the longest-running state-wide marriage initiative in the US’, December 2006, viewed September 7, 2007 at
FaHCSIA, viewed September 7, 2007 at
As prevention and early intervention became the key themes of the report, in the 1999-2000 budget, an additional 6 million dollars was allocated specifically for Family Relationship Education Skills Training (FREST) programs: community-based preventative marriage, relationship and parenting education services, men’s support services, early intervention for children and young adults in divorcing families, for primary dispute resolution services and a hotline on family law. Most recently, in response to the 2005 report Every Picture Tells a Story: Inquiry into child custody arrangements in the event of family separation, the Government extended FRSP funding to the opening of Family Relationship Centres, the first 14 of which opened their doors around Australia in July 2006. Tendered by various community welfare organisations, these centres provide mediation, dispute resolution and counselling for separating families. The accompanying Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act 2006 made it compulsory for any person applying to the court for a parenting order after July 1, 2007 to obtain a certificate from a registered family dispute resolution provider, to confirm that an attempt at family dispute resolution was made.
Marriage education is planned to be gradually introduced into the range of services provided by the Family Relationship Centres. Attendance at pre- marriage education currently is not compulsory in Australia. All marriage celebrants, however, are required by the 2003 Amendment of Marriage Act 1961 Section 42, 5A, Division 2, to provide information about available marriage preparation programs. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of couples marrying in Australia attend some form of marriage education (House of Representatives, 1998:135; Halford, 2000:ix; Parker, 2007). There are some secular providers of family relationship education services (FaHCSIA, web; 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 48 see also Parker, 2007). In terms of attendance, however, couples getting married under the auspices of a religious institution appear to form the majority of couples that attend such programs. Specifically, To Have and to Hold points out that in 1996, 73 percent of all marrying couples that attended any form of marriage preparation attended a program conducted by an agency affiliated or associated with the Catholic Church (House of Representatives, 1998:137). Compared with 35 percent of all couples marrying in the Catholic Church who attended marriage preparation in 1996, only 1 percent married by a civil celebrant or in a Registry, attended marriage preparation. In the Catholic Church, in most cases, couples need to provide proof of attendance to their marrying priest. In the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese alone in 2006, 1233 couples completed a pre-marriage course with Centacare’s Marriage and Relationship Education program (Centacare MRE coordinator, 2007, pers. comm.). Harris et al. (1992:16) comment that this is largely due to the doctrinal inclusion of marriage preparation in Christian theology, and therefore the establishment of the practice in the process of celebrating a marriage in Christian contexts. Clergy may run such preparation themselves, or refer couples to church-affiliated organisations providing marriage preparation programs. As we will see in the next chapter, such programs have historically formed an important part of the churches’ centralised welfare services
Marriage is ‘good for you’ To Have and to Hold appears to suggest that marriage makes people better off, and conversely, that divorce leads to illness, anti-social behaviour, poverty, and even death. I want to question here the model of health it is using; the causal direction it unequivocally delineates; and to make some broader sociological remarks about its overall argument.
Clearly, Andrews and the researchers he refers to follow in the earlier tradition outlined by Christopher Lasch in Chapter 1: that of early helping professionals modelling their work on medical practice, with the Western clinical model of health as the standard. Andrews, for instance, refers to the tenets of the ‘Science of Prevention’ by Coie et al as appropriate for marriage 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 49 risk-preventative work: ‘[i]f generic risks can be identified and altered in a population, this can have a positive influence on range of mental health problems, as well as job productivity’ (Coie et al. in 1998:153). The report then explicitly likens the task of a marriage educator to that of a surgeon:
Couples are no more expected to prevent or resolve family problems themselves than a physician would expect a patient to prevent an attack of appendicitis or to remove the appendix if that is the organ that next happened to get infected. (House of Representatives, 1998:127)
PREP Marriage researchers Stanley and Markman specifically refer to a 1957 US Commission on Chronic Illness definition of the aims of public health promotion: primary prevention (reducing emotional and behavioural deficits) and secondary prevention (early identification, diagnosis and treatment of deficits).6 The role of marriage educators is to reduce ‘risk factors’ that may lead to divorce, or even discourage the couple from marrying. Marriage is the ‘body’ that needs to be freed from disease, and perfect health is a state of absence of any sickness, weakness or pathology.
This simplistic understanding of health does not match the fact that a healthy body is one that has just the right amount of destabilising infections and viral guests, kept at bay by a robust immune system. Neither does it match the finding in marriage studies that some discord and argument is healthy in a marriage, as long as it is balanced by positive interaction. A renowned expert John Gottman (1989, 1993, 1998) had made this clear throughout his studies of marital conflict:
It appears that conflict avoidance is not necessarily dysfunctional, nor is intense conflict engagement and escalation necessarily dysfunctional. Negativity is dysfunctional only when it is not balanced with about five times the positivity, and when there are high levels of complaining, criticizing, defensiveness, contempt, and disgust. (Gottman, 1993:14)
Stanley, S. & Markman, H. (1997) ‘Acting on what we know: the hope of prevention’, viewed 6 September 2007,
Gottman offers an ecological allegory: arguing that in a healthy ecosystem, without predators, a system becomes unstable. In the same way, he finds in his clinical studies that some negativity in marital relationships is as necessary as positivity, and negativity and negative affect have a ‘positive, prosocial role’, because they stimulate real engagement, as just as
[t]hey may play a role in balancing opposing qualities that are both desirable in a marriage, such as intimacy and autonomy; they may also serve a role in keeping attraction alive over long periods of time. A relationship that is totally positive may thus be as undesirable and unstable as one that is all negative. (Gottman, 1993:14)
In other words, a healthy marriage is not necessarily one where problems and issues have been eradicated. Clearly, too, death is the constant companion of life and not, as some pro-marriage lobbyists would have it, life’s polar opposite. The possibility of endings is the constant companion of intimate relationships.
The argument that financial hardship and disease result from divorce (1998:27) is reductive and simplistic, also. We must surely envisage the possibility that one can have become sick, and this may put strain on one’s marriage, in terms of the need for care and financial costs. One may smoke and drink, which may cause affiliated illnesses, and this may cause conflict in a marriage. A range of studies covered in the media also shows a diversity of findings in relation to the connection between health and marriage. There is, for instance, some evidence to suggest that new singles who have just ended an unhappy marriage experience improved health (Cloud, 2007). Also, there is some controversial evidence suggesting that there are differentiated physical and mental health effects for women and men: that while men may enjoy better health if they are married, some divorced, widowed and never- married women report significantly better overall physical and mental health than married, and women who stay single may have better mental health than married or divorced women (Horin, 2005; The Age, 2003). It is significant also that Andrews’ report substantially leans on health studies from the US. The US privatised medical service system is notoriously discriminatory against the 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 51 less well-to-do, with recent studies emphasising the inextricable link between wealth and health outcomes for US citizens (Deaton, 2002; Minkler et al., 2006). If couples are poorer, they may have reduced access to healthcare, and their health may be worse. Poor health can impact on the marriage, and the worsening marriage, in turn, on health.
The most glaring oversight of To Have and to Hold is of the socio- economic conditions of life in which couples attempt to maintain their marriages. The only coverage this substantive topic receives is contained in a page and a half gesturing to a meagre 12 submissions on ‘Unemployment and work related problems’, one of which is by ‘Mr and Mrs John O’Neill’. The discrepancy between this data sample, and over 100 references for the health section (1998:53-54), is worth pondering. The overwhelming thrust of the report becomes, indeed, as Beck rightly suggested in Chapter 1, that marriage will ensure financial wellbeing, and divorce is the result of people’s own failure to have the right ‘marriage skills’, and the necessary virtues of forbearance and commitment. This oversight brings the ideological flavour of Andrews’ politics fully to the fore.
The report draws heavily on the work of a specific group of US commentators: Doherty, Popenoe, Waite, Wallerstein and Whitehead, who are all members of the US think tank, the National Marriage Project. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, famous for her controversial 1993 Atlantic Monthly article ‘Dan Quayle was right’, supported this conservative politician’s 1992 proclamation that marriage is the best anti-poverty program. Quayle promoted the value of state-supported traditional marriage based on the apparent finding that amongst married couples, the poverty rate was 5.7 percent, whereas 33.4 percent of families headed by a single mother were in poverty. The direction of the correlation between poverty and being married is left unexamined, as it is also in the work of James Wilson, another campaigner for the National Marriage Project. Akin to Rose’s 19th century moral campaigners, Wilson blames poverty and crime in black communities in US on out-of- wedlock births and the low rate of marriage. He argues that marriage splits the nation socio-economically, into ‘a nation of the married and the unmarried 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 52 bearing children’. As a solution, however, being a true neo-liberal, he suggests that welfare to single mothers should be curtailed, to encourage more marriage. Neither is providing employment opportunities is the solution, because:
Being in a single-parent family still creates risks for children. It is wrong in another reason, because you cannot redistribute income except to people who consist of a husband and a wife living together and able to work and take advantage of jobs. It is wrong because redistributing income simply makes it, for some people, easier to raise children without a father present. They do it with more money, but they do it with no greater effect. (Frontline, PBS online)
Clearly, what is really at stake is not the practical welfare of mothers, fathers, or children, but the upholding of the nuclear heterosexual family as an institution.
The above alliance of social conservatives had come under criticism from the American sociologist Judith Stacey, who reminds the campaigners that the most stable systems of marriage and family life have historically rested on varied forms of duress and inequality:
Family systems appear to have been most stable when women and men have been economically interdependent, when households served as units of production with sufficient resources to reproduce themselves, and when individuals lacked alternative means of economic, sexual and social life. (1996:49)
Stacey had been engaged in heated polemics with David Popenoe, one of the National Marriage Project academics, since the early 1990s, and in a response to his critique of her Brave New Families, she argues that contrary to Popenoe’s positivist definition of the family, the family is not so much an institution, as an ideological, symbolic construct with its own history and politics. Stacey argues that the very fact that women’s newly gained capacity to survive outside of marriage can be cited by the conservatives as a factor in the escalating divorce rates and single motherhood, only exposes ‘the inequity and coercion that always lay at the vortex of the supposedly voluntary companionate marriage of the “traditional nuclear family”‘ (Stacey, 1993:546). She suggests that instead of stigmatising the various nontraditional family 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 53 forms, critics should direct attention to real legal, economic and social policy reforms that will indeed benefit children, whose interests they claim to be protecting.
In the Australian context, the flavour of the report confirms the observation by Marion Maddox (2005) that there was collusion between a faction of the former Australian Liberal government and the right-wing conservative ideologues in the US. Andrews, Maddox notes, was the secretary of what was known as the Lyons Forum, a group of prominent Christian politicians seeking to shape public policy on issues such as euthanasia, abortion, same-sex marriage and welfare.7 Leaning on help from the Australian Centre for Independent Studies, the Forum’s maiden policy proposals in 1995 included directives to withhold benefits from single mothers, to ban lesbian women from access to fertility services and to introduce income splitting to give single-income two-parent families an advantage and to give couples tax incentives in exchange for relinquishing their right to no-fault divorce (2005:74; see also Hancock, 2002; Gittins, 2004; Dunlevy, 2007).
The Forum had framed such conservative policies as ‘pragmatic responses’ to the project of protecting an embattled ‘sepia-toned traditional family’ (Maddox, 2005:81). Crucially, the Forum drew on work from conservative and Christian-leaning US think tanks like the National Marriage Project, the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and the American Enterprise Institute. Maddox notes that these often paint ‘positively apocalyptic’ visions of marriage in contemporary society (Maddox, 2005:81). Their fundamentalist Christian view of family life is supplemented with the ‘prosperity gospel’, preached by organisations such as the US Assemblies of God Church (and Hillsong Church, in Australia). This is, in fact, a historical continuation of the life of capitalism as an economic system, explored famously by Weber. The Lyons Forum and the conservative Christian politicians who advocate ‘family values’ ideology, Maddox argues, now legitimate traditional principles by science (i.e. that intact marriage is
Allegedly counting prominent Australian politicians including Tony Abbott, Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Trish Draper, Tim Fischer and David Kemp. 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 54 good for heath), bolstered by the credo of free market ideology: that individuals can and must look after themselves.
A sociological response to this ideology must begin with a reminder that even PREP’s Stanley and Markman identify financial hardship as a risk factor for marriages (Markman et al., 2001:39). Community marriage initiatives, such as those run by PREP in Oklahoma, often run in impoverished and underemployed communities. Demographically, at one point of the Oklahoma initiative, it was found that 44 percent of participants were 200 percent below poverty level.8 Low-income people were less likely to marry at all, and more likely to be currently divorced and not remarried (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2007, web). In a recent Sydney conference, PREP’s Scott Stanley said that in some of the poorest communities, due to low levels of marriage and high divorce rates, there is no ‘culture of marriage’ as such.9 Neither is there a naturally occurring culture of western marriage in the poorer remote Indigenous communities in Australia. Here, we are reminded of another complexity this thesis will not explore but needs to mention - that heterosexual monogamous lifelong marriage as an institution is simply not inherent to all cultures; and indeed was forcibly instituted through the missions as part of the Western ‘civilising process’ in indigenous communities around the world.
Strong healthy marriages undoubtedly can create strong prosperous communities. However, conservative ideologues appear to overlook the fact that no marriage, no matter how strong, can of itself create jobs, regulate fair working conditions and wages, or ameliorate serious structural social problems in communities. While marriage creates the social fabric, it is also conditional on socio-economic factors. Consider, for instance, the very capacity to marry and financially sustain family life. Statistical analysis by David De Vaus suggests that in all age groups in the Australian 2001 census,
‘The Oklahoma marriage initiative: An overview of the longest-running state-wide marriage initiative in the US’, December 2006, viewed September 7, 2007 at
To Have and to Hold’s omission of socio-economic factors is perturbing, but not especially surprising, in the light of Andrews’ subsequent appointment as the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, to preside over one of the most socially divisive campaigns in Australia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The resulting Work Choices 2005 legislation deregulated the Australian industrial relations system, introducing the individually bargained Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) as an alternative to collectively bargained award conditions. Some workers are now negotiating their benefits, leaving many to forfeit significant employment protections.12 Meanwhile, their employers often have a significant bargaining
10 See also Westmore, P. (2001) ‘A manifesto for Australia’, News Weekly online, viewed 13 January 2006,
Keynote address, National Christian Marriage Conference, Wahroonga, Sydney, July 2007. For an overview of studies on Work Choices reforms, see University of Melbourne Centre for Employment & Labour Relations Law, viewed 13 August, 2007 at
The effects of insecure employment, underemployment and the casualisation of the workforce on individuals and families have been studied extensively by Michael Pusey (2003), and were recently documented in a report entitled An Unexpected Tragedy, produced by the nonpartisan Relationships Forum Australia (2007). The report found that 22 percent of Australian employees work 50 hours a week or more; more than 30 percent work on weekends; and 27 percent are employed on a casual basis. On average, 2 million Australians work full working hours on Sundays, and this time is not compensated during the week. The report showed that many Australian workers are anxious about the reduced stability and security of short-term contract employment; that long and unpredictable work hours went alongside increased conflict in family homes. High levels of household debt compel people to keep up the long working hours, and to take less risks bargaining with their employers. Those most vulnerable to this and also hardest hit by separation, are low-income casual workers. Sociologists have long argued that contingency is a destabilising condition of work in modernity. The new workplace structures inspire weak loyalty and breed ‘low levels of informal trust and high levels of anxiety about uselessness’ (Sennett, 2006:181). Being told to take responsibility for their employment and marriages by becoming more skilled, more flexible, better communicators, while at the same time having the support of state award conditions and a reliable welfare network pulled from under them disorient individuals.
Neo-liberal policy becomes a paradoxical mix of individualism and traditionalism, and couples are urged to re-create self-sufficient economic units independent of the State, and autonomous from society at large. Yet the complexity of social life lies in the fact that neither individual agency nor economic and social conditions singularly determine its outcomes. Policymakers who draw legitimacy for their social advocacy on Christian religious ethical grounds also forget that behind the initiative for the formation of the largest Christian Community Welfare Agency in Australia – Centacare - 2 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY POLICY IN AUSTRALIA | 57 was a recognition that people’s lives and relationships were often devastated by social and economic conditions beyond their control. Chapter 3 starts with a historical overview of community-based marriage education that had been offered in Australia from the 1940s onwards. It then goes on to examine the two risk-preventative programs singled out by Andrews’ report and partially utilised by Centacare’s current marriage preparation programs in Sydney, and offers an analysis of their real potential, and their limitations.
3
MARRIAGE EDUCATION:
PREPARING FOR LIFE TOGETHER
OR PREVENTING DIVORCE?
Every engaged couple thinks they don’t need it, every married couple thinks they did. Liz Brody, ‘You’re in love (But will it last?)’
This chapter examines the practice of marriage education, and particularly, its risk-preventative angle that resonates with the observations by social theorists that in modernity, life is increasingly reduced to a linear unravelling trajectory which enables people to pre-empt problems and minimise their risks of being hurt. I start with a historical overview of the field of marriage education in Australia. I then examine PREP (the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program) and PREPARE (Premarital Personal and Relationship Evaluation) – marriage preparation programs that attract Australian Federal funding. I argue that at the heart of both is a contradictory juxtaposition of two pedagogical philosophies: the predictive, risk-preventative and instrumental strand, that lends them much legitimacy; and person- centred, growth-directed philosophy. Only the first is examined here, while the latter is discussed in Chapter 6. Here, I focus first on the assumption by predictive epistemologies that relationships are linear, determined from the beginning by the qualities they possess; and second on the assumption that relational difficulties and possible dissolution constitute ‘failure’, which must be avoided by either encouraging the engaged couple not to marry, or by teaching them to focus on ‘fail-proofing’ their marriage. I argue that a more complex understanding of memory, time and ‘success’ in relational life is necessary. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 59
History of marriage education in Australia Marriage education had developed in the same historical context as the other charitable voluntary activities in the home, described by Kerreen Reiger. It, has charitable beginnings: marriage education is sometimes called ‘the child of the churches’ (Harris, et al., 1992:18), having historically developed in the context of Christian culture. Attending some form of preparation has always been a requirement for couples seeking to get married in Christian denomination churches, due to the sacramentality of marriage and the centrality of family life in Christian theology. Priests would prepare couples in their parish as part of their pastoral care. Some do so until this day.
Early community-based marriage preparation programs were conducted in Australia from the 1940s onwards. Organised by the Young Christian Workers (a Catholic Youth organisation), pre-Cana conferences were originally running in convents around Victoria. These were a series of lectures by esteemed community figures – priests, bankers, doctors, domestic management experts and married couples. Topics covered included the morals of Christian marriage in a secular society; parenthood; homemaking; and masculine and feminine psychology and physiology (for which men and women were segregated). The authoritarian and enthusiastic promotion of Christian values was seen as a solution to marital breakdown in the community escalated by the enormous social disruptions and demoralising effect of the Second World War (Harris et al., 1992:11; Parker, 2000). Such programs were eventually running in every capital city in Australia. Theological courses of the same name are still running in the United States. From 1943 onwards, a fledgling welfare organisation, the Catholic Welfare Bureau, also offered marriage guidance for both engaged and married couples.
Damian Gleeson (2000) writes that in the 1920s, John McMahon, an Irish priest who migrated to Western Australia, went to study to Washington DC and came in contact with the Catholic University’s National Catholic School of Social Services. Upon return, in his capacity as Director of Catholic Education, McMahon obtained scholarships for two students from the Sacred 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 60
Heart Highgate School in Perth: Norma Parker and Constance Moffit. Upon her return from the US, Parker became the Almoner at Royal Melbourne hospital, and later in St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. She was responsible for supply of certain medical supplies, investigation of home conditions of patients, arrangements of special care and hospice care of patients with inoperable and terminal diseases. Parker was actively involved in professionalising the field of social work, and taught in the University of Sydney and New South Wales University. She had a close collegial relationship with the social scientist Morven Brown, who became the first Professor of Sociology in 1958. By 1966, by invitation from the UNSW, Parker became an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Social Work at UNSW. When she retired, the Department became an independent School, headed by the first Australian Professor of Social Work, John Lawrence.
As a student, Parker studied with another young social worker, Eileen Davidson. Davidson went to the NCSSS separately, also on a scholarship. She worked in psychiatric hospitals and in adoption agencies in the early 1930s, and was also an Almoner. Davidson later became involved in rehabilitation of incapacitated WWII service personnel, and after the end of WWII, joined the International Relief Organisation in Europe, resettling orphaned and forcibly removed children. Upon return, Davidson was involved in community organisations, such as the NSW Association of Mental Health. She was actively involved in the foundation of Australian Council of Social Service and also taught at Sydney University. She received a papal knighthood in 2001, and an OAM for her services to the community.
In the interwar period in the 1930s, some Christian orders and the St Vincent’s de Paul Society ran a number of welfare services for the ill and unemployed. The Catholic Church actively advocated for welfare state policy during the Depression; Archbishop Kelly of Sydney put forward to the Stevens State government in 1934 the need to ‘accord urgency to the crying claims of our working classes… [as] the present crises can only be met by those who have control of our national assets’ (in Gleeson, 2000:187). Voluntary charity efforts were not coping with the unprecedented strains on families. In 1940, 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 61 the Catholic Trained Social Workers Association, jointly formed by Parker and Davidson as well as Constance Moffit and Elvira Lyons, lobbied to establish Sydney’s Catholic Welfare Bureau. A number of functions carried out by various Catholic agencies, such as orphanage and foster care work, court assistance, help for the disabled, and counselling for unmarried pregnant women, were sought to be combined under the auspices of this broader agency supported by the state. Specifically, the women identified a connection crucial for this thesis: the increasing rate of marriage separations and family dislocations in the absence of broader formal social assistance:
Under present day conditions not all families can manage to remain independent of assistance of various kinds. […] Unemployment, irregular employment and ill health often bring families to point where they have to turn to outside assistance. (Gleeson, 2000:192)
The Catholic Family Welfare Bureau (renamed Centacare, in the 1970s) opened in Sydney in 1941. It was first presided over by Fr (later Archbishop) Thomas, who saw the role of Centacare as that of promoting professional help and social justice through the recognition of the agency and voice of those in receipt of help. The professional social worker’s role was to ‘treat[s] the cause rather than the symptoms […] although some palliative treatment in the immediate terms was often necessary’ (Gleeson, 2000:196). There was initially some resistance to social workers being paid, as this deviated from the original voluntary nature of charity work. The crucial difference that was to be made to the historical charitable relief-provision facilitated by the Church was initiating change through identifying the broader social causes of poverty, and advocating for the empowerment of individuals.
Marriage counselling was a central occupation of the Bureau, from its inception. Undoubtedly at that time, due to the legal difficulty of obtaining divorce and the Catholic normative assumption of the sanctity of marriage, couples were most likely dictated to stay in their marriage. Even though the clergy that were involved in this work were now modelling their work on the work of health professionals, this normative assumption would have been unquestioned. Yet social work, informed by scientific principles, was now the 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 62 new discourse of whose seeking to do Church Welfare work. A Social Work Post-Graduate Diploma was deemed essential by Fr McCosker, who was involved in children’s foster care; and anecdotal evidence from early employees holds it that Monsignor Thomas, who was involved with Centacare from 1941, apparently donned a white lab coat when he saw married couples in trouble. Some remember that the waiting room of the marriage counselling department looked like a casualty department of a public hospital. The new church social worker was a scientifically-trained professional, as suggested in the paper ‘Needs in the Catholic Social Work Field’, by Moffit, Parker and Davidson: ‘This is the day of the expert and in the charitable field, this means the trained social worker’.
In 1949, for the first time, the NSW State government allocated some funds to the Bureau specifically for its preventative marriage guidance program. Fr McCosker, who later became the Director of the Bureau, was active in helping to incorporate counselling provisions into the Commonwealth Matrimonial Causes Act 1959, discussed in the preceding chapter. This Act specifically recognised the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau as an approved agency under the regulation pertaining to the act. This Act was subsumed into the Marriage Act 1961, and Attorney-General Garfield Barwick and Monsignor McCosker worked together to ensure that State Centacare Bureaux were funded to provide marriage counselling for couples who applied for divorce to the courts, making counselling a part of the divorce proceedings. Centacare became an ‘Approved Marriage Guidance Agency’. Due to an ongoing working relationship with the Attorney-General’s Department, Centacare was able to secure approximately 112,000 dollars per annum for marriage counselling, between 1984 and 1988.
Harris et al. write that from the middle 1960s, pre-marriage education was offered also by a number of non-church related organisations, such as the Marriage Guidance Councils (later renamed Relationships Australia, or RA). As we can see from data offered in the Andrews report in the preceding chapter, voluntary attendance still remains low for such organisations. The early 1970s also saw the germination of what were to become the two 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 63 national membership bodies: the National Society of Pre-Marital Education Organisations (now called the Catholic Society for Marriage Education, or CSME), and the Australian Association for Marriage Education (now called the Marriage and Relationship Educators Association of Australia, or MAREAA).
The format of church-affiliated marriage preparation courses started changing dramatically after the Second Vatican Council. In the history of the Church, this momentous event signified a move to a more holistic notion of the Christian vocation, and person-centred adult education and therapy were being taken on by social workers working under the auspices of the Church. Marriage preparation programs began to shift from dogmatic lecturing to group-work, that encouraged engaged couples to share and process their own expectations of marriage and their family histories, and to make their own decisions about what kind of marriage they wanted to build. Pre-marriage education was to be ‘life transition education’ engaging couples in a reflective process of growth and broadening their range of communication and conflict resolution skills (Harris et al., 1992:21-22). A growing body of clinical psychological research on marriage now also supported the field, and even priests were now either trained counsellors or social workers, or specifically trained in some programs (such as PREPARE).
We have to be careful when we discuss this field, to differentiate between marriage counselling (for already married couples), and marriage education, which this thesis focuses on. Centacare offers marriage counselling currently, but couples come mainly by referral from the courts. Professional standards were developed for counsellors in 1986 by Ray Reid, who later became the Director of the Diocese of Parramatta (Centacare Sydney split in 1987-1988 under the initiative from Pope John Paul II). Counsellors employed by Centacare are psychologists, counsellors and social workers, with degrees possibly even from programs instituted by Centacare’s founders, such as the Department of Social Work at UNSW.
3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 64
However, marriage education for engaged couples had developed more slowly, and this area had been subject to less direct regulation. Pre- marriage education at Centacare, retained some of its original voluntary nature, when it was undertaken by laity as part of their ministry. This became especially clear in my interview with the Manager of the Centacare MRE Sydney, in 2005. She told me that like herself, many women started working with couples in a pastoral capacity after they got married (some, with their husbands), and through their involvement with the Church’s Natural Family Planning programs, teaching other couples about Church-approved methods of birth control. Later, some, like herself, went on to obtain a degree either in Adult Education, or counselling (perhaps from the Institute of Counselling that was set up by Cardinal Gilroy as part of the Bureau in the 1960s – to help teachers, priests, brothers and nuns to work with young people). Many also completed the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, as a less academic qualification to run workshops for couples, or do education work in schools. Some women who started their involvement in marriage preparation in this way still combine it with work with the renamed Natural Fertility Services, which are also funded to a degree by the Commonwealth FRSP program. Faith forms a big driving force in doing this work. However, a later intake of educators in the late 1990s and early 2000s was of students in the social sciences and human services, or people already qualified as social workers, counsellors or psychologists (perhaps involved in Centacare in some other capacity, also). While all educators have to uphold the basic tenets of the Catholic ethos, there is in fact a variety of more open-ended approaches to intimacy being discussed. The combination of the dogmatic and the growth- oriented philosophies had become especially controversial in the context of marriage education with the movement of the Sydney Archdiocese in the conservative direction, under Cardinal Pell.
Currently, Centacare’s Marriage Relationship Programs use some PREP literature, some theory from David and Amy Olson’s circumplex family model, a variety of less clinical sources on communication and intimacy from Australia, and some of its programs use PREPARE. What becomes 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 65 interesting is how a community-based and social-justice oriented organisation can utilise these to help couples in the best way.
The Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) According to Centacare’s MRE coordinator, PREP had been chosen as part of its marriage preparation programs’ framework because it is structured, offers practical skill-training and is supported by statistical data of couples’ ‘success rates’ after completing PREP. As Chapter 2 had extensively outlined, PREP is widely used in US state programs in both prisons and the army. There is some evidence to suggest it is used in the UK, also.13
PREP is the copyrighted commercial name for a pre-marriage education program and the affiliated training workshops, literature and products that have grown from a body of research associated with the Centre for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. PREP combines cognitive-behavioural theory, and Bernard Guerney’s Relationship Enhancement program influenced by Carl Rogers. PREP holds ‘healthy marriage’ to be one where there is safety in interaction, personal safety and safety in commitment (Stanley, 2004:4).
Howard Markman, a psychologist and marriage educator, started conducting longitudinal studies in late 1970s and early 1980s to test a hypothesis that the nature of a couple’s communication before they marry is correlated with whether the marriage stays intact and spouses are ‘satisfied’, or becomes ‘distressed’ and breaks up. His findings were that
[a]lmost every couple can be considered to be at risk for divorce and for the resulting stress on themselves and their children. […] Longitudinal studies have indicated that dysfunctional communication patterns precede the development of marital problems and early signs of future distress are potentially identifiable in premarital interaction independent of the couple’s level of premarital relationship satisfaction. (Markman et al., 1988:210)
There are ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ risk factors in every relationship, or what Stanley calls ‘seeds’: ‘for many couples, the seeds of their eventual divorce
13 Bristol Community Family Trust, viewed September 5, 2007,
(those that will divorce) are there before they even say “I do”. That’s a sobering point’ (Stanley & Markman, 2001; Markman et al., 2001:39). The former are patterns difficult to change, including: a tendency to react strongly or defensively to problems and disappointments, having divorced parents, living together prior to marriage, being previously divorced, having children from a previous marriage, having different religious backgrounds, marrying at a very young age, knowing each other only for a short time before marriage, and experiencing financial hardship.
It is more likely that the couple will be able to do something about the ‘dynamic’ risk factors in their relationship: their communication and conflict resolution skills. More specifically, PREP claims to have identified four ‘danger signs’ especially predictive of future problems (Markman et al., 1988; Markman et al., 2001:43-66; Stanley, 2001). These are the following communication patterns: ‘escalation’, or adversarial engagement in which each person ‘ups the ante’ during argument, escalating the issue to the point of threatening to leave the marriage; ‘invalidation’, contempt for the partner’s character and disrespectful dismissal of their feelings or thoughts; ‘negative interpretation’, formation of negative expectations, selective perception and defensive or offensive behaviour in accordance with the negative belief; and ‘withdrawal and avoidance’, situations where one person pursues their spouse to discuss an issue, and the spouse evades or shuts down any communication.
According to the PREP ‘cascade theory of marital failure’, when a couple continues communicating in such ways, their relationship gradually worsens (Markman, 1988; Markman et al., 1993; Stanley, et al. in Berger & Hannah, 1999; Stanley et al., 2001). The constant ‘dripping’ of unresolved and physiologically distressful conflicts makes the presence of the partner a source of anxiety and fear, instead of support and warmth. The couple’s commitment starts being eroded, and instead of ‘dedication’, the couple is held together only by ‘constraints’ such as social and family pressure, obligations like children or a mortgage, or lack of alternatives. For many couples, the distress becomes unbearable, and they eventually divorce. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 67
PREP in practice A principal value that largely underlies PREP’s efforts is, in fact, directly related to that identified by Christopher Lasch in Chapter 1 as paradigmatic in the early marriage work in the US – keeping a marriage together. Thus, the operational term ‘marital success’ largely refers to remaining in an intact marriage.
On the one hand, PREP offers cognitive-behavioural training that draws on a variety of approaches including Relationship Enhancement (discussed further in this thesis), to help engaged couples avoid the downward cascade trajectory. PREP trains couples to identify the ‘danger signs’ in their relationship, and to re-create a sense of ‘emotional safety’ through structured empathetic listening and assertive ‘I-focused’ speech. They teach a structured ‘speaker-listener’ technique, which allows partners to feel safe and open; and a structured problem-solving tool, to close off issues that can be resolved. Essentially, PREP suggests that some practical communication skills that may not be ‘natural’, may nevertheless help couples in dealing with the inevitable conflicts and problems they will face in their married life.
On the other hand, however, most of the legitimating PREP literature and advocacy appears to suggest that Stanley and Markman want to warn couples of their risk factors as a way of dissuading them from marrying at all. Consider, for instance, Stanley’s paper ‘Can we predict if a given couple will make it or not?’ There, Stanley starts by saying that PREP has much credibility, because it has a divorce prediction rate of 90 percent. The seeds of divorce are always there from the beginning, and thus,
[d]elay and deliberation can help some couples discover dynamics that may lead them not to marry at all, saving them from the agony of marital distress and divorce later. [...] These data document this potential benefit of premarital education efforts – deliberation with enough delay that leads some couples to re-evaluate their decision, and, for some, avoid a significant mistake. […] The best hope for such an effort is in helping couples to take more time to discover potential weaknesses in their relationship. (Stanley, 2001:273)
3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 68
Further in the website article, however, Stanley qualifies his unequivocal declaration of PREP’s prediction efficacy. Actually, he writes, ‘success’ prediction rates are congealed from past populations of couples, and no prediction researcher can or ever had been able to predict a particular couple’s success rate prospectively. It is only when a researcher follows a couple in a longitudinal study and if the couple divorces, s/he will be able to trace a pattern. The word ‘predict’ obviously does not fit here, because what the researcher would be doing is claiming ex post facto, that the eventual dissolution correlated with some patterns at the beginning.
The trouble with ‘prediction’ in marriage studies, Stanley admits, is that it is a misnomer – a researcher is only able to classify couples according to old typologies. Moreover, couples that stay together are usually classified more correctly than those who divorce. This puts a would-be prophetic marriage educator who would use a rate to warn a couple in a bind: the statistics he or she is equipped with do not address the chances of an individual couple, and ‘[i]f you are that one specific couple, that’s not a very good prediction rate to base a key life decision on’. By implication, couples are expected to internalise the rate and calculate the prudence of their decision. Stanley qualifies the educator’s task by saying that since statistics are inaccurate in this instance, it is wiser to tell a couple something like: ‘You have many risk factors associated with marriages that don’t make it. You might want to think seriously about what that means for the two of you and take measures to lower these risks’.14 While Stanley may think that this helpfully softens the fatalism of the warning, I would argue that it does not.
If we consider the ‘static’ risk factors PREP warns couples about, we can see that the future of people’s marriages is treated as determined by some circumstances outside of their control (their parents’ divorce), by their less than perfect past (previous separation, children) and even living together with the current partner (regardless of the particular experience and
14 Stanley, S. & Markman, H. ‘Can we predict if a given couple will make it or not?’ viewed 7 September 2007,
Premarital Personal and Relationship Evaluation (PREPARE):‘Failing to prepare is like preparing to fail’15 The risk-preventative approach is particularly strong in marriage preparation programs that add a relationship ‘inventory’ to relationship skill-training like reflective listening, or assertive communication. To Have and to Hold makes special mention of such inventories (1998:154) and so does the later inquiry into Australian Relationship Education Service Activities:
Inventories are an important mechanism for delivering relationship education specifically to couples, and are uniquely placed to make immediate and lasting changes to couple relationships – whether they are marrying, cohabiting or re-marrying. (FaHCSIA, web)
One such inventory is PREPARE/ENRICH (Premarital Personal and Relationship Evaluation).16 PREPARE is a copyrighted commercial program which can be self-contained and delivered by clergy or trained individuals in the community, or can be an assessment component in addition to a self- contained program. PREPARE is offered as an additional component to some group programs at Centacare in Sydney, and as a self-contained shorter course for an individual couple with a trained counsellor. Sydney’s Centacare alone conducted the inventory process with 204 couples in 2006. PREPARE is often undertaken by older couples who have a history of divorce from a previous marriage, or who have children together or from previous relationships. The Catholic Church Tribunal sometimes refers such couples (Centacare MRE coordinator, 2005, pers. comm., 8 December).
Building a Strong Marriage Workbook, p. 3. Another inventory, considered to have a more religious basis, is FOCCUS (Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding and Study), developed in 1984-5 by Sr B. Markey, Michelletto, M. and A. Becker. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 70
When it was created in 1977, by clinical psychologists David Olson, David Fournier and Joan Druckman, PREPARE’s purpose was to ‘assist clergy and counsellors in making objective and systematic assessments of personal and relationship issues for couples’ (Harris et al., 1992:13). PREPARE is based on a series of longitudinal clinical studies that have congealed, using multivariate analytical procedures, statistically significant ‘indicators of the critical issues and common conflict areas in marriage’ (Olson in Berger and Hannah, 1999:196-216). These markers are captured by 165 statements, compiled in the PREPARE booklet.17 On the cover of the booklet, we can read:
PREPARE was designed to help you learn more about yourself, your partner and your relationship. PREPARE can identify some of the strengths in your relationship and problematic issues for you to discuss with your partner. PREPARE results are not intended to predict your chances for marital success or to determine when or whether you should be married. PREPARE is not a test and there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers. (Life Innovations Inc, 1996)
Here is a sample of statements contained in the booklet: ‘We are creative in how we handle our differences’; ‘We have a specific plan for how much money we can spend each month’; ‘My partner and I have different ideas about the best way to solve our disagreements’; ‘I am sometimes concerned that my partner appears to be unhappy or withdrawn’; ‘Sometimes I have trouble believing everything my partner tells me’. All statements eventually form 11 themes, such as ‘Personality issues’, ‘Communication’, ‘Spirituality’.
Each statement in the booklet has a normative or ‘preferred’ response, based on how happy or divorced couples responded in past studies, and tempered by some biases: sections on cohabitation and spirituality favour couples who resisted living together, and who practice faith together. Partners are given a booklet each, to individually respond to the statements. They can ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ or be ‘undecided’. When their answer sheets are
For the purposes of discussion here, I will be referring to the PREPARE booklet for engaged couples not living together. Variants of the inventory include PREPARE-CC, for cohabiting couples; PREPARE-MC, for couples with children; and ENRICH, for already married couples. They contain some additional thematic sections. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 71 processed, their responses are matched. When both give the same response to a statement, and this is the ‘preferred’ response, this registers as a point out of the total 10 for each theme. When partners give different responses to the same statement, or when their same response differs from the ‘preferred’ answer, they do not score a point. Scores are interpreted by the report as ‘agreement’ on, and ‘satisfaction’ with, issues of that theme in their relationship. The ‘positive agreement couple score’ is further revised for individuals, taking into consideration each person’s ‘idealistic distortion’ (measured by their responses to statements couched in absolute terms.)
The scores for each theme are then fitted to a couple typology (Fowers & Olson, 1992; Fowers et al., 1996). ‘Vitalised’ couples are those who have been found to have high scores on all themes, and are therefore expected to have a ‘high degree of overall relationship satisfaction’. ‘Harmonious’ couples score less on interpersonal skills, and are thought to minimise conflict and to have a ‘moderate overall relationship quality’. ‘Traditional’ couples also score lower on interpersonal strengths, and are less idealistic, but have more congruity on spiritual beliefs and parenting. The remainder of couples are ‘conflicted’: ‘realistic’ about their problems, but most likely to divorce. Counselling is strongly recommended for ‘conflicted’ couples.
The specific scores and couple types are provided in what is called the PREPARE ‘counsellor report’, usually used where the individual couple sees a counsellor. PREPARE literature emphasises that this report is not to be given to a couple. In a one-on-one session, the counsellor would use the information to guide the couple in discussing the themes and statements that generated divergent responses by utilising communication and problem resolution skills similar to those taught in PREP. In group training sessions, a different, ‘couple report’ with a reduced level of information is meant to be used, designed for couples to be able to see their strength and growth areas, but not the graphic depiction of their couple type, or scores. Couples are not allowed to keep their reports.
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If we read PREPARE trainer literature, it appears to encourage using the inventory as a warning and pre-emptive tool. Olson and Fowers claim that the credibility of PREPARE is in the fact that it can predict divorce, as ‘relationships can be assumed to have contained the seeds of eventual breakup from the very beginning’ (Fowers & Olson, 1986:403). PREPARE claims to be able to predict divorce with 80-85 percent accuracy (Brody, 1997; Craddock, 2001; Olson, 1999:107).
In a broader sense, the decision not to get married after attending a program can a positive outcome for the couple. Even though there is a hint of deference to expert knowledge, I would argue that the following comments by some Australian couples who decided not to get married after attending a marriage preparation program, captured by a 1991 evaluation of Australian pre-marriage programs in To Have and to Hold, are genuine:
I feel it exposed weaknesses in our relationship. After the program we reviewed the questions and answers and still could not resolve many, many issues. […] We were made aware that we didn't know each other as well as we thought. We discussed issues previously overlooked. Discovered differences we couldn't resolve and which probably would have become major points of conflict in our marriage. I believe now we hadn't thought enough about marriage and everything involved. We would not have lasted. We are very grateful for this program. (Harris et al. 1992:117 in House of Representatives, 1998:100-101)
For some couples, self-reflection and reflection on the relationship can provide a space for witnessing already-experienced distress, or significant problems. Such couples are often grateful for the non-judgemental presence of a neutral third party who sees them for a short time and who can allow them to air their own concerns about their future married life. They often thank educators for showing them that the way their families did things is not the only way; that their community and the Church care for them (see Appendix D). In other words, Lasch’s pessimism about society’s intrusion into the private sphere may, in fact, be somewhat anti-social. Couples are part of the community, and with a skilful and sensitive educator, can benefit from seeing they are not alone going through the problems they face. They may, indeed, decide to postpone, or even cancel their wedding if they perceive their 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 73 problems to be serious enough. This is a positive outcome, even though it is undoubtedly a traumatic and emotional experience for them. So when used without emphasis on the scores and types, but as a discussion tool alerting the couple to the topics on which they may hold different opinions, PREPARE can be very beneficial. But if they are told about their chances of divorce, their future is determined by a normative, significantly methodologically flawed, and potentially alienating tool.
Jack, Jill, but no crystal ball: Some problems with ex post facto problematisation Consider a cautionary tale in a promotional article on the PREPARE/ENRICH website (Brody, 1997). Jack completed a PREPARE inventory when he was getting married. He is now going through a divorce, and goes back to look at his results. This is explicitly warned against in PREPARE training: reports are supposed to be destroyed once used. But Jack somehow circumvents this rule (perhaps this holds some advertising appeal to couples reading this on the internet, when considering taking PREPARE?) When he gets his old report, he is shocked: ‘[i]t was a trip. The very things we split up over were identified on the survey’. The report had apparently originally identified that Jack and his wife had different types of families: hers was disciplinarian and distancing; his was more balanced and connected. Even though Jack now claims he knew even then, he foolishly went ahead and married ‘because they were in love’. During the marriage, now he says, his wife relied on him excessively to meet all her needs, and to compensate for ‘what was lacking elsewhere in her life’. He, on the other hand, was ‘fulfilled by his family, work and friends’. Now, in retrospect, Jack says that ‘it would have cost them less’, had they taken more time before the marriage to work through their issues.
The question that arises in response to Jack’s retrospective wisdom goes to the heart of the pre-emptive ethos of both PREP and PREPARE. Even if Jack was given information about his wife’s family and its possible influence on her personality, how could he have known precisely how such qualities would impact on their marriage, before he was married? How could he have foreseen the specific situations that would upset him, or destabilise 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 74 their marriage? How could a couple be expected to have resolved issues that only arise once they live together, such as PREPARE’s parenting styles or financial planning? In its predictive mode, PREPARE assumes couples must have such answers, and if they don’t, penalises them by giving them low scores and correspondingly, a ‘type’ verdict which judges their likelihood of staying together. The irony of this expectation is that PREPARE is explicitly biased against cohabitation. This can be seen from the preferred answers to questions about living together, in PREPARE-CC for cohabiting couples. Couples who think that the experience of living together makes them better prepared for married life are discouraged from thinking so by the scoring system – that is, if they agree to the statements: ‘Cohabiting is a good test of what my partner will be like after our marriage’, or ‘Cohabiting has been more challenging than I had anticipated’, they are penalised. But the seemingly commonsensical suggestion that if the couple does not have the right skills and is not ‘prepared’ yet, they need to spend more time deliberating and ‘getting ready’, actually puts them in a bind. In order to be ready, they have to live together; to live together, they need to be married; but in order for them to marry, they have to be ready first.
Another problem with the ‘prevoir pour pouvoir’ ethos of multivariate analysis is presented here. ‘Preferred answers’ and couple ‘types’ in the inventory are generated from past couples, and these in turn become determining of present couples’ futures. Couples are also slotted into rigid types. Clearly, however, responses to statements such as ‘I am sometimes concerned that my partner appears to be unhappy or withdrawn’ or ‘Sometimes we have serious disputes over unimportant issues’ are contextual, and may be answered differently depending on what was happening in the relationship at the time when the couple fills out the questionnaire. The fact that the qualifier ‘sometimes’ is built into the statement means that honest answers (agreement) would always be penalised. When only one answer is preferred by PREPARE (such as disagreement to the above), what is in effect presumed of ‘vitalised’ relationships is unrealistic. Such absolutism sits at odds with the special emphasis made by PREPARE on tempering couples’ excessive expectations of their future happiness (i.e. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 75 they are expected to disagree with the statements: ‘I do not expect that we will ever have serious problems in our marriage’, and ‘My partner is the only person with whom I could have a happy marriage’. If they agree with these statements, they are penalised). Deviation from ‘preferred’ answers is immediately interpreted by the inventory as lack of satisfaction or agreement, but quite obviously, substantively, this is simply not true. Take the example where one partner agrees and the other disagrees to a statement such as ‘My partner has some personal habits that bother me’, and this results in a score penalty. Firstly, in essence, both partners may be saying the same thing, because each is talking about their partner. This is a methodological glitch in the inventory.18 Secondly, even if both partners agree to the statement, the severity of their ‘being bothered’ – how much it matters to them - is overridden by PREPARE’s claim that irrespective of the couple’s subjective feelings, their failure to score is indicative of their potential to divorce.
Terminology One common term of reference in marital studies used by PREP and PREPARE is ‘marital quality’ (see Norton, 1983; Spanier, 1976; Spanier & Lewis, 1980; Glenn, 1990; Johnson et al., 1986). While conceptual confusion reigns in these studies, marriages are further objectified. Consider Johnson et al.’s (1986) attempt to ‘work towards a methodological and conceptual refinement’ of marital quality. They begin with the assumption that ‘satisfaction’, contained in the classical ‘dyadic adjustment scale’ (DAS) by Spanier (1976), is necessary to measure marital quality. Yet they immediately substitute the term satisfaction with ‘happiness’ (1986:34). Happiness is a more open-ended term, and ‘satisfaction’ is fundamentally about finitude (from Latin satisfacere, ‘enough’). Satisfaction tends to be about the individual, and easily leads to comparison, which is immediately confirmed by Johnson et al.’s way of measuring ‘marital quality’ through asking couples: ‘Is your marriage a success?’ ‘How often do you regret your choice of spouse?’ ‘How does the marriage compare to others?’ (1986:34-35). The couple is oriented
This is particularly evident in the sections on family of origin, where individuals respond in reference to two different families, yet their responses are matched for sameness and penalised for difference through a score that translates into low satisfaction on this aspect of their life. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 76 towards their marriage as if it were an object: a thing that can deliver satisfaction, be compared, or even exchanged. This reification is confirmed by the name of the PREP handbook, Fighting For Your Marriage, or the PREPARE workbook title Building a Strong Marriage: marriage is a project, something one can work on. Yet self-centred comparison and satisfaction are precisely the kind of thinking that is often blamed by marriage proponents, including Markman and Stanley, for being detrimental to genuine marital commitment (Markman et al., 2001:6). Studies also show that individual satisfaction diminishes after the first few years of marriage (Fowers et al., 1996:2). Yet the same researchers happily embrace such essentially individualistic assumptions as part of their methodology. Also, they create a highly unrealistic expectation of relationships. This is evident in Johnson et al.’s assertion that a marriage with problems has a reduced ‘quality rating’ (1986:36).
Asking couples to assess their marriage, I believe, can alienate them from their marriages, from their spouses – and from themselves. Take Jack’s case. He cannot see that he, too, had something to do with his wife’s emotional needs, or her isolation. His wife was in part responding to him – his self-sufficiency, or ‘fulfilment’. In response to her wanting more support, maybe he felt overwhelmed, over-identified or proud, and he distanced himself. At the same time, he may have only started seeing himself as self- sufficient in relation to her. Causal directions, origins and consequences are notoriously difficult to trace here. In any case, with the benefit of apparent objectivity and insight in his later position of being armed with the PREPARE report, Jack pronounces that his wife was deficient from the start, and this needed to be fixed up beforehand. During the post-mortem of his marriage, this is easy to say.
At this point, I will begin using interview material to draw out the conceptual implications of this chapter. Specifically, material from two interviews, with Natasha and Bella, will be explored to see how a preventative strategy such as PREPARE assessment would address real relationships. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 77
‘I think we started to have problems really early on’: Natasha’s story At the time of being interviewed, Natasha was separating from Xavier, her partner of 15 and husband of 3 years. When Natasha met Xavier for the first time at a friend’s dinner party on Bastille Day, she was instantly attracted to his joie de vivre – his love of travel and adventure. Natasha felt that they were very similar:
N: Intellectually we’re very different but similar – both quite intense intellectual people, love ideas, love flirting with ideas, umm, both creative, but in different ways. […] Both very practical in different ways. You couldn’t actually get two people more compatible in many, many ways – right down to what sort of garden we adore. […] On the shared experience of the world and an ethos about the world and how to live in the world, I think that all connects, right down to food.
They started a relationship. Natasha pursued an academic career, and Xavier studied science, art, and later, music. They travelled extensively and lived overseas. Natasha organised some exhibitions for Xavier and his friends, and he accompanied Natasha to her research fieldwork trip as an assistant and resident artist.
Differences surfaced in their perception of certain qualities each had. Xavier felt Natasha was not nurturing enough. Natasha equated ‘nurturing’ with ‘mothering’, and felt resentful of Xavier’s complaint, because she felt she was ‘supportive’ in organising his exhibitions and art contacts, and was encouraging of his studies. Her friends and students thought of her as a supportive person, also. But Xavier perceived her ‘support’ as pushiness and ‘nagging’:
N: I mean, when I think I’m being supportive, Xavier will think I’m nagging him about getting on with his career, which in fact is probably true. […] So I was constantly pushing, and Xavier was constantly being pushed, rather than just being able to do it himself. What was in fact a positive thing became a very negative thing, where I was a nag. [...] So this has been the basis of our relationship all along. It’s me getting shitty with Xavier, saying ‘For God’s sake do something, here, go do this’, and then he does it and then he does this outstanding work on it. And this is what I see as the basis of our relationship.
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If Natasha and Xavier were to undergo PREPARE assessment, its outcome would depend on when they did so. There is no one single definitive qualification to be given to each person – personal qualities such as ‘care’, ‘support’, ‘nagging’ are contextual, they change; the same behaviour can be positive, and negative, in different circumstances, and viewed differently. They are also mutually determined. Xavier can be laid-back and indecisive in response to Natasha’s active pushing. Natasha’s pushing is in response to Xavier’s holding back. They influence each other, and such definitional interdependence of long-term partners is echoed in educational terms such as ‘polarisation’ and the ‘pursuer-withdrawer/distancer’ communicative pattern (Markman et al., 2001; Betchen, 2005; Weiner-Davis, 1993).
Significantly for the argument this thesis advances, Natasha sees the complexity of the qualities and their interplay retrospectively, after the relationship had broken down. What could she have done differently had she been told at the beginning that Xavier can be indecisive? That quality, at that stage, was experienced positively: as flair, a creative and open-ended approach to life. It would seem to do no justice to their subsequent relationship, no matter how challenging, to say they should have nipped it in the bud, before its potential germination, because at times some qualities would be experienced negatively.
With the ‘benefit’ of the knowledge that the relationship had unravelled, and with all the negative experiences pressing on her mind, Natasha looks back to the relationship and selectively picks out the trajectory of steps that had taken her and Xavier to the point where they find themselves now:
N: It’s been all the way through the relationship, essentially. […] That’s the sort of thing that in fact we would argue about, I think, quite regularly. […] I think we started to have problems really early on. It’s been more like that, it’s become more and more like that, but I think it was always like that. […] I think that was always the potential there.
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The last statement is accurate – there was potential. But now, from being parts of the relationship, problems have become its essence (to her). Yet this is a false insight. Natasha is gathering reasons for the present problems ex post facto. This, after all, is the nature of memory – creative, rewriting the past to suit its current projects. The classical psychoanalytical term nachträglichkeit captures this (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988; Hall et al., 1984). Rewriting the past in selectively negative terms to logically suit the present unhappy state of the marriage is, in fact, a well-recognised tendency that characterises a troubled relationship (see Gottman, 1998).
Neither Xavier nor Natasha could have predicted with full accuracy where their relationship would take them. But with the benefit of hindsight, they could say that their relationship was ‘doomed’. PREP, then, would do no better job than Natasha, when she muses on the sealed fate of her relationship. But what is different about Natasha’s interview is that she does not regret having been married to Xavier. The relationship allowed them to ‘work through the shit’, as Xavier once said, and they remained friends; they still had a lot in common. The difficulties and the good times, their life together, had opened possibilities that would not have been there otherwise:
N: I think that’s what I enjoy the most from it, is that I think by myself I could not have done the quite amazing things that I have done. I don’t think Xavier could have done the quite amazing things he did, by himself. I think when two people come together, if there’s […] a love and respect and a collaboration on things, you can do so much more. It’s like you’re [pause] It’s like you’re ten people doing stuff. Things can just work to come together. So that’s the thing about relationships where I think they really work, is that you’re more than just two people coming together, you’re, you know, you’re a history of two people and you’re also the potential future of two people that makes many, many, more. If you go back in history, you’ve all these people, all these histories and all these things coming together to make these two people who meet here at this juncture, I think also there’s that sort of future potential about it. That, for me, is the magic of relationships.
According to PREP’s and PREPARE’s philosophies, this marriage ‘failed’; other couples could be warned using its experience. Undoubtedly, there was its share of negative experience and distress there. However, as a 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 80 relationship between two adults without children, it was a rich and real life. This makes us seriously question the universal norm of ‘success’ in marriage as staying together, for its own sake.
‘I just don’t want to be a statistic’: Bella What happens if one tries to follow PREP and PREPARE’s advice of ridding oneself of rose-coloured glasses, and instead, identifies with one’s statistical chances of ‘success’? What impact does it have on one’s ability to be with others?
Bella, my second interviewee in this chapter, had been with Nathan for 3 years at the time of the interview, and got engaged to him when this thesis was being completed. She said that until the age of 13, the happiness and stability of her family life was something she took for granted: it was ‘very stable. […] We just did sort of family things and there were no questions asked. […] It was all very routine and normal, if there is such a thing. Loving. No problems’. Then her parents separated, starting complicated engagements between her parents, her siblings and herself. Her parents’ divorce had cracked her idyllic picture: ‘I guess I’m more aware of marital breakdown and how easy it is, I guess, to back out of marriage and how complicated it is’. Bella says she has found it difficult to be happy for her friends getting married: ‘there is just this edge of like it being really good, but there’s also this feeling of whether it will really work. You hear the statistics and it’s no surprise. Friends around you and their parents, they’re all divorced’. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of apprehensiveness in Bella’s thoughts on whether she and Nathan would marry. She said she would definitely marry for the sake of children, who would need certainty:
B: I just wouldn’t want them to be uncertain in any way that mum and dad don’t really care about each other, or maybe that mum’s just going to run off one day and she’s not married. But there are laws in place now, that sort of stop lack of commitment, I guess, in some way. I just don’t know.
If Nathan and Bella were to marry, commitment would have to be made half in jest, she says, not too seriously: she ‘does not need to go through the whole ceremony’ but would just have a ‘joke’; ‘just throw a bit of a party and 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 81 say that we’re just going to have a crack at spending the rest of our lives together’. Bella would not want to ‘make a big deal out of it’. While making light of marriage, Bella is also very serious:
B: I have a cynicism, but at the same time I just don’t want to be a statistic as well. So I would try everything I could to keep it together. I would try really, really hard, as hard as I could, to keep things going. I just wouldn’t want to back down out of it. Especially if children were involved. I think seeing my parents break up has given me a commitment to trying as hard as possible, if we do go down the path of marriage, never to break up.
Even though Bella is burned by experience, she insists she will not let it determine her future. She is aware of ‘all the different kinds of variables’ that might be present, but will persevere:
B: It’s about being steadfast and certain, sometimes to the point where it might seem that you’re being stubborn or something like that. But within the terms of a relationship, I think it’s about knowing that so many things could happen, trying to take those into account and not shutting yourself off to certain things, but being aware of them. Being aware that everyone has their faults and trying to work things out, as much as possible.
Bella says that for her, being committed is the personal decision to resist the temptation of opportunities and distractions in a society that encourages keeping one’s options open and satisfying oneself first. To draw out Bella’s situation, let me examine it in the light of some sociological literature on trust.
Risks, trust, faith Niklas Luhmann is a social theorist who directly addresses the relationship between knowledge of past precedent (such as statistics) and rational calculation, and the actual process of making decisions in social life. In his Trust (1979), he writes that in order for any social action to proceed, there needs to be a base level of trust. One cannot rationally decide to trust based on knowledge that it is safe to do so, in the first instance. In order to gather knowledge, one must make an initial leap of faith. Trust cannot be coerced or requested – it can only be offered, and accepted. Distrust, involving elaborate 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 82 and taxing strategies of calculation and holding back, relies on selective use of information; one becomes more dependent on less information (Luhmann, 1979:72).
Risk-preventative strategists may imagine that genuine relational giving can only be made once there is trust in the other person, and in the soundness of the potential relationship and its purity from ‘seeds’ of discord or divorce. Precise failure rates are presented as sobering and eye opening for couples intending to marry. Clearly, however, in Bella’s case, knowing about her parents’ problems, and the divorces of her friends, scares her about making her own commitments. Bella’s apprehension is precisely the malaise that policymakers and marriage campaigners frequently refer to as the troubling legacy of more commonly occurring divorce. The oft-repeated argument is that children of divorced families are wary of entering marriage themselves, are less trusting, and more prudent and careful about their relationships (Wallerstein, 2000; Parker, 2006, conference). As Minister Andrews said in the preface to his report, many young people define marriage in reference to divorce, with caution and apprehension (House of Representatives, 1996:i). However, at the same time, premarital programs such as PREP and PREPARE emphasise the need to inform couples about the statistical outlook for their marriage – to slot them into a ‘couple type’, to show them national divorce rates. Psychologist Kim Halford from Griffith University, active in the area of marital research in Australia, also stresses that therapists need to address the fact that many marrying couples are ‘unrealistic’, because they ‘routinely overestimate their chances of staying together’ and ‘estimate the chance of them ever divorcing as extremely low, despite the well-documented high rates of relationship break up’ (Halford, 2000:43; 2003). I suggest that such reflexivity, if used in a deterministic way, can scare couples and make them feel powerless. The past gains a grip on the present, sealing the fate of the future and precluding creativity. How can knowledge about the past, such as statistical information and the real experience of divorces, not become debilitating; how can trauma not impair one’s ability to live life openly? Australian sociologist Jack Barbalet offers one response. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 83
Barbalet agrees with Luhmann that it is only possible to determine whether an action based on trust was correct by judging ex post facto (in Barbalet, 1996:88). He draws on Keynes’ view also: that ‘a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation’ (cited in Barbalet, 1996:85). Social trust must often be made in the absence of evidence, and it actually generates the very evidence it requires (1996:89). One must start some relationship off, and then gather evidence. The initial step must just happen, or not at all. Similarly, in the Ethical Demand (1997), ethicist Knud Løgstrup speaks of the essence of trusting relation as the risky, vulnerable but essential leap of handing oneself over to the mercy of a potential partner. One does so without reasons to believe the other intends well. The possible outcomes are response, or the abuse of that trust by the other person. The latter is negotiated with oneself retrospectively, by accusing the other, blaming oneself and devising future strategies, while the ego tries to make sense of its temporary lapse of precaution: ‘[w]e would much rather admit blemishes and weaknesses, mistakes and stupidities than to admit to our having laid ourselves open’ (Løgstrup, 1997:11).
Bella’s courage echoes the above logic. The trauma of family breakdown, the disintegration of relationships of close ones, the ending of one’s own love affair, open our eyes not only to the possibility of pain, and also, eventually, to our tendency to idealise the past. Nevertheless, Bella insists she will go on, steadfastly, with the awareness of such possibilities. She does not close her eyes to pain and relationship breakdown. She does not pretend it cannot happen. She vows to keep trying – even though she cannot control what her partner does. There is a quiet, determined courage and dignity about her words.
On pathologising change: The Legacy of Divorce reconsidered Judith Wallerstein, who To Have and to Hold extensively quotes, has studied the lives of children who grew up with divorced parents since 1971. In her 2000 book, The Legacy of Divorce, she argues that two contemporary attitudes to divorce need to be overturned. The first is that children are 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 84 happier when their parents are happy. She argues, instead, that unless there is violence in the home, children do not remember or care about their parents’ unhappiness or anger, and the benefits that intact families provide for children warrant staying in the marriage:
What most parents don’t realize is that their children can be reasonably content despite the failing marriage. Kids are not necessarily overwhelmed with distress because Mommy and Daddy are arguing. In fact, children and adults can cope pretty well in protecting one another during the stress of a failing marriage or unhappy intact marriage. (Wallerstein, et al., 2000:27)
The second myth Wallerstein seeks to overturn is that the impact of divorce is short-term, and that life returns to its normal patterns once the parents repartner. She claims that more often than not, the trauma of separation and unresolved feelings of anger or resentment between ex- partners remain years after the separation.
Wallerstein argues that children from divorced families suffer, amongst other things, from fears, anxieties and distrust about the future and others. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of their parents, but do not have good role family models. They avoid commitment, or ‘jump impulsively’ into relationships with ‘troubled people’ (2000:xxiv). Their world is a ‘far less reliable, more dangerous place’ (2000:27). Growing up takes them longer as they have to let go of more (2000:37).
All of these patterns lead Wallerstein to conclude that when parents divorce, they fail their children:
Parents who divorce may think of their decision to end the marriage as wise, courageous, and the best remedy for their unhappiness – indeed, it may be so – but for the child the divorce carries one meaning: the parents have failed at one of the central tasks of adulthood. Together and separately, they failed to maintain the marriage. […] Divorce still represents failure – failure to keep the man or the woman, failure to maintain the relationships, failure to be faithful, or failure to stick around. (2000:34)
Clearly, for Wallerstein, individual happiness needs to be overridden by broader responsibilities. Clearly, superglue marriage will ensure spouses ‘keep’ each other. 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 85
Yet a powerful insight from one of Wallerstein’s interviewees leads me to seriously question her condemning indictment. As a young woman, Karen, whom Wallerstein interviewed first as a child when her parents divorced, was cohabiting in an unhappy relationship which Wallerstein considered to be a precise corollary of Karen’s history. Then, Karen met another man. She was distrustful and held back at first. However, when one day, Gavin was caught in an ice storm on his way back home, Karen had a moment of new clarity:
I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I lose him either way. And that’s when I realised that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married. (Wallerstein, 2000:xxii-xxiii)
To make Karen’s insight even more precise, she will, without question, lose Gavin one day, when his life will run its course. Her commitment to Gavin is a mature one, accounting for the fact that life involves change and loss. But who is to say if it was not her age, and maturing, that led to this insight?
There can be no argument that divorce affects the experiences of childhood and adolescence in profound ways. There can be no doubt that some divorcing parents fail in their duty of care towards their children, while caught up in their own battles and grievances. This is precisely why the recent changes ushered by the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act 2006, and the focus on ensuring the wellbeing of children after their parents’ separation through compulsory mediation of a parenting plan and family counselling provided by the new Family Relationship Centres, are timely and necessary. We must take such initiatives seriously.
However, we must also remember that children’s lives can be affected when their intact family migrates, when there is serious illness or accident, when there are pressures of unemployment, lack of social integration, when there is violence or substance abuse in the home. Many normal changes that life throws up can traumatic, yet change is simply inevitable. Intact families, too, can provide negative role models, expectations, fears and anxieties. We 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 86 must remember that change handled well can be a resource for growth and maturity. Growing up as a task always involves coming to terms with the past, and making choices about one’s future, tasks that Wallerstein makes out to be the prerogative of children of divorce. Let’s hope that we can learn from Bella and Karen to make choices with the equanimity, courage and faith they have shown in this chapter.
Implications for marriage education A variety of approaches and philosophies currently exist in the field of marriage pedagogy in Australia. There are differences between theoretical approaches, and between the group-based and couple-based formats of programs. Practitioners come from a broad range of educational and professional backgrounds – some clergy, with or without professional training; some people are doing it as part of their church ministry; some counsellors, psychologists, teachers and nurses. There is no single qualification, as yet, to become a marriage educator. The process of the professionalisation of this field is happening currently – as the qualification is being incorporated into the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) system as a Certificate IV, and a Diploma of Relationship Education. Training will be offered by registered training organisations around the country.
However, because of the complexity of skills this work requires, many practitioners believe that the field will still draw educators with experience and expertise in some form of human service delivery and a component of working with groups, and the new qualifications will only work to recognise prior learning. This background information is important if we are to fully appreciate the complexity of the field. No common standard of marriage pedagogy exists yet, and it is really at the ‘coalface’ of actual work with couples that emphasis is made – either on growth or prevention.
Sydney Centacare’s MRE programs are a case in point. Undoubtedly underpinned by some Catholic principles on family life, they nevertheless focus on helping engaged pairs grow and develop, both personally and as a couple. The content of its programs had grown almost organically, with the 3 MARRIAGE EDUCATION | 87 contributions from a team of dedicated educators from very different walks of life. PREP research is used, but while some information about ‘danger signs’ is provided, the overwhelming emphasis of Centacare’s MRE programs is on helping couples build emotional safety in their relationship, through teaching them simple yet powerful ways to talk to each other and support each other (Centacare MRE coordinator, 2007, pers. comm., 4 February). An educator would not instruct a couple to reconsider getting married, but would help the couple work out the answers to their own questions, themselves, through skilful engagement. In this, a program like this is much closer to RE - Relationship Enhancement, the second theoretical strand of PREP influenced by the work of Carl Rogers. To this, this thesis will turn in Chapter 6.
4
HOMO ECONOMICUS IN THE FAMILY HOME
It can be said that Mi loves Fj if her welfare enters his utility function and perhaps also if Mi values emotional and physical contact with Fj[…] Even if Fj were ‘selfish’ and did not return Mi’s love, she would benefit from a match with someone who loves her, because he would transfer resources to her to increase his utility. A marriage involving love is more efficient that other marriages, even when one of the mates is selfish, and increased efficiency benefits the selfish mate also. Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family
Almost by definition, ‘the man who has everything’ is an unlikely marital prospect. The ‘woman who has everything’ is even less so. Susan Maushart, Wifework
Quality, calculation, comparison, risk-calculation, perused in the context of marriage studies in the preceding chapter, sound curiously like economic terms. Is there a conceptual crossover between these fields, worth examining? I believe there is. In work immediately preceding his death, Michel Foucault turned to the Chicago School neoclassical economic modelling as the latest hegemonic hermeneutic field mediating social identities. As we will see in this chapter, key assumptions and the vocabulary of exchange, bargaining and utility maximisation inherent in this discourse, indeed, pervade social theory and marital clinical research in relation to intimate relationships.
Homo Economicus in modernity: The amazing self-selling product A brief history of the chief protagonist of economic theory - homo economicus - is offered by Mary Morgan (2006). John Stuart Mill coined this term, and described the science of economics as a prism that reduces human life and behaviour to the constant pursuit of wealth and luxury, and the avoidance of work (Morgan, 2006:5). Max Weber argued that economics reduced the complexity of human action by treating it as if ‘it were completely rational, unaffected by errors or emotional factors as if, furthermore, it were completely 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 89 and unequivocally directed to a single end, the maximisation of economic advantage’ (in Morgan, 2006:7). Economist William Jevons was first to adopt calculus as economic methodology, in the late 1860s. What is significant about Jevons’ work is that it does not merely represent life in graphic or numeric form, but assumes that precise calculations of utility and gain take place in human life (Morgan 2006:11).
The systematic way in which economics had been rationalising social life has been coined ‘economic imperialism’ by economists themselves (Lazear, 2000), as economics is known for its tendency to redefine the entire social sphere as an economic domain (Lemke, 2001:197). The economy is often no longer seen to have an intrinsically peculiar rationality, laws, instruments, but captures the entirety of human action – as a market, allocating scant resources and fostering competition (Lemke, 2001:197). The economic matrix becomes programmatic, providing the yardstick for critical evaluation of any practice: everyone and everything, in Foucault’s words, is on ‘a kind of permanent economic tribunal’ (Lemke, 2001:198).
The invidious power of the new paradigm is that the citizens of neo- liberal ideology are now simultaneously products and sellers and promoters. Macpherson (1975) suggests that the ethos of possessive individualism makes self-objectification central to modern market societies. Modernity replaces ascribed status allocated through mutual recognition according to fixed custom with social mobility, gained through individual enterprise of selling one’s labour. Labour becomes a commodity, possession, to use or hand over to others for a price (Macpherson, 1975:48-49). People exchange their capital in skill and energy:
Exchange of commodities through the price-making mechanism of the market permeates the relations between individuals, for in this market all possessions, including men’s energies, are commodities. In the fundamental matter of getting a living, all individuals are essentially related to each other as possessors of marketable commodities, including their own powers. (1975:55)
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Marx specifically addressed this aspect of modernity: the worker of the modernised work place becomes, by nature of the capitalist production process, a commodified piece of equipment akin to a factory machine, performing routine tasks (Marx, 1975:323-24). His or her value is only commensurate with the profit that can be made from the things he or she makes. Such reification of material life leads to what Marx refers to as alienation: the deep malaise that affects the worker whose life is governed by the routine of labour, yet who is poorly compensated for this in terms of actual quality of his or her life.
Georg Simmel discusses the psychic correlates of possessive individualism inherent to metropolitan life (1950). The money economy flattens the varied and irrational chaotic life of the city to a series of precise exchanges, based on a strict system of time keeping. The same standardising logic governs what rapidly becomes a dominant system of value in centres of economic activity – the economy. Monetary value is attached to almost everything. Money is concerned with exchange value, reducing all quality and individuality to the one question: ‘How much?’ (Simmel, 1950:411) Calculation like this requires the use of intellect, which turns social interaction into cold dealings with people as numbers. The ‘imponderables of personal relationships’ (1950:412) are dealt with as though they were merely a question of ‘balancing service and return’ (1950:411) in line with the ideal of natural science:
[t]o transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. (Simmel, 1950:412)
Quantification, and therefore, a homogenisation of difference to a continuum along a scale, the loss of uniqueness as incomparability, ‘just isness’, leads the metropolitan dweller, who is eager to stand out and to invent ever-so-elaborate ways of being different. All kinds of tendentious peculiarities, extravagances, mannerisms, caprice, preciousness, find a place in the city as people seek to stand out of the crowd (1950:421). The division of 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 91 labour and specialisation leads them to sell themselves as unique and irreplaceable. The individual is swamped, and has to struggle to stand out, has to ‘exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself’ (1950:422). S/he realises with hopelessness that once on the scale, s/he is already devalued; s/he becomes overwhelmed, and blasé:
Money, with its colorlessness and indifference, becomes common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. (1950:414)
In late modernity, the worker is indeed forced to value her/himself as a comparable thing. Neoclassical economic theory demands workers become entrepreneurs of their persons. Human resource management becomes the accounting science of ‘human capital’. Constant self-assessment is imperative in the job search and employment process, aided by carefully constructed curriculum vitae, interviews and psychometric inventories and tests. The enculturation into self-evaluation starts early: as Colin Cremin observes, schoolchildren in the UK begin to practice cataloguing their achievements by constructing their Record of Achievement (ROA) as early as at the age of 16 (Cremin, 2005). Like the CV, the ROA frames activities and qualities in a commodified form in compliance with employer’s requirements (Metcalfe, 1992; Cremin, 2005). Reflexive procedures become an integral part of staying employed, in the form of appraisals and evaluative feedback. 19 Competitive self-evaluation is promoted as the path to success: ‘the enterprising self will make an enterprise of its life, seek to maximise its own human capital, project itself a future, and seek to shape itself in order to become that which it wishes to be’ (Rose, 1996:154). Maladies such as unemployment, poverty and illness, conversely, are marketing incompetence: failures in self-governance, or defective entrepreneurship skills, lack of rational analytical skills in determining the costs and benefits of actions (Lemke, 2001:199, 201-202).
19 Australian workplaces are reputedly one the biggest consumers of inventory ‘products’ in the world (see Smith, 2005; Creagh, 2005; Hewett, 2003).
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Some history of exchange in marriage It becomes interesting to see how the above discourse plays out in intimate relationships. While it would be tempting to suggest that economists are solely responsible for the permeation of marriage and family lives by terms like evaluation and exchange, this would be erroneous. Numerous historical and contemporary marriage practices demonstrate that marriage had always mediated exchange. The real question is: between whom, and for whose benefit?
A classical anthropological study of the Australian Aborigines by Sir James George Frazer suggested, for instance, that marriage was a key mechanism for building kinship links through the exchange of family members, and in particular, women (in Ekeh, 1974). Frazer studied cross- cousin marriage, and found that when a male married, usually a female relative was given to the tribe of the wife. Frazer concluded that women were property to be exchanged, which made older men wealthy, and young men, poor. Bronislaw Malinowski argued, in contrast to Frazer, that traditional societies did not possess the necessary level of individualisation to make notions such as individual gain appropriate. Malinowski analysed the Melanesian Kula practice of exchange of necklaces and arm shells, and found that barter occurred only between predetermined, permanent and lifelong exchange partners. The social status of the trading parties determined the patterns of exchange, in the first place, and the social nexus was in turn reaffirmed through the exchange, while there was no enhancement of mutual utility through the exchange (1974:27). Kula exchange was a manifestation of the fundamental human impulse to create social ties through an economy, and the participatory ontology significantly complicated the understanding of giving and receiving as polar and mutually exclusive activities. Marcel Mauss followed in Malinowski’s footsteps, with his famous study of gift logic in traditional societies, through the cultural practices of potlatch in Polynesia and North America. This marked the beginnings of French collectivistic theory of exchange and stratification, including theorists like Claude Levi-Strauss.
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Pierre Bourdieu follows this intellectual tradition. Bourdieu offers an analysis of arranged marriage practices in villages in Algiers (1977). On the surface of things, practices such as paying bride wealth appear to be about families gaining wealth. Rituals surrounding marriage brokerage reveal something more complex. Marriage creates an additional family member, an extra pair of hands for the ‘thousand contingencies’ of a tough life in technologically pre-modern conditions. Ultimately, the cohesion and survival of the group is at stake. This makes marriage the whole group’s business, and requires a collective participation by the whole network of interested parties (Bourdieu, 1977:59). Bride wealth that is exchanged has quite a different meaning from simply enriching the receiving party, and this is confirmed by the fact that more honour accrues to the party that returns a large proportion of the payment after hard bargaining:
Each side intends to prove its own ‘worth’, either by showing what price men of honour, who know how to appreciate it, set on alliance with them, or by making a brilliant demonstration of their estimation of their own value through the price they are prepared to pay in order to have partners worthy of them. By a sort of inverted haggling, disguised under the appearance of ordinary bargaining, the two groups tacitly agree to step up the amount of the payment by successive bids, because they have a common interest in raising the indisputable index of the symbolic value of their products on the matrimonial exchange market. (Bourdieu, 1977:56)
Careful assessment takes place: potential spouses’ age difference, previous matrimonial history, sibling order, relation to family authority holder, family alliances and enemies, economic standing, structure of power and authority relations, the fertility of the group. Ultimately, it is the reproduction of the kin system that is sought (Bourdieu, 1977:60).
The practices of matchmaking in Japan and Taiwan show a similar logic (Applbaum, 1995; Blood Jr, 1967; Jordan, 1997; Pimentel, 2000). Robert Blood Jr (1967) writes that while traditional Japanese matchmakers would examine the prospective spouses’ family trees for genetic mental and physical defects, this was done to ensure that the produced offspring was to be healthy, and was done under the supervision of the families involved. Any actual personal interaction between the couple was to be avoided at all costs, 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 94 as personal preferences were considered to be ‘extraneous factors’ that could jeopardise a successful match (Blood, 1967:6).
In a more recent study of Japanese arranged marriage by Kalman Applbaum, there is an even clearer illustration of the social embeddedness of the practice. In 1990, 25-30 percent of all marriages in Japan were arranged by pro nakodokai, or marriage agents. It is important that a matchmaker is someone that the couple knows:
[w]ith whom there is some basis of association either because they are known to a family member, to someone in the workplace, or to someone in the neighbourhood community. The key consideration is that the potential mate should be situated within a set of relations known through prior association to another person in that effective network. (Applbaum, 1995:38)
Traits are matched: family reputation, etiquette, income, occupation, education and social standing. There is an elaborate system of evaluative categorisation, according to cultural prejudices and astrological beliefs. The appeal of arranged marriage is that the match is made impersonally by an objective other. What is most vital is the couple’s preparedness to be married. If one is not ready to be married, one matchmaker says in Applbaum’s study, ‘a crooked nose or glasses may stop the proceedings. […] If however, one is mentally prepared for marriage then almost anyone will do’ (Applbaum, 1995:52).
The community emphasis is echoed strongly again in David Jordan’s study of Taiwanese matchmaking practices (1997). It is considered shameful for a person to be married off as an individual severed from their family (for instance, a woman who has lost her virginity, or is from a poor family; or a man who is relatively old or from a poor family.) As disowned autonomous individuals, such people are treated as being bought, as they do not have the backing of social ties or a home to return to. A somewhat comical comment from a respondent also highlights the appreciation of impersonality: ‘[y]ou don’t want to marry somebody you already know, because you already know what is the matter with her’ (Jordan, 1997:9).
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Such impersonal marriages in traditional settings are not based on free market decisions; the economies involved are not separate from the broader society and the kinship groups that sustain it. Now, let’s consider the application of economic principles to marriages and families by neoclassical economists, and see if anything new is added to tradition, and how such theory talks to social theory. Whose interests do economists and sociologists both claim to defend, and whom do they defend in the end?
Gary Becker and the economics of marriage and family One of the most concentrated attempts to apply economic principles to social life, as Foucault noted, comes from the Chicago School of Economics, and one of its most controversial theorists is Gary Becker. Becker’s work is still widely referenced by his economist colleagues (see Ben-Porath, 1982; Hannan, 1982; Bergstrom, 1989; Jin & Xu, 2004). Even his critics acknowledge the contribution Becker had made to this area of study:
Like all social scientists who study the family, I must position myself in relation to Gary Becker. To a remarkable extent, his vision has shaped the tools we use, the questions we ask, and the answers we give […] In its contemporary form, economics of the family is Gary Becker’s creation. (Pollak, 2002:4-5)
Becker was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize for his life’s effort to redefine the social sphere as a form of the economic domain. In this, Gary Becker’s work is close to Jevons’: Becker does not merely reduce the complexity of human life to utility-maximisation, but he considers all activities to be essentially economic in nature. Anything not seeking utility is categorised as temporary lapse with a utility purpose of its own (Becker, 1976:7).
First, I want to consider the assumptions behind Becker’s theory on the matching process when people seek marriage mates. In A Treatise on the Family (1981), Becker suggests that during the selection stage, individuals match themselves against others according to their ‘quality’ and ‘price’. ‘Higher’ quality people match with others similar to them; ‘lower’ quality people do the same. This is what Becker calls ‘assortative mating’. There are two assumptions here. The first is that there is a standard of quality, which can be 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 96 diminished by illness or previous divorce (as argued by England and Farkas (1986:49), for instance). The second is the assumption that people have stable, fixed ‘qualities’ that can be known. Thus, Becker deems divorced people to have been ‘faulty’ from the start: ‘the average divorced person can be presumed to be more quarrelsome and in other ways less pleasant than the average person remaining married, because an unpleasant temperament is one cause of divorce’ (Becker, 1981:234). The flaws are always there – just not discovered. It is not marital discord that makes one quarrelsome, but one is quarrelsome to start with. 20
Becker acknowledges that perfect knowledge of a potential spouse is impossible only at the beginning. Caught up in the moment, people ‘hardly know their own interests and capabilities, let alone the dependability, sexual compatibility, and other traits of potential spouses’ (Becker, 1981:219). But because being married to someone is better than not at all, they marry with such ‘highly erroneous assessments’. They are ‘satisficing’ by marrying the first reasonable candidate, and then learn everything about them, while looking out for better prospects. Becker is relying here on the notion of ‘bounded rationality’ (Hodgson, c1993:79). Also called ‘procedural uncertainty’ in behavioural and institutional economics, the term refers to the natural limitations in the computational and cognitive capabilities of the decision- maker (orig. Giovanni Dosi and Massimo Egdid, 1991 cited in Beckert and Zafirovski, 2005:582).
However, Becker is still arguing that people are in principle knowable, and they stay the same, so it is merely a matter of time to discover how unsuitable a partner may have always been. Comparison, constant calculation and complete knowledge are deemed prudent strategies in long-term relationships to safeguard oneself against ‘selling oneself short’ – curiously, not unlike the couples whose marital ‘quality’ was tested through ranking and
20 See also the study on arranged marriage by Jin and Xu who rely on Becker’s work. They use the term ‘match quality’ interchangeably with ‘marriage quality’, claiming to assume that individual personality does not change over time and all uncertainties that occur after marriage are subject to rational expectation before the marriage contract is completed (2004:7).
4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 97 comparing their marriage to others’ marriages, by Johnson et al., in the preceding chapter. Becker’s argument falls short of the more sophisticated economic concepts of ‘strong’ substantive uncertainty – absence of the information presumed possible – and ‘fundamental uncertainty’, the impossibility of prospective knowing, due to the inherent creativity and non- predetermined structural change of the social field (Dequech, 2000). Yet it appears from the previous chapter that it is precisely the latter term that is most suited to intimate relationships. Yet people’s relationships, as we already glimpsed from Natasha’s interview, and will see again, are not additive. People both change each other, themselves, and their relationship changes them, as they change it. This is the definition of a non-linear field, par excellence.
Who is to benefit? What is the ultimate goal of Becker’s assortative mating? The answer to this question is counter-intuitive, and had caused much debate in the social sciences. On the one hand, the gain one anticipates from getting married, according to Becker, is purely individual:
According to the economic approach, a person decides to marry when the utility expected from marriage exceeds that expected from remaining single or from additional search for a more suitable mate. Similarly, a married person terminates his (or her) marriage when the utility anticipated from becoming single or marrying someone else exceeds loss in utility from separation. (Becker, 1976:10)
Personal utility, or ‘Z’ to be gained in marriage, is defined as ‘consumption of household-produced commodities’ such as ‘quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love and health status’ (Becker, 1976:207). The point of marriage is to maximise Z.
But at the same time, Becker argues that the ultimate purpose of the ‘optimal match’ between marrying individuals is to maximise the ‘output’ of their marriage (Becker, 1981:70). The efficient functioning of the family unit is sought in rationally distributing tasks between members. This appears to be a collectivist model. The controversial aspect of this argument that has come under steady criticism from feminist economists and sociologists, is Becker’s 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 98 conjecture that all members of a family will benefit when all altruistically contribute, and a single central preference-distributor will decide how to allocate the benefits of this cooperation (see Wooley, 1996; Agarwal, 1997; Bittman & Pixley, 1997; Nussbaum, 2000). Any issues of individual preference and recognition are neutralised. In the name of seemingly value-neutral efficiency embodied by mathematical formulae, traditional gender division of labour is reinstated as the optimum arrangement (Becker, 1981:73). The social dimensions of family life are trumped by the rational imperative. The problem, of course, is that in patriarchal families, the male head of the family has often been far from an altruistic central distributor. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds Becker that in traditional patriarchal societies, women are often ‘denied the basic goods of life, because they have been seen as parts of an organic entity, such as the family is supposed to be, rather than political subjects in their own right’ (2000:247).21 But in response to the problem of the inequities of home life, Nussbaum and others borrow game-theoretical strategies from economists, that are much more normatively individualist than even Becker’s neoclassical economic theory, which is commonly taken to epitomise methodological individualism.
The first step in this process is the assumption that atomised individuals constitute a proper society. Following in Nussbaum’s footsteps, Bina Agarwal, for instance, argues that ‘households/families […] are recognisably constituted of multiple actors, with varying (often conflicting) preferences and interests, and differential abilities to pursue and realise those interests’ (Agarwal, 1997:3). One way to negotiate these different interests is by using game-theoretical strategy developed for heterosexual relationships by Paula England and Barbara Kilbourne (in Friedland et al., 1990; see also Lundberg et al., 1997).
21 The profound functional dependence of the traditional family on the subordination of women’s individual interests, rights and desires is illustrated by an eloquent exclamation once made by the Indian Minister of Agriculture: ‘Are you suggesting that women should be given rights in land? What do women want? To break up the family?’ (Agarwal, 1997:1) 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 99
England and Kilbourne approach the problem thus. They describe the patriarchal heterosexual marriage as a pool of differentiated investments: earnings from men, and domestic labour and care-work from women (1990:172). Women’s investments are ‘non-liquid’, because acquired skills of caring for particular family members are not easily transportable into another relationship, and cannot be sold on the labour market. Men, on the other hand, can utilise their earning capacity whether they are married or not, and regardless of who they are married to. Their investment is more portable, or ‘liquid’. A good bargaining strategy is to offer an investment into a joint venture in such a way that it is not replicable, and so its retraction would be a great loss to the other party (England and Kilbourne, 1990:172). Such investments can be used as a ‘threat points’, to extort benefits:
The better one’s alternatives outside the relationship, and the worse one’s partner’s alternatives, the more one can afford to risk the other partner leaving by bargaining harder within the marriage. […] The threat points of a bargaining situation determine what each person would ‘walk away with’ (and without) if the bargaining over how to allocate the surplus from the relationship-specific investment breaks down and the parties walk away from the relationship. (England and Kilbourne, 1990:177)
In traditional pre-modern societies, women have therefore always had less power (on these terms). Riding on the gains of employment and financial freedom, women today can fully utilise their bargaining power and negotiate conditions that would benefit them in marriage.
On garbage and those damned dishes One area of relational life where this suggestion had been taken up is in relation to the perennial issue of housework. A well-known Australian study of household life conducted in 1997 by UNSW sociologists Michael Bittman and Jocelyn Pixley found that women consistently perform more chores and childcare work at home. For instance, young men in families spent less than half the time in cleaning and cooking and laundry than young women in families (1997:102). 44 percent of men compared to 14 percent of women had someone else prepare food or drink for them and clean up after the meal (1997:100). Women carry out a significantly larger proportion of housework, 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 100 even when their engagement in paid work outside the home is equivalent to that of their male partners (1997:97-115; 151-164).22
What makes concerted action on this numeric inequality difficult, Bittman and Pixley argue, is the persisting ideological framing of women’s work as part of the domestic sphere that does not lend itself to ‘harsh’ calculation. The ideal home is a cosy milieu of intimacy, harmony, love and care that we are socialised to consider inappropriate to measure. There is another new ideal that does not help, equalitarianism - that both men and women should contribute precisely equal amounts of work at home and with children. Family life, Bittman and Pixley remind us, contains an ‘invisible world of hard labour’ (1997:85), and so
[a]ny recognition of the economic value of family activities requires a different mindset, one that puts aside the usual concentration on the emotional quality of family relationships. If this seems an artificial procedure, it is because we have become so accustomed to the idea that family relationships should be about intimacy and affection. At the same time, we are so inured to this normative view that we are also complicit in the process of denying the existence of mundane housework such as putting out the garbage. (1997:85)
Bittman and Pixley argue that both genders, but women especially, cover up the discrepancy between the ideal and reality through a number of tactics colluding in the creation of a sense of ‘pseudo-mutuality’: an illusion that housework is shared justly (1997:146). This is what Beck also referred to as ‘subjective preventive strategy’ in his Individualization (2002:110). When respondents say that they do not think fairness is a precise 50/50 splitting of duties, or when they say that they decided to distribute tasks based on individual skills and external demands, or when women undervalue their contribution, because they multi-task – these are treated as cover-ups.
In the end, the best strategy that can take care of the discrepancy for Bittman and Pixley is applying strict accounting to count the precise numeric
More recent studies of housework patterns in Australian families by Lyn Craig at the UNSW Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) confirm that women still spend more time in unpaid work when they have children than their partners do – with a first child, there is a discrepancy of 40 percent in the additional workload, and with a second child, 45 percent (see Craig, 2002a; 2002b). 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 101 contribution of each partner, and then evaluating the market value of such activities using the ‘third party criterion’ (how much it would cost to purchase equivalent outside the domestic sphere, excluding things that cannot be ‘outsourced’) (1997:89). Then, they refer straight to England and Kilbourne, to allow individuals to decide whether their energy is better spent on education and professional development and thus retain the bargaining chips, while outsourcing the chores (1997:179-187).
Clearly, individual interests are sought to be protected here, as justice, Bittman and Pixley argue (in tandem with Agarwal), ‘must recognise discrete persons […] with aims and hopes that sometimes conflict’ (1997:241-242). In the end, the incalculable dynamics of relational life that are one side of the ‘double life’ of the family are reduced to quantities of time and money. If we take this approach to its logical conclusion, home life is dissolved into a set of contracts, goods and services. On a fundamental level, ordinary life is split into some other, more ‘real’, ideal life of the family, and the messy mundane activities sought to be palmed off. The daily rituals are to be eradicated, as they are superficial. Yet as we will see later in this thesis, it is precisely the proverbial taking out the garbage that helps couples like Nathan and Bella get it together, to feel connected and grounded and real in their relationship. It is precisely such activities that can constitute a rich and meaningful common life.
Paradoxically, the only value Bittman and Pixley uphold is market value, or monetary price; all activities are costed in this way. The problem seen with domestic work is that it had been excluded from the economy: that there are no job descriptions, time sheets or wages in the home. Thus, the only way to value women’s work is through pricing it. Yet, because money earned in the labour market will always buy most services, it will always be a smarter strategy to invest in education and career development. Therefore, both men and women can be advised to concentrate on their individual enterprising activities, away from relationships. And this is indeed what people do in a highly consumerist society – as Beck noted, also. There is much more control to be had over things, than people. 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 102
One dire impact of accepting this argument can be seen in recent studies on the distressing impact that growing working commitments of Australians have on marriages and family life, prefaced in Chapter 2 (Relationships Forum, 2007). The impact of bargaining can be seen also in some anecdotal evidence from Australian and US lawyers that couples often break up during the negotiation stage of their prenuptial agreements. Clearly, relationally, bargaining for individual rights and entitlements does something to the actual relationship. Two interviews support these observations.
‘Brain explosions’: Corey At the time of the interview, Corey and Andrea were both university students at various stages of postgraduate study. They had been in a committed relationship for several years, and were living together.
Corey met Andrea while both were involved in student politics. He was instantly attracted to Andrea. He liked her intelligence and liveliness and they ‘just hit it off’. Corey said that they were both aware of the nature of the relationship early on – that it was serious, because there was emotional care involved. However, a year into being together, Corey ‘had a bit of a brain explosion’. He felt that ‘it was getting quite serious’ and he just wanted to be single again. Corey partially attributed this to wanting to follow the normative expectations of being a ‘real man’. He attended a private boys’ school, where it was ‘very sort of ra ra, we are meant to be tough and get girls and all the rest of it’. He was never ‘good at that’, and now was his last chance to try and ‘compensate’ for his shortage of conquests. Even though he loved Andrea, he was ‘never quite sure’, ‘hadn’t quite decided, absolutely’ that he wanted to be with her. It was not that Andrea ‘wasn’t the person’, but that he ‘hadn’t yet made a decision’ to commit. In a sense, he had become isolated in his own world of fantasies and expectations, and nothing Andrea could do would change the situation.
Corey started regularly ‘going out’ with his sports friends, and seeing a number of women. He describes these women as ‘great fun and great looking’ 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 103 but not ‘intellectually challenging’. While counting his conquests, he started to doubt he was on the right track:
C: I guess, there was you know [pause] various, I suppose there were episodes, where what I would have originally, well, before I did it, I would have thought it would be fun and cool and you know, that I’d enjoy that. Sort of, it would make a great story, you know, have one night stands. But it was just shit. Not that actively shit, like in terms of how I felt the next day. [pause] But that attitude of just sort of accumulating women and stuff. That didn’t actually make me feel any good. Doesn’t deliver any of the same sorts of satisfactions a relationship does.
The other women are means and the encounters are instrumental, assessed for delivering some stimulation that would ‘do something’ for him. One-night stands would ‘make a great story’ – as material for his life’s narrative, to be able to tell stories when he is old, as we sometimes say. Yet, the very substance of his life is a means to that, and objectified. It becomes fodder for the heroic self, ‘gathering experiences’.
Corey knew that his relationship with Andrea was something richer. Eventually, he saw her at a friend’s party, and implored her to take him back. They moved in together. He was now ‘more sure and prepared for the fact that the relationship may last for 40 years’. However, Corey admitted he still wanted to flirt with other women:
C: I don’t think I have completely broken free. I think it’s hard to get away from wanting attention, I suppose, wanting to know. Just because you are in a relationship doesn’t mean you are not unattractive or whatever. But I mean, I don’t want to sound like – I don’t cheat on Andrea. But I suppose I still haven’t entirely within myself gotten over wanting to, say, I suppose, flirt, when I am out sometimes. D: Doesn’t it stay with you? C: Yeah, I am sure it does. I mean I don’t know. It seems like it’d be nice if it didn’t. Well, because it’s a little. [pause] It’s a little, I suppose, you sometimes think if my partner knew she could be quite upset. You know the way you dance with someone or whatever. That would be upsetting. And I suppose in a sense its not a massive deal, but I think another part of me has a lot of respect for people who are together enough to sort of to go, you know, ‘I don’t need to do that’ [muffled].
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In Becker’s terms, Corey is only doing what is rational: he is with Andrea, but he still wants continuous ‘market appraisals’, and is still partly open to ‘bidders’, even if only in the form of flirtation. It is a state of hunger for approval, and a secret guilty craving, Corey admits, because he knows it would hurt Andrea if she knew. It feels that having one foot out of the relationship in this way is an unsettled feeling. In this state, it would be very hard to have the stillness required to be with Andrea and appreciate her for who she was, without immediately reducing her by comparing her to other girls.
A short time after this interview, I found out that Corey and Andrea separated. In later conversation, Corey explained to me that ultimately, at some point he had had to admit to himself that he was not prepared to be with Andrea fully. This may perhaps be a clue to the problematic nature of the decision-making mode, as options never quite disappear, and decisions can always be unmade if they are completely arbitrary and self-driven, without context. We will return to Corey’s interview again in the last chapter of this thesis.
On totals and choosing the best deal: Nathan Another interviewee, Nathan, provided an interesting account of how he viewed the role of his relationships in his life. Nathan and Bella were not living together at the time of the interview.
It had taken Nathan some time to get to the point of feeling committed in this relationship. At the start, after a lengthy period of deliberation, he left his previous girlfriend to be with Bella, yet he still was not sure:
N: For ages I always wanted to be in a relationship, but I was always looking outside the relationship whenever I was inside. Whenever I was in one, (talking about this trading up or trading down!) the aspects of how I looked at the relationships, everyone was saying that they don’t think like that. But as long as you think like that, it’s really hard to build a relationship.
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The reason Nathan offered for his restlessness sheds much light on the dilemma:
N: There is always that possibility that is yet to be explored that new people always offer. There is always the fact that you get to re-express yourself all over again. I think what’s in that is either dissatisfaction with the person you’re with, to some extent, or dissatisfaction with yourself. I think sometimes relationships just provide frameworks in which we can reconstitute ourselves and scrape away those bits that we didn’t like in the previous relationship. As long as there are always those things prevalent, there may be many reasons pushing you to restart another relationship. But if you strip away the dissatisfaction with yourself or the other person, then there is less reason to pursue the possibilities that are unexplored. So I’m not 100 percent certain, but I’m much more satisfied with myself and I’m much more satisfied with Bella, so I want to be with her and not other people.
Nathan understands that his ‘self’ is in lively, creative relationships with different people, and is constitutively contextual. He feels he can become a different person in the different encounters he has with others. This comes out also when he says at the beginning of the interview that he finds it very hard to describe himself, because different things he can ‘pick out’ would apply in particular situations.
However, there is also an instrumental, mirror-like quality about the way Nathan describes the role of other people and relationships in his quest for self-formation. This instrumental attitude characterises Nathan’s feelings about a friend who was getting married not long before the interview took place. At the bucks' party, Nathan’s friend told him in confidence that he missed the kind of intense conversations he used to have with Nathan and their mutual male friends. This puzzled and upset Nathan, because he felt the friend had ‘settled’, ‘given up on finding certain things in certain people’ and had ‘taken the best of what’s left, to some extent’, because his bride could not engage in sufficiently enriching conversation. When I asked Nathan what he thought an ideal lifetime partner should be able to do, again, he was in consumer mode:
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N: If you’re going to be in a relationship where you’re going to commit, there has to be enough there for you to leave open the possibility of them allowing you to express those parts of yourself that you don’t know are there to be expressed. So that means that whatever you already have there has to be able to be expressed. If that’s already closed off, you don’t know what else will be closed off.
The notion of getting ‘enough’ (essentially, the meaning of the word ‘satisfaction’), is a condition and seems an unfair test for the other person. It reminds of a classical Russian fairytale challenge the villain gives to the hero fool: ‘Go there, I don’t know where, and bring me that, I don’t know what’. Even Nathan does not know what he wants, but expects Bella to be ready to allow it. These demands from the partner, from the intimate relationship, are much higher than those of any other relationship in Nathan’s life:
N: I get something else out of my relationship with my friends that Bella would never be able to replace, nor would she want to replace that. Yes, there has to be space in a relationship for it to embrace possibilities that you haven’t conceived of. But the relationship with the other guys (in sport), I know what I’m going to be expressing. There has to be room for growth, but the formula is much more rigid, in a sense.
So team-mates are forgiven for only operating within a limited range of potential (which is probably also not very generous towards them), but Bella is expected to bring out the unexpected in him, and sustain her ability to do so indefinitely. She needs to perform a role of the challenging, flattering, interesting partner. Relationships ‘provide’, ‘offer’ opportunities to reconsider who Nathan is. He ‘gets’ things, heroically ‘restarts’, ‘strips’, ‘scrapes’, ‘reconstitutes’ within the ‘framework’ for the self to roam in; the relationship becomes a collection of ‘experiences’, ‘explorations’, ‘skills’.
Once the concepts of ‘maximisation’ and ‘satisfaction’ enter Nathan’s and Corey’s vocabularies, the infinite – here – incalculable and inexplicable potentiality of relationships, is reduced to a total. Only the logic of totality can enable one to ascertain that something is ‘less than 100 percent’. The individual becomes a container, with a point of ‘contentment’. However, unlike in mathematics, doing things by proportion does not quite work in 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 107 relationships. Almost everything is not enough if one has to add up points to decide on loving someone, or staying with someone – simply because this experience has a different ontology altogether. Roland Barthes describes this:
Something that, starting from totality, actually exceeds it: a totality without remainder, a summa without exception, a site with nothing adjacent (“my soul is not only filled, but runs over” […] enough means not enough […] at last I know that state in which “delight exceeds the possibilities envisioned by desire.” A miracle: leaving all “satisfaction” behind, neither satiated nor drunk. (1990:54-55)
We will return to this different ontology later, in the second part of this thesis, specifically in relation to Nathan’s and Corey’s stories. As we will see later in Chapters 7 and 9, Nathan knows that there are instances in his relationship with Bella when he allows himself to be caught in ordinary situations, and experiences a different way of being in the relationship – a sense of being grounded in it, rather than demanding things from it. This recognition is crucial if we are to see the complex interweave of the identity- based and relational ways of being in all relationships.
The question that preoccupied Nathan when he was torn between his ex-partner and Bella, ‘What do I want?’ is exemplary of alienation of the possessive individualist model. A supposed privilege of the free rational choice-making subject of modernity, it is actually a profoundly impossible question when asked purely in reference to oneself, outside of a context or concrete situation. There is a nebulous sense that there is something always beyond, better; a restless desirous state of ‘this not being it yet’, always reaching out beyond wherever one finds oneself, wherever that happens to be. Time is also experienced differently. Marriage for Nathan is a declaration that the other person offers what Nathan needs at a particular point:
N: If I’m going to be in a relationship and be married, you want to make an expression, a symbolic representation to other people, that this person that you’re getting married to offers you all those things, at this moment in time.
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This implies he already sees other possibilities, later down the track. Because the relationship is being decided from a self-centred mode, a mistake can cost a lifetime sentence of ‘dissatisfaction’. The infinitude of being in a relationship turns into infinity, an intolerably long time – far too long to live with the consequences of a bad choice. It only seems reasonable and rational to think of what one is getting oneself into, and what one will get from it.
The Faustian predicament of homo economicus Corey’s and Nathan’s stories are reminders of a paradigmatic story of Western culture that shares the conceptual concerns of this chapter. It is the story of Dr Faust. Marshall Berman writes that what puts Goethe’s Faust apart from his many predecessors in a long lineage of literary work beginning with Johann Spiess’ Faustbuch of 1587, is that Goethe’s Faust is a thoroughly modern subject. He conceives himself as a symbolic capitalist of both material and inner possessions: things, artefacts, knowledge, experience. His capital is ultimately himself (Berman, 1993:49). Faust is a recognised and esteemed doctor, lawyer, theologian, philosopher, scientist, professor and college administrator. He is surrounded by beautiful and expensive possessions associated with a rich intellectual and aesthetic life: paintings, books and manuscripts. Nevertheless, his achievements, as well as his things, feel to him like a ‘pile of junk’ (Berman, 1993:41).
What has happened is that Faust had turned the world around him into means for his self-cultivation. His triumphs are traps, because they are ‘triumphs of inwardness’ (Berman, 1993:41). He takes drugs, reads, studies art, nature and people to further his intelligence and aesthetic sensitivity. The more expanded his mind and more refined his tastes, the more alienated he is. The world and others have become a never-ending series of ‘nexts’, with every new thing gathered in the hope of ever-more refined stimulation. The poignancy of the situation is that through endless comparison and stimulation, Faust loses the capacity to see something as unique: he becomes blasé. Worse still, he feels devalued himself, for all his riches. He feels disconnected from real life and real concerns of people outside of his room. When he compares himself to others, the possessions and inner qualities are not 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 109 safeguards, but instead, expose him to the possibility of being compared, and ranked lower than others. Mephistopheles comes to Faust’s rescue by promising him that constant stimulation will bring its sought rewards, if only Faust can move and accumulate even faster than he had been. Speed and constant activity and movement devoid of an actual end become virtues: ‘if I stand fast, I shall be a slave. […] It’s restless activity that proves a man’ (Berman, 1993:50).
Here are two contemporary examples of the Faustian predicament. The first is a short description of the pressures Australian young women experience today:
For women, turning 25 is a pressure point. By then, to get what you want out of life, you need to have ticked a few of the boxes. Put yourselves in the shoes of a young woman and try the tick test: pass HSC, don’t become anorexic, get a part-time job, do well at university, keep your friends, don’t get pregnant, start a second degree, aim higher at the office, cement a relationship, play sport, don’t get fat, have a baby before it’s too late. Check your scorecard, even if the ticks outnumber the crosses, it might still be depressing. (Cameron, 2003)
There are many hoops to jump, notches on the belt (or bed post) to gather. At the same time, the goals reached fail to satisfy, as there are always more on the horizon. What keeps one moving is no less than an addiction – to not being still, never taking a pause. As one woman interviewed in the article says: ‘You get addicted to being busy’. And this is precisely the argument of many sociologists about the nature of modern subjectivity. Beck, for instance, writes that the modern individual preoccupies him- or herself with busy- making, weighing between options, where the final decision begins to matter less than the compulsive process of choosing and comparing (Beck, 1992:114).
A second poignant example is popular press coverage of a Cornell University study into the processes of finding partners:
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If your love life reads like a tragic tale of bad choices and missed opportunities then don’t despair, there may be a scientific explanation. You may not be the problem. It’s probably your strategy of selecting a mate that needs a bit of refining. (Yates, 2003)
Neuroscientists Peter Buston and Stephen Emlen, who conducted the original study, set out to test the ‘cognitive processes underlying mate choice in Western society’ (2003:8805). Specifically, they claim to test the hypothesis that people look for partners similar to themselves, drawing on their self- perception. Subjects are asked to assess themselves and then disclose what they look for in a partner. Emlen and Buston hypothesise that the most reproductively successful unions must be stable ones, and stability comes from finding a partner similar to oneself, because otherwise the ‘higher quality mate’ would always ‘trade up’ in partner quality (2003:8805). Quality is broken into four ‘evolutionarily significant’ characteristics: wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, and sexual fidelity. To temper ‘unreasonable’ self-assessment, women are ‘exposed to profiles of physically attractive females’ which they use to compare themselves on a scale, and males, to ‘profiles of socially dominant males’ to rank themselves (2003:8805). There are always poorer and better quality people around, and a rigorously conducted valuation ensures one gets a commensurate partner. A similarity is found, and Buston and Emlen suggest that this needs to be turned into a prescription: that people ‘should not seek the highest quality partner available but should simply look for partners who are similar to themselves.’ Accordingly, counsellors must match people on a trait-by-trait basis (2003:8809). 23
23 Examples of this logic can be seen in internet websites of the burgeoning industry of internet dating (see Gottlieb, 2006). A variety of statistical and pseudo-scientific methods and techniques are employed by ‘in-house experts’ to devise systems of fit. Some, like psychologist Buckwalter, claim to have found that studies of happy married couples suggest homogeneity is key to long-term ‘success’: ‘Similarities are like money in the bank. Differences are like debts you owe’. Some, like anthropologist Helen Fisher, use a typology of neurotransmitters and hormones which she translates into personality classes, akin to the Myers-Briggs typology. She claims to have found which types of people work best together, but she also asks about the qualities of people in their ‘most successful relationships’. Some combine preferred qualities with what is deemed to match, such as celebrity Dr Pepper Schwartz’s ‘Duet Total Compatibility System’. 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 111
My point here is not about whether similarity or difference that brings people together. The real issue here is ranking and comparison, and their constant companions: the dread that one may not be ‘good enough’ and will be swapped for a ‘better specimen’. After all, Yates writes: you must be
honest in your assessment of what you are able to offer; be careful where you set your benchmark; do not congratulate yourself too soon on having reeled in an excellent catch – chances are they are already thinking of upgrading to a bigger pond.
One is always on edge, ranking and being ranked, trading and being traded. This sense of perpetual anxiety and fear of being abandoned is precisely what Bauman and Sennett singled out as the defining malaise of modern relationships, held together ‘until further notice’, while both partners continue to draw the most value out of each other and the arrangement. And this is indeed the paradox of valuation. Simmel was prescient about its false promises of uniqueness – it degrades. And despite their advocacy of bargaining and evaluation, England and Kilbourne, too, admit that the ‘rating- dating game’ and bargaining strategies have a ‘hidden cost’: ‘relative impersonality’ and psychological discomfort (1990:175). It is, indeed, a little humiliating when another person considers you ‘depreciated in value’ if you are ill, or have children from a previous marriage (England and Farkas, 1986:49). Any sense of uniqueness, of the freely given, gratuitous nature of love – becomes impossible. People become cynical, and fatigued by being on the market, judging and judged. And this is not hard to see in contemporary life.
To conclude, according to economic and sociological theories outlined in this chapter, healthy self-interest involves accurate assessment and continuous search for more Z: better meals, more exciting sex life, more successful children, more social prestige, wealth and even better health. In effect, the search for more leaves one in an unsettled state, afraid of missing out. Clearly, both Nathan’s and Corey’s relationships make us question the supposed benefits of such strategies. We will soon see that there are different ways to experience relational life. We are not being sentimental in 4 HOMO ECONOMICUSIN THE FAMILY HOME | 112 reconsidering individualistic bargaining accounting logics in intimate relationships, appealing for a return to the traditional impermeability of the domestic sphere by notions of justice or fairness. We must demand equity, but just not strictly on mathematical or identity terms. We need real concrete participation, recognition and gratitude, and couples tell us this repeatedly. The 50/50 ideal implicit in mathematical diarised models is simply not realistic, not desired. It is a different mode of being, altogether, that is called for – and the second part of this thesis will explore this different way of being. For now, it is important to turn to the actual psychodynamics of identity logic.
5
DESIRE
absence / absence Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object – whatever its cause and its duration – and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
Catch it. Put it in a pumpkin, in a high tower, in a compound, in a chamber, in a house, in a room. Quick, stick a leash on it, a lock, a chain, some pain, settle it down, so it can never get away from you again. Margaret Atwood, ‘The Female Body’
In Chapter 4, I looked at the ways relationships are often constructed as additive dyads composed of two competing individuals. However, what is the precise identity structure of relational life – how do two individuals define themselves in relation to each other? What constitutes a healthy sense of selfhood in relationships? To answer these questions, this chapter considers a dynamic famously explored by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: the experience of difference purely in binary-oppositional terms. Hegelian difference and desire are sometimes promoted as constructive solutions to the problems of modern relationships. With the benefit of insights from an interview from Isabelle and Donald Winnicott’s work, we examine the psychodynamic problems of the Hegelian scenario.
Isabelle’s tale At the time of the interview, Isabelle and Jason had already separated. They had been together for five years, with the exception of an eight-month separation in between. The relationship started on a tentative note. Isabelle had just left a long-term partner, and did not want to be with someone else so soon. She was also unsure if she liked Jason. However, she was attracted to him and ‘fascinated’ by him, as he had a very different cultural and religious background, and was an athlete. In the beginning, Isabelle felt that she was 5 DESIRE | 114 more ‘experienced’, and more ‘sophisticated’, than Jason. She smugly told her friends that she could ‘teach him a thing or two’.
Quite soon, Isabelle’s bravado began to wear off. Jason came from a religious family and was apprehensive about having a sexual relationship outside of marriage. He also declared he was not interested in having a girlfriend, because he was busy with his athletic career, studies and commitments to his parents and older siblings and their families. Isabelle was very attracted to Jason by this stage. While originally, she was not sure whether she liked Jason as a person, now Jason’s withholding behaviour prompted her to pursue him. He wasn’t ‘falling’ for her, the ‘amazing’ person she was) and she was revved up by his withholding. The longer she went without seeing him, the more intense their weekly meetings became. Isabelle now felt that she was ‘performing’ for Jason, to appeal to him as a ‘good catch’. From feeling smug and in control in the beginning, she now felt caught herself.
After some months of such dynamics, Isabelle told Jason she was leaving, because she did not feel he would fall in love with her. Jason responded by saying that he was in love with her. Even though Isabelle could not understand how Jason’s withdrawn behaviour indicated such feelings, they ‘officially’ became partners. They went dancing, spent time at each other’s houses, and their physical relationship blossomed. However, there was still some doubt in Isabelle’s mind about the long-term potential of the relationship. Jason had some strong opinions based on his religious upbringing, which he was not prepared to compromise. He held strong views about the irrevocability of marriage, and was often apprehensive about Isabelle’s convictions. However, Isabelle felt that this contradicted the way he acted towards her, as frequently, he was not ‘there’ for her. Isabelle felt that if they married, Jason would expect her to just fulfil the traditional roles of a mother and wife. She felt that he wanted security above all, while she wanted to travel and ‘explore life together’. Jason often ‘misread’ Isabelle’s intentions when she did caring things for him, or dismissed them, which upset her. Finally, Isabelle felt that Jason’s family was distrustful of her. The fact that 5 DESIRE | 115
Jason worked for his older brother and sister-in-law meant that their influence mattered, and affected their relationship. She felt that his primary loyalty was away from her. After about two years, after some months of growing distant, the couple had an argument and Jason suggested they needed time apart.
When the realisation of their actual separation sank in, Isabelle felt ‘desolate’. She was devastated to hear from Jason that he was happier being single, and interpreted that as him ‘choosing every other woman over [her]’. She missed being known by him, and the humour they shared. Isabelle felt ‘abandoned’: as though she was literally ‘left behind’ by Jason while he moved on, and he shut her out of his life. She was depressed and lonely, and daily decisions felt arbitrary. Isabelle kept communicating with Jason. Reflecting on this time now, she realised that she wanted some kind of perfect recognition, agreement, ‘enveloping’ from Jason. She could not accept any communication where his thoughts and feelings differed from what she wanted, or expected. Thus, she preferred to focus on carefully reconstructing her own version of events and their dissolved relationship. She kept reliving the hurt by keeping it alive.
What was Isabelle after? The consequent series of events complicate the simplistic understanding of the goal of desire as simply the attainment of its object.24 After almost a year, Isabelle met someone, and told Jason. He almost immediately asked her to be back with him. Isabelle was simultaneously overjoyed, and angst-ridden. While she ‘got what she wanted’ – Jason wanting to be with her – she still saw his enmeshment with his family, and certain expectations of her, as problematic. Restarting the relationship just as it was before did not feel right, but she had strong feelings for Jason, missed him, and just wanted them to be together. Having gone through a lot of emotional turmoil, she felt she had to try:
I: All that pain… They say that you don’t know till it’s gone, but I don’t think that’s quite right. First, the vanity. It’s like I was stripped, exposed:
This reminds of the proverb many cultures share: ‘Don’t wish too hard, or you’ll get what you want’ (Phillips, 1994:42). 5 DESIRE | 116
all my insecurity. The constant: ‘Am I not good enough for you?’ Accusing him of leaving when I had a lot to answer for, too. A friend gave me a song back then, which sums it nicely: something like, ‘How long will it take to realise that such love songs are not about your lover, but about yourself?’ […] I was going on, like, ‘I don’t know what his plans are. I don’t know if he likes me. Why does he do that?’ And Anthony said, ‘But how do you feel about him? What do you think?’ It was actually harder to answer. […] When we were apart, I was comparing everything to when we were together. Like, ‘I must have been happy then, because now I am so sad’. ‘I must have had what I need now’. Especially with friends, I was just in my perpetual gloomy longing mood. Boring all my friends with conversations that would inevitably spin down into talking about loss. The real place I wanted to be was in the fantasyland of ‘being with J’. [When] I had him, here it was again. Our different interests and all that, my feeling he could be callous with people.
Jason was aware of Isabelle’s ambivalence. However, the couple got back together. Problems resurfaced some time after, which we have a chance to see in the next chapter. Jason was beginning to work longer and less predictable hours, and did not want to move in with Isabelle. She spent a lot of her time alone, and ‘could not get through’ to Jason about her loneliness. She said she was ‘running on hope’ a lot of the time. As this became unmanageable, some three years after their reunion, the couple separated again, this time for good.
What complicates this couple’s story is their struggle with commitment and what each of them understood it to be. Isabelle wanted Jason to be more similar to her, for them to be more ‘on the same wavelength’. But even when he tried, and when she ‘had’ him, she often distanced herself from him. On the other hand, when he ‘rejected’ her, she wanted him. This brings up the possibility that she somehow enjoyed the feeling of being rejected. She needed Jason, in some form, in her life. At the same time, Jason admitted to Isabelle when they were separating, that he did not make earnest effort to look after her, because he was unsure if she was ‘the one’, and his efforts could have been a waste. She partly knew about this ambivalence, but stayed. Even though Isabelle complained to friends that she was being treated poorly, she still stayed, secretly hoping that she’d finally make Jason see ‘his wrong ways’. But when Jason did draw closer, she sprang back with 5 DESIRE | 117 her original pride and inflated sense of self-importance (‘I am better than that’).
Isabelle was clearly reliant on Jason for something important. When she felt lonely and ‘abandoned’, it was an intolerable condition precisely because her sense of who she was became intrinsically dependent on Jason’s treatment. Isabelle fantasised about not simply being with Jason again, but him confirming her, agreeing with her, being the same as her, being the partner she wanted. In this, Isabelle’s experiences remind of Roland Barthes’ dramatic posturing in his brilliant Lovers’ Discourse (1990). Barthes’ lover X looks away, or listens to something else while Barthes speaks, and Barthes is distraught. X’s failure to absolutely confirm him forces Barthes into ‘sordid calculations’ akin to Isabelle’s: seduction, self-aggrandisement, self- pity:
I am spending my qualities for nothing: a whole program of affects, doctrines, awareness, and delicacy, all the brilliance my ego can command dies away, muffled in an inert space, as if – culpable thought – my quality exceeded that of the loved object, as if I were in advance of that object. (Barthes, 1990:167)
Revved up by his impotence, akin to Isabelle, Barthes proceeds to dramatise his predicament:
Now absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who loves, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense – like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction… [A]n always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you. To speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute; it is to say: ‘I am loved less than I love’. (1990:13)
The problem is, of course, that X may not be silent at all. It is just that X fails to confirm Barthes’ brilliance. Barthes wants nothing less than a Lacanian primal scene with the gratifying mother as mirror (1990:168). When X does not do this, Barthes dies as the Subject he wants to be. The pathos of this fundamentally post-structuralist scenario is that confirmation is always 5 DESIRE | 118 deferred. Philosophically, we can examine such ways of relating through the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic.
On playing masters In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1972), Hegel sets up the basic terms of situations such as Isabelle’s, that occur often in social and relational life. Hegel understands the notion of identity itself, at its most abstract, to be the objectification of splitting forms of an undifferentiated ‘fluid medium’. Some forms ‘become the other through this difference’ (Hegel, 1972:108). In social life, newly split consciousness seeks identity – an ontological sense of constitutive integrity and self-certainty. Reflexivity takes consciousness out of immersion, and through the process of apprehending otherness, consciousness becomes self-consciousness: ‘certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life’ (Hegel, 1972:109).
According to Hegel, the essence of self-consciousness from now on is pure desire (1972:105,109,110). Self-consciousness becomes identity, ‘I’, and when it becomes:
[c]ertain of the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty, a certainty that has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner. (1972:109)
The paradoxical and fraught relation that ensues is the Lord/Bondsman, or Master/Slave, struggle. Self-certainty seeking self- consciousness posits itself as Master – the primary definer that needs to annihilate difference. In order to do that, the Master takes ‘only the dependent aspect of the thing’ to have ‘the pure enjoyment of it’ (1972:116). The enslaved Other is treated as an ‘inessential, negatively characterised object’ (1972:113). Ultimately, in order for the Master to feel absolute self-certainty, all Otherness needs to be eliminated altogether (1972:113).
Here, the Master confronts a fundamental obstacle to the attainment of this objective. The sole driving force and modus operandi of self- 5 DESIRE | 119 consciousness is desire – a restless antithetical, assimilatory disposition towards the world. But if the Master succeeds in making everything an undifferentiated ‘lifeless unity’ (1972:114), then there is no difference, and no possibility of uniqueness or supremacy. The process of splitting and pushing off would have to be re-initiated for the Master to retain a sense of vitality and purpose. The only way to do so is by keeping desire alive.
This produces a highly disadvantageous situation for the Master, one that makes his supremacy illusory. Instead of annihilating the Slave, the Master must keep it alive and give it sufficient autonomy to make the Slave’s confirmation of the Master’s status freely offered. Thus, the Master becomes thoroughly dependent on the Slave. The Master ends up projecting onto the Slave the self-loathing of having to play such charades due to his fundamental inability to be completely autonomous. Objectification goes hand in hand with self-objectification: ‘what the Lord does to the other he also does to himself’ (1972:116). Neither Master nor Slave is such through some inherent essential qualities; they are mutually constituting and defining. These are, indeed, the banes of identity struggles involved in colonialism and patriarchal gender relations.
Isabelle’s paradoxical ambivalence about Jason as a partner coupled with her dependence on being with him is a good illustration of the Hegelian scenario. She resents his real or imagined qualities, but this is essential for her to maintain a sense of superiority and the feeling that she is ‘gracing his side with her presence’. As long as he goes along with this, the relationship can be discussed, and Isabelle has a sense of purpose and a cause for righteous indignation. When Jason shows that he is an independent agent, what disappears is the very identity-defining structure Isabelle had relied on for a very long time – the ego-bolstering illusion of Jason’s desire and need for her. At the heart of her hurt is wounded pride and sheer horror of finding out that the Slave is independent, and can leave. It is not at all incidental that spurned lovers often fantasise about the death of their ex-partners, or violent and dramatic ‘slashing’ scenes where they cut off all association with the 5 DESIRE | 120 person who caused pain. They seek no less than the annihilation of the cause of their identity’s collapse. Hegel illustrates clearly the deceptive facade of the roles of Masters and Slaves. Masters do not have the control they want; Slaves are not powerless dupes. The game is ultimately fruitless, maintaining a self- perpetuating and torturous loop of desire. Nevertheless, Hegelian strategies remain in our culture in various guises. Consider, for instance, the revival of patriarchal gender roles for heterosexual courtship, in response to the difficulties of keeping relationships together in contemporary Western societies.
Flirting, teasing, trapping: Strategies of control in relationships A classic description of courtship is found in Georg Simmel’s essay ‘Flirtation’. His opening reference to Plato’s definition of love, as the ‘intermediate state between having and not-having’ (1984:133), immediately defines love as possessive desire. Even though Simmel insists that genuine love cannot be exhausted by the attainment of the desired object, he defines heterosexual relationships in identity-object terms: ‘the object of love is a woman and subject a man’ (1984:133). Simmel argues that objects become desirable when they cost something, such as effort and energy expanded in pursuing them.
The essence of flirtation is in its ability to enact opposing actions and qualities simultaneously: having and not having, proximity and unavailability, aversion and submission, consent and refusal (1984:134-135). In Simmel’s times, flirtation is one of the few forms of power a woman has. Disenfranchised and subordinate in legal status and civil personhood to her father and then her husband, a woman resorts to the form of agency allotted to her within the patriarchal set-up – that of bait. Eventual submission brings her moment of ‘power’ to an end:
The power of the woman over consent and refusal is prior to the decision. Once she has decided, in either direction, her power has ended. Flirtation is a means of enjoying this power in an enduring form. And at least in a number of cases, it can be observed that women who are very domineering are also very flirtatious. (Simmel, 1984:141) 5 DESIRE | 121
Simmel argues that women need to ensure that their investment of energy is worthwhile, and therefore are much more particular about the qualities of the individual men they flirt with. Meanwhile, men’s desire is proportional only to women’s avoidance: Since the woman is the chooser she is influenced much more by the individuality of the man than he is by hers. The fact that the man has this or that specific characteristic is responsible for her choice. The man, however, is more disposed to pursue the woman as woman. (1984:140)
Thus, the archetypal woman remains the archetypal unknown ‘other’ to man:
It seems to be the universal experience of the male sensibility that the woman, indeed, the deepest, the most devoted woman, whose charm is inexhaustible – holds back some ultimate, indecipherable and unattainable quality even in the most passionate offering and disclosure of herself. (Simmel, 1984:147)
Now consider the instrumentalisation of flirtation in a best-selling ‘self- help’ publication directed to young women, The Rules (1995), by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. This book sold over 1.4 million copies worldwide, and has multiple sequels, as well as a ‘program’ and a ‘support network’ in the US. Fein and Schneider made appearances on many US shows, and film rights to the original book have been apparently bought by Paramount Pictures. ‘Doing The Rules’ entered the vocabulary of many young women growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Interestingly, The Rules drew support from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, who was introduced alongside other conservative family policy strategists in Chapter 2 of this thesis (in her Why There are No Good Men Left).
Fein and Schneider suggest that when a contemporary relationship fails, it is likely to be due to the fact that the woman expressed ‘male’ qualities such as initiative and forthrightness. Women are urged to rediscover and accept that both in the workplace and in dating, agency is male prerogative: ‘women never make anything happen, and need to trust in the natural order of things – that man pursues woman’ (1995:27). Thus, in courtship, if a woman speaks to a man first, or shows active interest (perhaps thinking she is ‘just 5 DESIRE | 122 being friendly’ or that the man might be shy and needs help), she is interfering with whatever was supposed to happen or not happen, perhaps causing a conversation or a date to occur that was never meant to be and inevitably getting hurt in the process. Eventually he’ll talk to the girl he really wants and drop you. (Fein & Schneider, 1995:27)
Every man is a hunter and a pursuer ‘by nature’. Thus, in order for a man to eventually propose (the ultimate goal of the program), Fein and Schneider suggest that a woman must never make eye contact but must be in the man’s field of vision, and receptive to his advances. Should a man talk to her, a woman should not try to be clever, because ‘men aren’t interested in women who are witty in a negative way’ and ‘most men find chatty women annoying’ (1995:32). Instead, she can listen and laugh at his jokes. She must never call the man herself. The aim of The Rules is to make a man so exasperated by being led on that he must ‘ring’ his prey – that is, propose marriage. This, according to the blurb on the back cover, will ‘bring out the best in you and the man’, and will ‘ensure that he falls head over heels in love with you’. A woman who ignores The Rules does so at her peril, as she is guaranteed to find out, eventually, that her man never truly wanted her. Women must play if they want to get married: ‘being a good sport could make the difference between being just another date and his future wife’ (Fein & Schneider, 1995:39). Who is in control in this chase? Despite the man’s supposed prerogative of mastery, he is made out to be enslaved by his need to pursue. Despite the woman’s supposed self-protection and control, she has to self-objectify herself. Shulamith Firestone, a second-wave feminist philosopher, offers some more cutting insight on this set-up.
At first, it would appear that Firestone’s 1970 paper ‘Love: A feminist critique’ calls for the return to the pre-feminist role assignment in courtship to retain the sexual power women in patriarchal societies held over men. That is, women were expected to ritually work men into a state of ‘physical torment’ during courtship, and in this way, compel men to marry them: ‘[m]en… expected that any self-respecting woman would keep them waiting, would play all the right games without shame: a woman who did not guard her own 5 DESIRE | 123 interests in this was not respected’ (Firestone, 1998:53). Feminist revision of gender roles urged to abandon manipulative games, seeking to establish more equal, open, and honest relationships with men. Perhaps this was a mistake, Firestone muses – as men still do not value women for their openness and wit, and prefer the game of being teased and kept at bay:
A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved… [F]or much as men were glad to enjoy their wit, their style, their sex, and their candlelit suppers, they always ended up marrying the Bitch, and then, to top it all off, came back to complain what a horror she was. (1998:55)
In freely offering men the benefits of women’s liberation without the expectation of the traditional reciprocal obligation of marriage, in opening their homes, beds, kitchens and bank accounts, women have sold themselves short, losing the ‘little protection they had so painfully acquired’ (1998:55).
But at this point, Firestone points out the downsides of playing the game. The woman baiting a man will despise him for being a sexually- stupored dupe: ‘Though she knew his love to be false, since she herself engineered it, she can’t help feeling contempt for him. […] She was merely the closest to his fantasy image’ (1998:53). She realises that the man knows nothing of her, but wants her purely because he cannot have her. The fact that she had to make so much effort for someone who does not even want to know her as a person makes her feel devalued, and makes it necessary to stage a disappointment scene, that he was ‘decidedly not worth it’:
Now what happens after she had finally hooked her man, after he had fallen in love with her and will do anything? She has a new set of problems. Now she can release the vise, open her net, and examine what she had caught. Usually she is disappointed. […] It is usually way below her level. (1998:52)
The outcome of the chase is self-loathing and bad faith. Fein and Schneider’s ‘best in a man’ is blind worship and pursuit for capture. The ‘best in a woman’ is traditional self-objectification for man’s benefit, in her appearance and behaviour. The man is entrapped in a lifetime of deception and chasing. Who is the hunter and the hunted in these games anyway? How could someone who loses their interest in a woman the very instant she shows any agency be 5 DESIRE | 124 a committed and genuinely caring partner, lover, parent? Do all men want dolls?
We can attempt to answer these questions by referring back to Jason’s and Isabelle’s tortured situation. The roles were reversed, but the same dynamics are there. When Jason keeps Isabelle chasing him, she is revved up with desire for him. When he is present, she is repelled, overwhelmed by his sudden presence. When she goes off with a potential new lover, Jason comes back, only to fall back into his reclusive ways. The hunter and the prey keep changing roles, and yet there is no connection, there is no intimacy, as long as the game continues. As Isabelle herself attested, the most frustrating thing for her was that while getting tired and sick with the emotional and physical drain of making herself an attractive decoy, convincing Jason about their relationship, worrying about not being good enough, she felt somehow alienated from herself - distracted, detached from the things she instinctively knew really mattered. She was unsettling herself, and almost deliberately limiting herself by distraction from her work and her interests. Unconnected to the ego directly, such ordinary things were simply not as compulsive or addictive. Quite clearly, there is no sense of health – relational or individual – about such games.
An important element of Fein and Schneider’s, and Firestone’s arguments, for this thesis, is that their wisdom is retrospective. Having experienced the pain of relationships that disintegrated, having seen first hand how trust can be broken, someone has to be blamed and strategies have to be brought in place to ensure this never happens again. The Rules demonise the man: Remember, early on in a relationship, the man is the adversary. […] He has the power to hurt you by never calling again, by treating you badly, or by being around but indifferent. While it’s also true that you can reject him, the fact is that it’s the man who notices you, asks you out, and ultimately proposes marriage. He runs the show. (Fein and Schneider, 1995:46)
The Rules are a kind of a practical guide for people like Natasha, or Bella, from the preceding chapter – a pain-proofing instruction guide. It is easier to 5 DESIRE | 125 demonise the other as the enemy, rather than re-engage in an open consideration and acceptance of the failure of a relationship which may have been an outcome of a complex sequence of events and interactions (such as it is with Isabelle and Jason). It is far more rewarding for the hurt ego to feign powerlessness and exploitation.
The very unfortunate broader social consequences of this that we can observe in our society, is that instead of continuing the challenging process of developing deeper, more real and genuine relationships between men and women, in knee-jerk response to complexity, regressive gender politics is revived, alongside conservative moral discourses. PREP’s Stanley (2005), too, urges women to hold off in relation to cohabitation and commitment, by claiming to have found evidence that men are only fully supportive of their wives, not girlfriends, while women tend to give away the benefits of marriage without due reciprocity. In popular culture and on the streets, we also have the perennial revival of shallow gender stereotypes: the standard misogynist set of female tags (the unattainable Snow Queens, cockteasers, gold-diggers, high-maintenance girls, trophy wives), and male tags (led by their cock, hunters, power-obsessed, players, emotionally clueless, money-bags). Both hurting and bewildered genders attribute power reciprocally, while in reality, nobody gets any closer to intimacy.
On objects and the paradox of autonomy (language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother’s departure and return: a paradigm is created). Absence becomes an active practice, a business (which keeps me from doing anything else); there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies). Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
Psychoanalytical theory helps at this point, to understand the dimensions of desirous, alienated ways of being described in this chapter so far. The key developmental task in infancy, argues psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, is healthy differentiation. It is a way of being during which one is not merged in an unrealistic state of union with all otherness, is not using otherness instrumentally, and is not insisting on autonomy in isolation. Healthy differentiation is an ontological state of being ‘unintegrated’ – where one is 5 DESIRE | 126 able to draw on potential resources in times of isolation or stress. The inability to do so, or repeated stressful situations, invoke anxiety and regression to states of ‘disintegration’, even when one grows up. In the rest of this chapter, I want to argue that some individuals’ Hegelian experiences in antagonised relationships, such as Isabelle’s, or Barthes’, can be seen as experiences of disintegration.
According to Winnicott, at the beginning of a child’s life, the mother indulges him/her in a fantasy of merger: ‘the infant takes from the breast that is part of the infant, and the mother gives milk to an infant that is part of herself’ (Winnicott, 1991:12). The infant increasingly notices the times of the mother’s absence. He/she begins to play with objects: a thumb, foot, a toy or a blanket. One such object is singled out, and tested by the infant through ‘affectionate mutilation’. This inaugurates the infant’s experience of difference:
The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on, the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you’. ‘I love you’. ‘You have value for me, because of your survival of my destruction of you’. ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy’. (Winnicott, 1991:90)
Winnicott calls this a ‘transitional’ object. The transitional object facilitates the experience of ‘unintegration’ – a state of being held, companioned, while the infant can relax his/her ego boundaries and ‘flounder’, without orientation, or needing to react to external factors (Winnicott, 1965:34). During this stage, the mother must be present and available, but must also start to gradually dispel the infant’s illusion of their merger by not pre-empting the infant’s wishes, but allowing him/her to ask for things, to point (Winnicott, 1965:50-51). In being companioned but not ontologically ‘one’, the infant learns to be in a healthy relation to ‘inner objects’ such as memories:
The basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present. […] Being able to enjoy being alone along with another person who is also alone is in itself an experience of health. Lack of id-tension may produce anxiety, but time-integration of the personality enables the individual to wait for the natural return of id-tension, and to enjoy sharing solitude, that is to say, solitude that is relatively free from the property that we call ‘withdrawal’ […] The relationship of the individual to his or her internal objects, along with confidence in regard to internal relationships, provides of itself a sufficiency of living, so that temporarily he or 5 DESIRE | 127
she is able to rest contented even in the absence of external objects and stimuli. (1965:30-32)
Winnicott calls unintegration ‘ego-relatedness’ – ‘the relationship between two people, one of whom at any rate is alone; perhaps both are alone yet the presence of each is important to the other’ (1965:34). Interestingly, he suggests ‘liking’ others is this kind of relation, whereas ‘love’ is an id-relationship (1965:31). Liking may refer here to a less self-centred state, a comfort in someone’s presence, being side by side in a companioned, yet differentiated, state. Winnicott may be using the word ‘love’, then, to refer to a more identified state, where the self is immediately drawn into the primal mechanics of identity negotiation. As we will see in Chapter 7, this is not the only way to understand this word.
The mother may sometimes fail to allow the infant to develop autonomy. She can do so through continuing to outguess his/her needs, or alternatively by becoming overwhelmed by the infant’s need for attention and leaving him/her completely alone too early. Then, the infant may develop strategies to survive the ‘unthinkable anxiety’ of being left alone. Such strategies fall under the umbrella of ‘disintegration’ (1965:58): a ‘sophisticated defence that actively produces chaos in the absence of maternal ego-support’ (1965:61). The infant stages situations where objects are manipulated to feign omnipotence again.
Famous stories of disintegration abound in literature. A childhood story from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is one. In an early formative experience, little Marcel is going through a painful episode of loneliness in his bedroom in the attic, while his mother is entertaining guests downstairs, having forgotten to kiss him goodnight. Marcel devises an elaborate scheme to entice her to come upstairs. This does not work. Eventually, his parents are walking up to their bedroom, and he catches her on the staircase. His father indulges him, by allowing his wife to sleep in the child’s bedroom to keep him company. But even though Marcel’s wish came true, his victory has a bitter edge of loss. He now sees that his mother is an autonomous, separate being; that she is not under his control. She is also 5 DESIRE | 128 mortal, and one day will leave him for good. Throughout his later relationships with women, Marcel experiences this sense of loneliness and desire for a merger he knows impossible. Proust wants women to come to him of their own accord, but instead he has to pursue them, while feeling left behind as they carry on with their lives without him.
Gabriel Josipovici encapsulates little Marcel’s crisis in a succinct cameo of a boy going for a walk with his mother, in Touch (1996). The child instinctively takes his mother’s hand when they go for a walk, but one day, the hand is not there. From the hands held together being ‘an unseen, unthought- about ground of his universe’ (1996:30), the world splits. The hand and the mother must be mastered, through any means possible: ‘Should the owner of the hand be threatened? Or cajoled? Or both?’ (1996:30). The boy fantasises that by having the hand back, all will be back to normal. However, his sense of wholeness is not commensurate with the totality of adding hands together again. For Josipovici and Proust, this is the Edenic fall of knowledge, heralding adulthood.
Another very Hegelian strategy of regaining a sense of control over the mother is creating a dependent surrogate, and another famous story that captures this is in Freud’s essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1984:283- 287). Freud’s grandson is a ‘good boy’. He conscientiously obeys orders not to touch things and does not cry when his mother leaves him on his own. He often throws toys out of his cot, with a loud drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’, which Freud reads to be the word ‘fort’ (‘gone’, in German). Others pick them up for him, and he responds with a triumphant ‘da’ (‘yes’, or ‘here’). Then he elaborates on this game. The boy ties a piece of string to a wooden reel, and throws it out of his curtained cot, out of his sight, accompanied by ‘o-o-o-o’. Then he pulls on the string, retrieves the toy, and exclaims ’da’.
Freud speculates that the boy achieves a great cultural feat – he renounces his need for the mother. Instead of being a passive subject to her will, he is now active. Moreover, the boy can now fantasise, if the reel is to be a substitute parent, that he himself is sending his mother with a masterful 5 DESIRE | 129 declaration: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself’ (1984:285). Later, he does the same in reference to his father, who was away at the war front – throwing a toy on the floor and exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ This kind of separation is a willed one, and more tolerated – ‘[t]he chaos of disintegration may be as “bad” as the unreliability of the environment, but it has the advantage of being produced by the baby and therefore of being non-environmental. It is within the area of the baby’s omnipotence’ (Winnicott, 1965:61). The child maintains a sense of wholeness with the aid of a wilful ego, using otherness to push off it – and even gets some pleasure from the experience. While such dynamics occur in stressful situations in adulthood also, Winnicott insists that an adult life wholly built on self-induced and subsequently managed crises and lacking in ability to be in healthy unintegrated solitude, is a ‘false life’ (Winnicott, 1965:34).
Melancholia, clearly present in some of Isabelle’s tales of loneliness, is another disintegrative dynamic in relationships. In his essay ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1984), Freud distinguishes between the two terms. The healthy task of mourning is ‘loosening the fixation of the libido’ and ultimately impelling the ego to declare the object dead, and to reincorporate the externally invested energy of the libido (to ‘decathect’ it), so as to be able to reinvest it in a new object. A melancholic, on the other hand, like the Master dependent on the objectified Slave, refuses to give up the object, because it is still intrinsic to his/her project:
In melancholia countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault. […] To come to an end, either after the fury has spent itself or after the object has been abandoned as valueless… The ego may enjoy in this the satisfaction of knowing itself as the better of the two, as superior to the object. (Freud, 1984:266-267)
When the absent lover is alive, yet absent, the hurt other lover may sadistically debase them. This way, the absent lover is maimed, and ‘benevolently’ taken under the wing (‘Who would want you now?’). Self- mutilation, however, can also be a way of keeping oneself stimulated, as a suffering dramatic protagonist of a drama. This is Barthes’ ‘twiddling of the 5 DESIRE | 130 wound’ (Barthes, 1990:161), or Isabelle’s self-traumatisation and drama, pushing Jason away defiantly, thinking he would come back. The strength of her desire is directly proportional to the strength of the rejection – for they are the same energy. The disintegrative movements, the self-induced ‘falling apart’ and the excessive active pushing away are better tolerated than the passivity of recognition of a relationship not working, as at least the ego can take credit.
It is not incidental that Isabelle said, towards the end of her interview, that learning to be on her own in what felt like a healthy way was one of the hardest, but most rewarding lessons she had to learn after separating from Jason for good. This new state of being that she was gradually able to experience was a re-immersion in the world, through interest:
I: Things are becoming interesting again. It’s exciting! Yes. Not unpicking wounds or getting wound up by certain kinds of people, and going on the merry-go-round again. Noticing […] Like coming to life again. Noticing situations, or people, strange and somehow touching.
She referred to this new healthy state as ‘being at two’, through experiences such as listening to music, or being in a garden. Crucially, too, while she still felt that she had developed a lot of her stronger values that now governed her life in relation to the values that Jason and his family represented to her, such use of her experience did not seem negative anymore. Instead, she was using the richness of her experience, even if painful, to make something good of it.
What we must look at now, in response to this, is how couples can foster a sense of wholeness and not fall into the above patterns. We must see what ‘being there’ means ontologically, and what discourses can help with fostering presence.
This fragile life between birth and death can nevertheless be a fulfilment – if it is a dialogue. In our life and experience we are addressed; by thought and speech and action, by producing and by influencing new are able to answer. For the most part we do not listen to the address, or we break into it with chatter. But if the word comes to us and the answer proceeds from us then human life exists, though brokenly, in the world. The kindling of the response in that ‘spark’ of the soul, the blazing up of the response, which occurs time and again, to the unexpectedly approaching speech, we term responsibility. We practice responsibility for that realm of life allotted and entrusted to us for which we are able to respond, that is, for which we have a relation of deeds which may count – in all our inadequacy – as a proper response.
Martin Buber, The Way of Response
6
‘BEING THERE’:
BETWEEN COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNION
I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to cry with you. A song on the radio, 2004
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’
This chapter marks an ontological shift away from ways of being with others that are identity-focused and self-presentational. The relational, empathetic, presence-focused ways presented from here onwards challenge the picture we’ve had so far: that intimacy in relationships is based solely on symbolic and material exchange between self-seeking individuals. This chapter starts this second part of the thesis by examining the understanding of healthy communication in pedagogical literature, and couples’ experiences of dialogue. David Bohm reminds us that communication is related to ‘communion’, an ontologically different phenomenon, and the work of Carl Rogers introduces the notion of presence in relationships.
Half sick of shadows She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said. Alfred Tennyson, ‘Mariana’
Isabelle, whom we met in the previous chapter, frequently repeated during our conversation that she wanted Jason to ‘be there’ for her. When she moved house, for instance, Jason asked her whether she needed help, but also told her that he was going to be busy on the day. Isabelle’s family helped her. As 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 133 she was cleaning the house, however, she said she was still hoping that Jason would turn up to help:
I: I found myself, um, feeling sick from the fumes of the chemicals, scrubbing the balcony door, and hoping he’d just come over, get a brush and join. When I brought it up he just blew up, saying he offered, and I said no. He said he didn’t know what I wanted. And I remembered this story I saw on TV the other day. A Nigerian woman living in Paris was saying how in France, people always asked if you needed help. In Nigeria, when there was trouble in your life, the whole village turned up at your house and started doing stuff.
Jason assumed that because Isabelle did not ask, she did not want help. To Isabelle, turning up unannounced to help was synonymous with being a caring partner who thought beyond what was said, and imagined what she may have needed.
According to relationship pedagogical literature, Isabelle in this instance was not an ‘assertive’ communicator. The term ‘assertiveness’ comes from a popular 1993 book Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Living, by Alberti and Emmons. Australian communication expert Michael Kaye links being assertive and comfortable with self-disclosure, and an augmented sense of agency and ‘active orientation to life’ (Kaye, 1994:143). Assertiveness is presented as one’s natural prerogative, making failure to assert one’s feelings ‘self-denial of one’s rights’ (1994:144).
PREPARE, discussed in Chapter 4, holds healthy communication in relationships to be clear, self-focused and assertive:
Assertive communication involves the expression of thoughts, feelings, and desires as one’s right. Assertiveness is self-focused and, therefore, is marked by use of ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than ‘you’. […] Assertive people tend to feel better about themselves because they are able to express themselves… When both partners are assertive with each other, this tends to increase the level of intimacy because they are able to ask for what they want and, thereby, increase the probability that they will get what they want. (Olson, 1999:72)
PREPARE assumes that assertive communication correlates with higher self- confidence and lack of partner dominance. Clear, direct communication, 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 134 rather than the expectation that the partner will guess or ‘mind-read’, increases the chance of ‘getting what one wants’:
Some husbands and wives think that love alone will make the spouse understand all their needs and desires: if she (he) loves me, she (he) would know what I want. However, spouses cannot guess their partner’s inner feelings. Two people must tell each other what they need and want. (Olson & De Frain, 1997:274)
Ontologically, this communication appears transactional. It is, as the online Oxford dictionary definition suggests, the ‘exchange of information between individuals’. This is also the essence of the ‘ping-pong’ model of communication, as it’s called by Shannon and Weaver: a process of getting an information package across from one location to another (Fiske, 1982:6).
When we examine further material from Isabelle’s interview, a more complicated picture of communication emerges. Here is an occasion when Isabelle acted competently, according to the above model. Isabelle and Jason were coming back from a Sunday afternoon together; she wanted him to try some gelato at a café she had discovered, while he wanted to go home:
I: He said he didn’t want to stay. But I still told him I really looked forward to seeing him the whole week, that I wanted to spend some more time together. He eventually agreed. We then sat in the car for an hour so that we could ‘talk about it’. I explained to him why I wanted him to stay, why I wanted to go for a walk, why I wanted to hold his hand, that I missed him, that it was only 10 minutes. Arghh. It’s one of those things you remember now and think – wow, that was crazy. The walk was so stupid. He was holding my hand like I asked him, we were acting like this happy couple. And then having this verbal diarrhoea, being all articulate... It’s a sick feeling even now as I think [about it]. D: It sounds like the discussion was not helpful? Or... I: It wasn’t talking that I was after, I guess.
Isabelle clearly asked for, and ‘got’ what she wanted. She acted as a self-focused, competent, assertive speaker. Clearly, however, she wanted Jason’s willing participation, his desire to spend time with her, but she could not get that. Jason went along literally ‘pulled by the hand’, but he was not present, perhaps as he was already thinking about his work in the coming 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 135 week. Just as he seemed alienated, Isabelle, too, was not present but anxiously keeping promised time, and wondering whether Jason enjoyed himself. Later, when the couple tried to ‘talk about it’, the need to explain only highlighted Isabelle’s sense of disconnection and loneliness.
When Isabelle says it was not ‘talking’ that she was after, we can get a good sense of that poignant impotence of words that couples experience when they want to connect, but end up as combatants in a ‘discussion’. Etymologically, discussion is related to ‘concussion’: breaking apart, fragmenting, through a violent jolt, a clash. Discussion was a frequent occurrence towards the end of this couple’s relationship:
I: He had this phrase he’d use: ‘Do you think we should talk about it?’ But I think he wanted to go through what happened, and unpick what I said, bit by bit, cut it down as wrong, or just [pause] My thing, my problem. He’d start with ‘but’. ‘But I disagree’. It was hard to say anything to that. So I stopped wanting to talk about our ‘issues’ Then he would get angry that I wasn’t serious about working it out.
Firstly, Isabelle said, the form of Jason’s question showed distance. He was giving her the right of choice, rather than saying he wanted to talk. This was similar, she said, to the way Jason often asked her questions like: ‘Do you have plans for the weekend’, or ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ She read such questions to mean that Jason was somehow separate from her, did not assume they would be spending the weekend together, or did not know what she may have wanted as a gift. Perhaps Jason wanted to respectfully give her the right to choose, and did not assume they are one person. Perhaps, too, he made judgements in the past, Isabelle disagreed, so he now he preferred to ask.
In either case, Isabelle feels Jason’s request to ‘talk’ was in bad faith, because he drew her out only to invalidate her – to prove himself right. Previously, she admitted that she did something similar in their correspondence while separated, when she was unable to accept Jason’s feelings. Both Isabelle and Jason are unable to listen to each other’s different opinions, yet to stay connected. 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 136
Barthes once called such impotent floods of words ‘scenes’, that is - conversations that go on indefinitely as egos are being defended, and each subject makes bids that are ‘never anything but Narcissus’ cry: Me! And me! What about me!’ (Barthes, 1990:206) Isabelle called such situations ‘locked horns’ arguments, and Barthes agrees: agreement is logically impossible insofar as what is being argued is not the fact or the decision. Scenes are compulsive, because they are fuelled by the endless sickly Hegelian energy of desire: to assimilate, to make same. The self writhes, grasping and pushing off, blaming and defending:
A fever of language overtakes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements. I am aware of nothing but a machine running all by itself, a hurdy-gurdy. […] Once I happen to produce a “successful” phrase in my mind (imagining I have found the right expression for some truth or other) it becomes a formula I repeat in proportion to the relief it affords. […] I keep swallowing it and regurgitating my wound. I spin, unwind and weave the lover’s case, and begin all over again. […] As with the lover suffering from the loquela: he twiddles his wound. (Barthes, 1990:161)
‘This is where your relationship starts’: Natasha and Isabelle, again When Isabelle talks about her need for Jason’s presence, she is talking about an elementary and fundamental experience:
I: He wouldn’t be there when I needed him, and [he would] have an elaborate explanation, that I had to understand that he was busy, and it was important. I was so over it I think once I said: ‘Imagine I am hungry. I will die if you just give me an excuse why you can’t feed me, or if you promise you’ll bring some food next time’. It was humiliating to keep asking him to [pause] to care for me, I guess. Asking him to love me. It made me feel sick. Hanging on, half-hoping what you suspect is not true. I just wanted [pause] to trust that he would be there.
The sense of ‘being there’ – presence, reliability, groundedness – is a difficult one to put into words, and as Isabelle finds out, impossible to create by asking for it; in fact, the more she seems to articulate her need for it, the more futile the exercise becomes.
But now, here is a different extract. Isabelle and Jason once went skiing, and this is what happened:
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I: I had gone to the snow before with friends, so I kind of knew all the right places, and things to do, and how to do the boots and stuff like that. We kept going up the same lift a few times, and Jason says to me ‘Did you know we can go all the way to the top in this?’ And I was like, ‘No, I didn’t’, and so we did. D: What happened? I: It was incredible. It was snowing really heavily, you couldn’t see anything, so we rugged up while being lifted. Then it cleared up. Just going past that point, and no-one was going with us, and then getting to the top and seeing the valleys and far off peaks, all white from the unexpected fall the night before, and the icy brightness of the sky. And we were there alone, and we had this map they give you and we decided we would ski across from there to Blue Cow. D: What did you enjoy about it? I: I think because this was something unexpected, that we did together, completely new for both of us. Neither one of us had done anything like that before. And we were in it together. Traversing these amazing slopes of untouched snow, the bright blue sky, the silence.
What stands out about this experience is that both Jason and Isabelle were giving up preconceived expectations, and instead, opened themselves to experience something new together. The couple was in a new environment, away from home and work, working creatively as a team, looking out for each other and enjoying spectacular scenery. Before, the couple earnestly discussed their ‘issues’ – work, commitment, lack of time spent together, but they did not feel closer. The relationship and the issue become ‘objects of discussion’, treated at arm’s length. Here, on the snow, not a lot is said at all – a short question, a genuinely interested response. There is no agenda, but there is an openness to collaboration. This becomes a highlight in this couple’s relationship.
Let’s see how another couple confirms the significance of such a shift. At the time of the interview, Natasha (whom we met in Chapter 5) was in therapy. She started seeing a therapist to work through her concerns about her stagnating career, but during the process she started scrutinising her marriage to Xavier:
N: During the course of my therapy, I became sort of dissatisfied with what was [pause] Well, things about our relationship and things about my life and everything. […] In therapy I never wanted to speak about things about my relationship because I thought it was the only secure 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 138
thing I really had at the time – was a relationship that had been going for 15 years and was, I thought, good. But then stuff sort of started surfacing and I became sort of dissatisfied – and angry, actually. I’m not quite sure exactly why.
When Xavier started therapy, ‘stuff started surfacing for him also’, ‘he also became dissatisfied with the relationship’. As a result, both decided the relationship ‘wasn’t so good’, and started talking about separating. It is significant that Natasha describes this process using the words ‘thing(s)’ and ‘stuff’. When she takes the ‘objective’ stance of an observer and analyst, her marriage and Xavier become objects of study. She puts herself in a fraught and frustrating situation of trying to intellectually ‘figure it out’:
N: I’m actually not sure what the problems are, still. So those things all sort of became, you know, blurred and overlapped and […] What happened back then was um, again, I’m actually not sure. This is strange, because I actually think I think I know these things until I’m actually in a situation where I’m speaking about it with you and trying to think about really what it is. Or it might be just that I’m going through a more confused stage at the moment, because sometimes it’s quite clear.
Note again the repetition of ‘things’. Natasha finds it difficult to point her finger at the exact cause of the problem, but her feeling is very palpable: ‘essentially, a sense of being disconnected, [that] you’re not together, somehow’. By this stage, a number of colluding circumstances compelled this couple to reconsider the future of their relationship, and they separated permanently. However, there was a previous occasion, when Natasha and Xavier were able to work through such a stage with a counsellor. Her description of the process holds valuable lessons for this thesis.
When Natasha and Xavier came back from one of her overseas research trips, they experienced a problem. While away from home, they spent a lot of time together, relied on each other and collaborated creatively. However, when they came back to Australia, they grew distant through spending more time apart on separate careers, and their power struggles resumed. Natasha’s ‘power base’ was her academic career and Xavier’s were 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 139 his wealth and financial independence. They would get to the point where they were not able to speak to each other. They sought help.
At first, their counsellor asked them about their families of origin, their relationship expectations, their careers, about their personal qualities and aspirations. The counsellor seemed to have been building up a dossier of ‘things’ or ‘issues’ that make up the relationship. We may think that he would then plug these variables into an equation, to find the solution for the lost feeling of connection. Indeed, many troubled couples treat their falling out of relation in this way, performing logical gymnastics to ‘solve’ the problem. Frequently, this is frustratingly fruitless. A skilful helper can enable a couple to do something different. When the counsellor encouraged Natasha and Xavier to confirm information about their collaborative project overseas, the couple started talking again. At first, they did so to create a report for the counsellor, but as they went on, with lessening awareness of the task, they were just talking. The counsellor alerted them to this shift:
N: And he just stopped us at that point and said: ‘This is where your relationship starts. You get over things about, you know, difficulties with family here or problems with who owns the house or who’s living in the house, or who doesn’t own the house, and all these other things, and all these power-based things that we’ve been working on’. He said: ‘That’s basically where your relationship begins’, and pointed that out to us. He also told us that we didn’t need to see him again, that we’d be fine. And we believed him, so we were for many, many years.
The counsellor facilitated a dialogue between Natasha and Xavier and witnessed the process, so that they are aware of the change. ‘Things’ were a starting point, but became catalysts for a change in the relational ecology. ‘This is where your relationship starts’ is a very powerful phrase. Their relationship starts with mutual reliance and collaboration – when they needed each other, helped one another. This happened away from home, and this happened in the counsellor’s room. Natasha and Xavier can see then that the ‘things’ that stood between them are not concrete, fixed facts, but are products of the way they look and engage. When they are at war, contesting power in the relationship, they need pawns for battle and see objectified 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 140
‘things’, ‘stuff’, ‘problems’, ‘issues’ or ‘obstacles’. When they cooperate, the relational process takes over.
The connection, between the relationship itself, and the qualities and processes that sustain it, is ontologically complex. The engaged presence, conversation become the relationship – it is not as though discussion is separate to and instrumental towards creating ‘a’ relationship. Instrumental discussion can sometimes only highlight the distance and disconnection, and attempts are made to pin the blame for this onto one person or the other. Surely, it must be someone’s fault, we assume, refusing to acknowledge the presence of a more complex phenomenon - of a relationship, with its own creative potential. Blame, or ‘invalidation’ (using a PREP term), comes into play. However, when conversation ‘works’, we can appreciate the complexity more readily. Misha, another interviewee, says this too: that when communication ‘works’ with his wife Oksana, it is difficult to say how:
M: It’s a real meeting of, you know, all of you, sort of thing. You really have to, um. It’s one of those things you know when it’s happened, but it’s very hard to say what it’s comprised of, to dissect it. So it’s [pause]. It really makes you feel well understood and comfortable with, you know, what you’ve said. It is being listened to and appreciated, and almost like, you’ve experienced it.
Interestingly, the conundrum of cause and effect, dependent and independent variables, is rarely explicitly addressed in marriage research literature. Here is one of such rare methodological admissions:
When it is found that the tendency to communicate vulnerability rather than hostility is more likely to occur in improved couples later in therapy than in unimproved couples earlier in therapy, it is often implied that the communication of vulnerability mediates relationship enhancement. In fact, it is equally plausible that the communication of vulnerability is an outcome of an improved relationship that has in turn been mediated by other factors. (Jacobson and Addis, 1993:88)
Therapist John Gottman’s argument that ‘the most consistent finding in the literature is that negative interaction is much more common in the interaction of unhappily married couples than happily married couples’ (1989:47), then, 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 141 could well be a tautology. Is a well-functioning relationship one where there is good interaction and communication, or is a communicative relationship a well-functioning one? I actually do not think we can answer this question – precisely because relationality does not operate sequentially. Something more complex is going on.
Dialogue Etymologically, the Latin root of the word ‘communication’, commun-is, means ‘common’, and -ic-, ‘to do’. To communicate is to make common, to share. When Isabelle is skiing with Jason, when Natasha and Xavier work together overseas, supporting each other, when they talk, they are ‘making common’ - not just passing already pre-existing information from identity to identity. One term to describe it is ‘dialogue’. Physicist and philosopher David Bohm describes this kind of engagement:
[I]t may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e. creating something new together. Such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other each has to be interested primarily in truth and coherence, so that he is ready to drop his old ideas and intentions, and be ready to go to something different, when this is called for. (Bohm, 1985:175)
The notion of being ‘called’ to give something up towards the common meaning being created, to a less self-centred way of engaging with others, is central to the philosophy of Martin Buber, which will be explored in the next and in the concluding chapters of this thesis. The sense of serving the conversation – freely, but necessarily, compelled, ensuring its life and continuity – is different to wilful ego presentations. Bohm reminds us that ‘dia’ in the word dialogue does not mean ‘two’, as we commonly assume. The logic of two positions being negotiated is at the heart of a term such as ‘compromise’, which some communication theorists admit never quite works for both people. ‘Dia’ means ‘through’ – meaning that dialogue is an alchemical engagement, where there is change on both sides. This is something to which Nathan attests when he describes his relationship with Bella (even though he uses the terms with less precision):
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N: With Bella, even though we might disagree about things, there is enough shared that we can actually work through ideas and listen to each other, and come to compromises of sorts. Not even compromises, but changes of perspective for both of us. Whereas with the other girls, there were things that were discussed, as much as we could intelligently and incisively discuss them, we were always going to end back on separate stages to some extent.
Etymologically, the word communication is related to a word which bears out this more complex ontology – ‘communion’. Holy Communion for the Christian community is a profoundly social ritual. The partaking in the body and blood of Christ during a Communion service awakens the very notion of the living church. This is why communion has a participatory logic: it is constitutive; it brings together an ‘organic union of persons’, an organised ‘body’ professing a faith. Communion is ‘mutual participation, fellowship’, ‘sharing or holding in common with others’ (Oxford Dictionary online). This echoes with Emile Durkheim’s insistence on the fundamental sociality of religious ritual, in his seminal Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
More strongly than anything, what joins Natasha’s and Isabelle’s experiences of dialogue is a sense of presence and empathy. We need a vocabulary and a conceptual framework that can capture this. Carl Rogers is a therapist and philosopher whose work is very helpful in mapping the basic structure and disciplines of dialogical engagement.
On ‘becoming’ Rogers’ work can, and often is, dismissed by social theorists on account of its historical context. His work would, in fact, be a direct target of Richard Sennett’s critique. Sennett was known to have been suspicious of what he saw as the narcissistic infatuation of the Left in the 1960s and 1970s with encounter groups and self-development. As I understand it and hope to show, Rogerian therapy encourages reflexivity, but is profoundly astute in its understanding of sociality. The confusion may be due to the fact that individuality (uniqueness of each person) and individualism (narcissism) are easily conflated by some thinkers. It may also be due to the fact that Rogers is a compatriot and contemporary of psychologist Abraham Maslow, famous for 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 143 his ‘self-actualisation’ hierarchy model of needs. Maslow reifies the individual pursuit of satisfaction, through prioritising autonomous organic ‘lower’ needs above ‘higher’ needs that include relating to others, as well the ‘superior perception of reality’ (Kingwell, 1998:48).
On the contrary, for Rogers, the growth and development of human potential is always embedded in a social context, and sociality in fact precedes healthy autonomy. Rogers’ view of humanity is also very different to Sennett’s. Sennett is very pessimistic about human nature, concerned that excessive self-disclosure reveals our most primal tendencies that are best well-hidden from view, because ‘[e]very self is some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations betweens selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed, or envy are kept locked up’ (Sennett, 1977:5). As we will see, Rogers’ insistence on treating people as whole is much more inclusive of all that humanity is capable of – nice, and ugly. Genuine sociality and growth are real, not saccharine and sentimental. As we will see in the following two chapters, this notion of wholeness in genuine relating resonates through my interviewees’ stories, also.
In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, Rogers defined his therapeutic philosophy as one of facilitating ‘helping relationships’. A helping or empathetic relationship is a situation where at least one party has the intent of promoting the ‘growth, development, maturity, improved functioning, improved coping with life of the other’ and ‘more appreciation of, more expression of, more functional use of the latent inner resources of the individual’ (Rogers, 1961:39-40). While Rogers originally studied helping relationships in clinical settings, he later applied his insights to intimate relationships.
In the late 1950s, Rogers studied the therapeutic effectiveness of mental health clinicians. He found that those with the most improved patients tended to be able to accept the personal meanings of behaviours of their patients. Such clinicians attempted to work towards goals oriented to the personality and meaning reference system of the patient. When the patient 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 144 was ‘met’ as he/she was, and was not immediately judged and ‘fixed’ in accordance with the clinical standard of ‘health’, change would occur for the patient. Certain conditions were necessary for this process to take place.
Effective helpers were genuinely interested in their patients’ lives. What made an impact was not a perfect, ‘objective’ understanding of the patient’s frame of reference, but the helper’s attitude of wanting to understand, even if this was a ‘bumbling and faulty attempt to catch the confused complexity of meaning’ (Rogers, 1961:53). Interest (inter-being), presence and concern evoked trust (Rogers, 1961:44).
Rogers found that the less effective clinicians were overly intellectual. Regardless of their theoretical orientation, if they focused on rationally examining the past for possible causes of the problem, they pre-empted autonomous change. In hastily applying a theory, or even experiential learning from past cases, the clinician was not able to be present with the individual patient in front of them. Also, immediate advice, problem-solving and excessive sympathy and self-disclosure from the clinician were unhelpful. When we consider the self-positions involved in these approaches, we can see that healthy differentiation characterises effective helping relationships. Rogers no doubt draws here on his psychoanalytical training. Ineffective therapists such as Winnicott’s over-competent carers close the creative gap that enable discovery and growth through over-identification.
The subtle yet crucial therapeutic skill of establishing such relationships requires certain psychic disciplines. To enable change, the therapist must facilitate the process of becoming, based on the belief that the essence of a person is in growth, not in a solidified identity construct. The helper must be able to satisfactorily deal with the following question: ‘Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in process of becoming, or will I be bound by his past and by my past?’ (Rogers, 1961:55).
Rogers refers to this meeting as giving the other a generative ‘permission to be’ (Buber Agassi, 1999:261). He also uses the phrase 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 145
‘confirming the other’, from the work of philosopher Martin Buber: ‘confirming means […] accepting the whole potentiality of the other […] I can recognize in him, know in him, the person he has been […] created to become’ (in Rogers, 1961:55). Rogers and Buber, in fact, carried a long-standing dialogue on the nature of relationality, culminating in a famous documented conversation in University of Michigan on April 18, 1957 (Buber et al., 1997; Buber Agassi, 1999). In this conversation, Buber expanded on this idea:
I would say every true, let’s say, existential relationship between two persons begins with acceptance. […] I take you just as you are… But this does not mean, ‘I don’t want you to change’. But it says, ‘I discover in you, just by my accepting love, I discover in you what you are meant to become’. (Buber Agassi, 1999:266-267)
The crucial element of this process is that the helper must have a similar healthy differentiated relationship with oneself, being able to hold his or her own reactions, contradictory feelings and thoughts:
One way of putting this which may sounds strange to you is that if I can form a helping relationship to myself – if I can be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings – then the likelihood is great that I can form a helping relationship to another. (Rogers, 1961:51)
The helper must be able to be available to the patient: ‘to withhold oneself as a person and to deal with the other person as an object does not have a high probability of being helpful’ (Rogers, 1961:47). However, to maintain the essential creative difference, the therapist must be a ‘sturdy respecter’ of his/her feelings, needs, feelings, so that s/he can withstand being ‘downcast by his [the client’s] depression, frightened by his fear, engulfed by this dependency, destroyed by his anger, taken over by his dependence, enslaved by his love’ (Rogers, 1961:52). Rogers refers to this using Winnicott’s terms: the therapist needs to be not rigid, monolithic and self-same, but in a dialogical self-relation. In the same way, the patient can be held and enabled to ‘experience their experience’. In the security of a confirming relationship, the person can allow him/herself to examine the various aspects of his/her experience without distorting them to fit his/her pre- existing concept of self (Rogers, 1961:76). Contradictory feelings can be held 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 146 without needing to reconcile them, leading to an acceptance that the self is a fluid construct that encompasses difference.25
Rogers calls this the ‘effective moment’ in therapy – a moment of meeting, being able to see some aspect of oneself differently, or the possibility of seeing something at all (Buber Agassi, 1999:261). The relationship – the working of two individuals together – is experienced as a richer way of being than separate autonomous functioning. As a psychiatrist friend of Rogers says, we may never ‘feel as whole, or as much of a person’ as in an effective dialogue (Buber Agassi, 1999:248).
In his 1973 book, Becoming Partners, Rogers uses this conceptual framework in examining the experiences of five married couples. He admits in the introduction that he would not have predicted some of the couples to have lasted – like the very young Gail and Dick, who experienced uncertainty about the marriage, a temporary break-up and an affair; or the older Denise and Eric, who dealt with mental health problems, drug addiction, high conflict and infidelity. These marriages survived, defying rational expectation of their disintegration, boldly resilient in the face of adversity. These stories hold a lesson for the politicians or pre-emption advocates who would have liked to weed these ‘risky’ relationships from the start, before the wedding – as surely, ‘seeds’ were clearly there. Life pans out in more complex and surprising ways.
Rogers emphasises that the complexity of the marriages he examines is normal: that as real relationships, they are made of moments of ‘grooving together’ and hours and months of perplexity, jealousy, despair (Rogers, 1973:11). While all couples in the book are dedicated to being married, they are not fixated on staying together as an end in itself. In their complexity and imperfection, Rogers refuses to label these marriages successful, or failed: ‘are the unions “good” or “bad”, or do they belong in some other judgemental category? I do not know. They exist’ (Rogers, 1973:14-15). These
Adam Phillips (2002) describes this as the task of psychotherapy; and in fact the tolerance of inner conflict and unself-sameness; similarly to that of democracy. 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 147 relationships are, regardless of their seeming incongruence with good sense. The reader is respectfully invited to draw their own lessons.
Rogerian pedagogy in marriage education The PREP concept of ‘invalidation’, as well as the ‘speaker-listener’ technique central to PREP couple training, both owe to the fact that work inspired by Rogers forms a substantial part of the PREP theoretical base. Whereas the first P abbreviates the predictive and risk-preventative strand incorporating cognitive-behavioural theory and risk pre-emption (discussed in Chapter 3), RE stands for ‘Relationship Enhancement’, a program based on the 1977 book of the same name by Rogerian marital therapist Bernard Guerney.
In line with Rogers, Guerney emphasises the importance of helping couples work with their own understanding of what a good relationship entails, through increasing their reflective empathising skills:
The major value judgment underlying the RE programs is that lack of understanding or, worse, misunderstanding, of self and one’s intimates is bad and understanding is good. The fundamental goal of the program is to increase understanding of one’s self and one’s partner along dimensions directly pertinent to the relationship. (1977:12)
Not only a retrospective understanding of origins of problems, but the ability to do things differently is sought, so that couples’ habitual processes have been altered. Improved understanding entails ‘the capacity and willingness to appreciate relationship-relevant needs, desires, preferences, aspirations, values, motivations, and emotions of one’s own self and one’s partner’s’ (1977:12). Even though the life and growth of relationships is the focus of RE, the intactness of relationships is not fetishised. In fact, it is recognised that:
[i]t is possible that in some instances a fuller understanding of this type would lead to drastic changes, for example, to a divorce. The relationship would be considered improved, and the program successful for that couple. By our definition, then, ‘enhanced’ relationships are those in which the participants have developed a greater capacity, within and by virtue of the relationship, to better understand themselves and each other. (Guerney, 1977:12)
The ending of a relationship is not posited as failure, because staying together is not ‘success’, and relational life is recognised to be complex and not always 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 148 controllable or predictable, with variables outside the most well-intended efforts. Endings, though painful, are part of the living process.
‘Being there’ Here is an experience from Isabelle’s interview which shows how a couple can discover the possibilities of accepting listening, and what it does for their sense of closeness.
In the last months of their relationship, Jason and Isabelle once went to have some pizza near his house, and sat outdoors to eat and talk. Jason started to tell her how hurt he was by the way she tried to end their relationship (Isabelle had a brief infatuation with a colleague).
Up until this point, Isabelle said she could not accept Jason’s feelings of hurt and anger. She felt justified in leaving Jason and even causing him pain, because she had repeatedly tried to address the fact that they as a couple were not developing, and that she was lonely, to no avail. Her sense of righteousness led her to invalidate his feelings and thoughts about what happened. Even though she outwardly accepted Jason’s side of the situation, she still believed that deep inside, Jason ‘had to’ have known that he was wrong, and she was right. After all, he was a ‘reasonable person’.
On this occasion, over pizza, however, Isabelle decided just to listen to Jason, and to just repeat what he said. At first, speaking Jason’s words felt extremely confronting and distressing. By speaking his mind, she had to try the words for ‘fit’ on herself, and thus, to try for fit the hurt and incredulity Jason experienced when she left him – feelings that she had previously dismissed as ‘unjustified’. She had to entertain what it would have been like for her if Jason did something like what she did. The depth of the hurt and betrayal shocked her. What also shocked her was her realisation of the extent of her expectation that Jason did not feel hurt.
Jason’s feelings and thoughts were threatening to Isabelle. Jason’s side of the story showed that part of Jason’s life was his own, away from her, 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 149 unconnected with her. Perhaps because there was a running theme of distancing and strong external loyalties, Isabelle wanted Jason to be closer to her. She was scared to admit that she played a role in the overall relationship problems and had to answer for some of Jason’s feelings. Through imagining what he went through, she could no longer hold the distance and hide behind the justification that Jason ‘deserved’ the pain. She could no longer cling to her sense of being ‘right’.
The paradoxical aspect of this experience was that Isabelle felt the closest to Jason while acknowledging and witnessing difference, which she previously assumed was divisive, and wanted to underplay or not see at all:
I: It was strange. Scary, but amazing. Just this enormous flood of love. Watching his emotions on his face. His eyes welling up. Just sitting with him, and feeling this love, and the sadness. Because I loved him, so much. I did not want to leave. On the contrary, even with all this scary stuff like – the ‘I don’t know’s’. I wanted to keep looking at him like that. […] I used to say to him before, that even if I was unhappy about something, if he listened, I would feel that [pause] that things would turn out all right, I guess. He didn’t believe me, he thought it was funny I guess. That we were OK. Not just like: ‘You are wrong, I have nothing to do with this, so I don’t have to deal with you; you are on your own there. I am off the hook’. That type of thing. ‘I will not get involved, because otherwise it gets messy, and I might find out my actions have all sorts of consequences’. Also, me not allowing him to get upset, because what did I do? But we just can’t control the feelings of the other person, I can’t tell you how to feel, what the correct response is, and that you’re stupid otherwise.
Isabelle avoided implication previously, because she did not like the lack of predictability about Jason’s responses. But when difference is held, without fear (of breaking up; of being ‘wrong’), with openly voiced concerns, doubts, hurts, and when this couple does not try to twist and shape everything to still preserve ‘the relationship’, Isabelle and Jason are closer to each other than ever. There is tenderness, care and vulnerability; an embodied understanding of each other’s position that leads to trust that what is said is genuine. Something alive and real is experienced. The difficult part of the ending of this relationship was that Isabelle felt there was potential for a mature relationship to develop through such experience. Jason, however, said 6 ‘BEING THERE’ | 150 he did not trust Isabelle to stay, should they have married. He insisted that the right marriage was not about what a couple did together, but a matter of meeting ‘the right person’ which would warrant an unconditional, irrevocable bond for a lifetime.
Let’s revisit PREP and PREPARE’s theory of effective communication - that self- or ‘I’-focused, assertive communication ensures that partners express their needs, which increases the likelihood that these are fulfilled. This is meant to ensure that the couple does not cross-project or attribute their own thoughts or feelings to each other. But it can leave them separate, and also on their own in their ‘I’ bubbles. We can see from Isabelle’s experience of going for gelato that assertive, clear self-presentation can leave one vulnerable and exposed. Words used instrumentally do not create the sought sense of love and companionship; they alienate.
Empathy is required to make this work – the pizza incident exemplifies this. Both Isabelle and Jason are still speaking their own feelings, but stumble on something different, more ontologically complex. Through sensitively holding and ‘trying for fit’ Jason’s feelings, Isabelle is able to experience the paradoxical way of embodying both her own and his situation, at once; and they do not compete. They are not the same, but they are not separate, they don’t work off each other in a using way, either. This is, of course, anathema to Hegelian binary oppositional identity logic, where only one identity at a time can be a listener or a speaker, a winner or a loser, a giver or a receiver. By sensitively holding both distinct yet related positions, the problematic lack of differentiation is overcome and yet there is empathy, and love. Isabelle is not only able to understand Jason’s position, but also her own, in relation to his. She comes to herself, through him. This dialogical nature of our own identity, experienced in communication with others, is confirmed by renowned theorists such as Bakhtin and Mead (Bakhtin in Vern et al., 1986; Mead, 1967; Tugendhat, 1991). The fantasy of sameness, necessitating cutting off, shutting out anything threatening, is replaced with love – short-lived, precarious, yet real and burning.
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It is not wilful agency alone that prevails in this state of being. The next chapter moves to explore this important question of agency in relational situations, through the work of Rogers’ life-long conversation companion, Martin Buber.
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LOVE ACTUALLY
We are puzzled by this. That we are just comfortable being beside each other and on different sides of the bed. In silence we are very comfortable. It is not a bad silence. Even when you are at home, you can play music and do our own things and go out, and come back. So it is just this staying together. That’s the real thing. (Rajiv)
I have come to think, Sarah, that sometimes it is not about how much we love the other person, but who we are when we are with them. Macon, in the film The Accidental Tourist
As we saw in the preceding chapter, relational engagement can go beyond self-centred, goal-oriented activities. Interview material in this chapter, analysed with conceptual help from Martin Buber - a contemporary and lifelong conversation companion of Carl Rogers - challenges the individualistic modus operandi further, and develops our understanding of agency and responsibility, and the varieties of love in intimate relationships.
Two relationships: Nathan Nathan, whom we met in Chapter 4, described his current relationship with Bella as primarily a great friendship, abundant with times when they laughed and joked with each other. It was very different to Nathan’s previous relationship. While on the one hand, that love affair was ‘intensely emotional, consuming in its emotional expression’, on the other hand, the peaks of passion which he thought ‘could never be replicated’ were interspersed with periods of feeling ‘just fucking depressed, like all the time’. At that stage, Nathan could not imagine the possibility of a more real love. Now with Bella, he said that he realised ‘there is so much more to loving someone than this kind of burst of passion’. The kind of connection he had with Bella ‘provided a stronger, long-term platform’:
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N: The kind of love that I sometimes feel for Bella now is in actual fact more profoundly overwhelming than that [relationship] ever was. It wasn’t the kind of love that I expected to find. It’s spoken about so often, being in love, being consumed, being overwhelmed. And this is what it’s like with Bella. It’s not that I’ve grown to love her or anything like that; I’ve been made aware of the humanity of others, to some extent.
The words that help to understand what is happening in the above passage are ‘overwhelming’, ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘consumed’. In the previous relationship, Nathan was swept over by emotions and drama. We hold such feelings to be quintessential to a romantic love affair: a roller-coaster of sexual passion, excitement, sadness, need, traumatic partings and teary reunions. We speak of ‘losing control’, ‘falling head over heels’, being ‘driven crazy’. This wild abandon, while undeniably real and traumatic to the lover in its various manifestations, is also somehow performative. It is tempting for lovers to see themselves as tortured protagonists of a drama (as we have seen with Isabelle in Chapter 5). Nathan’s feelings were undeniably real, but he admitted that he sometimes liked to indulge in feeling downcast.
Desire provides a certain energy, feeds something in a person – this is obvious from the fact that Nathan still thought about his previous partner. Emotional upheaval can be addictive. For this very reason, it is also intolerable for a prolonged period of time. It makes the lover feel trapped in their circular obsessive feelings: unable to move ahead, to do things, to plan a future. The wider world and other people are a mere backdrop to the microcosmic soap opera. Nathan’s previous relationship eventually ended. Bella, on the other hand, makes Nathan ‘aware of the humanity of others’. The relationship with Bella takes Nathan back to the world: it re-engages him. Nathan’s world expands in a much broader sense than simply Nathan as a separate individual growing wiser or more experienced. The whole ontology shifts here. There is a new sense of plenitude, of overflow. The relationship with Bella is not shutting Nathan off from anything else. In fact, even his previous relationship can now be seen differently, understood more deeply. The pain experienced there fertilises the present. 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 154
A sense of overflowing wonder played out in Nathan’s body language. Normally confident and articulate, at the point of describing how he felt about Bella, Nathan paused and threw his hands in the air, looking upwards, exclaiming:
N: And to see that I’m lucky enough to have that person lying next to me [pause] It is just full on. I don’t know. I can’t talk about it without feeling overwhelmed by that. It’s not that I attribute it all to her - I attribute it to our relationship.
This love was palpable in the interview room; it was immediate and present. The context of this moment may be significant. When Nathan wakes up, he is still in the liminal half-waking state where judgement, evaluation and memory are not yet cranked up. A fraction of a second later, he will re-member who he is, re-cognise who Bella is. Biography, history, balance sheets would then come into play. But in this moment, he is in awe of just seeing Bella afresh, with soft eyes. Note: Nathan is ‘overwhelmed’ here, but it is a different kind of giving up of agency: one that enables, makes him stronger.
The erotics of passion: I-It I will now consider the two ways in which Nathan’s agency is altered, through the two meanings of the oft-heard phrase ‘I love you’. In torrid affairs, lovers often forcefully pronounce this phrase as if what they want to say is that they actively do something to their beloved. Therein lies the pathos of the plaintive cry of a jilted or betrayed lover: ‘But I love you!’ – that is, ‘I do this, I have done so much, and I get hurt, is my love no guarantee of your love for me in return?’ Now let’s examine what philosopher Martin Buber has to say about this dynamic in Between Man and Man (1947). Buber attributes this way of declaring love to the repertoire of the Eros of passions, an archetypal character in Greek mythology.
The Eros of passion, who was associated with the profane world, is lame-winged. When caught in this Eros’ realm, the lover is enamoured with his suffering loving self. Buber’s acerbic words are to the point: the erotic lover
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stamps around and is in love with his passion. There one is wearing his differentiated feelings like medal-ribbons. There he is enjoying the adventures of his own fascinating effect. There one is gazing enraptured at the spectacle of his own supposed surrender. There one is collecting excitement. There one is displaying his ‘power’. There one is preening himself with borrowed vitality. There one is delighting to exist simultaneously as himself and as an idol very unlike himself. There one is warming himself at the blaze of what has fallen to his lot. There one is experimenting. And so on and on – all the manifold monologists with their mirrors, in the apartment of the intimate dialogue! (Buber, 1947:49)
The constant need for self-confirmation, the pride in one’s exquisite feelings, the narcissistic preening – are all recognisably Hegelian. The beloved is used as a means to maintain the desirous lover’s identity. There is a masochistic element to this ‘love’, in the pleasures of feeling wronged and self-righteous. Buber’s lame Eros writhes and rails against his fate in bad faith as ‘success’ would curb the very energy that keeps him/her alive and vitalised.26
In Buber’s view, preoccupation with feelings and experiences as though they were trophies, is part of what he calls an I-It orientation or modus operandi in life. I-It is a ‘sphere of goal-oriented verbs’, where all activity has some-thing for its object: ‘I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. I want something. I sense something. I think something’ (Buber, 1996:54). The world becomes objectified into a series of discrete aggregates of qualities with measure and boundary (Buber, 1996:61, 68). I and It are linked by a hyphen, because the self also perceives itself as a thing.
An illustration of this orientation is the way the possessive individualist model of selfhood, analysed in Chapter 4, understands the process of social identity formation. It is imagined to be the perpetual accumulation of ‘experiences’ – be it travelling around the world only for the purpose of collecting photographs of important landmarks and stamps in one’s passport, compulsively changing jobs, seeing art or opera just to ‘tick the boxes’, having multiple sexual experiences and romantic ‘flings’. Often, Buber argues, we will try to discriminate, calling aesthetic, spiritual or inner experiences ‘high-
See also Phillips (1993) On kissing, tickling and being bored. 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 156 culture’. Buber insists that this categorisation is arbitrary, because these can still be used instrumentally to bulk up our selves:
Inner things like external things, things among things! I experience something. And all this is not changed by adding “mysterious” experiences to “manifest” ones, self-confident in the wisdom that recognizes a secret compartment in things, reserved for the initiated, and holds the key. O mysteriousness without mystery, O piling of information! It, it, it! (Buber, 1996:56)
The Eros of dialogue: I-You There is an orientation quite different to I-It in human life, Buber reminds us. The second Eros of Greek mythology is the winged Eros of dialogue. While the earth-bound Eros is trapped in his own little world, the Eros of dialogue is able to do something paradoxical. This is how Buber describes it:
That inclination of the head over there – you feel how the soul enjoins it on the neck, you feel it not on your neck but on that one over there, on the beloved one, and yet you yourself are not as it were snatched away, you are here, in the feeling self-being, and you receive the inclination of the head, its injunction, as the answer to the word of your own silence. The two who are loyal to the Eros of dialogue, who love one another, receive the common event from the other’s side as well, that is, they receive it from the two sides […] (Buber, 1947:48)
We can recognise this paradoxical ability to inhabit the positions of self and other, transcending the separation, from Isabelle’s last story about talking with Jason over pizza. Her very sense of being changes when in relation. Nathan intimates the same when he speaks about once walking down the street with Bella. Everything is actually different, and Nathan is different when he is with her:
N: We still have a sense of intimacy even if we’re just walking down the street, and I am thinking thoughts that aren’t immediately related to her and are about something else that’s completely boring. If she suddenly wasn’t there, that would be a profound difference. I’m profoundly different when I’m walking by myself to when I’m walking next to her.
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The Eros of dialogue perceives otherness through what Buber calls the I-You orientation.27 Addressing someone as ‘you’ changes the entire ecology:
Whoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever there is something there is also another something; every It borders on other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others. But where You is said there is no something. You has no borders. Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation. (Buber, 1996:55)
‘You’ is always uttered from an implicated stance; ‘you’ is in relation to ‘me’ - there is no ‘you’ as such outside of a meeting between at least two people who are addressing each other. ‘You’ is ‘not at hand but only present, not experienceable, only touchable’ (Buber, 1996:69). Nathan confirms this: he says he does not ‘pick out any features’ of Bella when he thinks of what makes their relationship work. What creates the attraction is between them, and it is them, together: ‘you just know that whatever engagement we had, usually it would be spontaneous and fun. I guess it was aspects of us that were the attraction’.
I bet that if Nathan said ‘I love you’ to Bella when she was sleeping or when they were walking down the street , he would have meant by it quite a different state of affairs than when he proclaimed it to his previous partner. The crucial distinction is picked up by Buber’s differentiation between the terms ‘feelings’, and ‘love’. Feelings can be had, entertained, fuelled, experienced, but one is in love, or falls in it. Love is a relation, a way of being towards others and oneself – not a forceful action enacted on the lover.
Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. […] Feelings one ‘has’; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its content or object; it is between I and You. (Buber, 1996:66)
Jane, another interviewee, uses the word ‘love’ in this way. Jane could describe in precise detail how it felt to feel emotionally close to her spouse
Walter Kaufmann changed the better-known ‘I-Thou’ in the original translation by Ronald Gregor Smith, to ‘I-You’, in 1970. 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 158
Narum: it was a ‘physical feeling, warmth, and a little bubble somewhere beneath your chest, and it sort of like expands until your face is a little bit red, and […] you sort of can't stop smiling and there's the problem of not having words to articulate the feeling’. Jane was very particular about not carelessly using the words ‘I love you’ to express this sensation to Narum. In her native Icelandic tongue, there was a word reserved for people with whom one had a relationship involving physical touch: one’s children, siblings, rarely one’s parents, and mostly, one’s spouse. This word would be said at the wedding, and rarely afterwards. She referred to a joke from her culture: ‘I told you I loved you when we got married and I'll tell when it changes’. Love here is more than just action.
Feelings vary and fluctuate, and can be treated as commensurate with their object; they can be compared on a scale (Buber, 1996:129). Love, in Buber’s eyes, does not discriminate this way: ‘love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling – the equality of all lovers’ (Buber, 1996:66). This love encompasses different feelings, even dislike and doubt. It is real, not sentimental and sweet. This is confirmed by therapists:
A curious thing which never fails to surprise persons in therapy is that after admitting their anger, animosity, and even hatred for a spouse and berating him or her during the hour, they end up with feelings of love towards the partner. […] The positive cannot come out until the negative does also. […] Hate and love are not polar opposites; they go together. (May, 1969 in Olson & DeFrain, 1997:292)
As we already saw in Isabelle’s story, it is actually censoring doubt and the potentially threatening aspects of the relationship to preserve it, that limit its potential and suffocate it. Wanting sameness, mirroring and happy feelings, can eventually kill a relationship. Nathan confirms this also. He says he felt particularly close to Bella from the start, because they came from similar families, each with one dark-skinned and one light-skinned parent. This meant that Bella had empathy for his struggles in a predominantly white society:
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N: Even if she hadn’t confronted them [the struggles] herself, any kind of sharing I had with her wouldn’t be met with a dismissal. Because every girlfriend I’d had prior to that, apart from one, had been a white girlfriend, and there would be times when you’d try to discuss those issues and they would say, ‘Look, I don’t see you the same way you see yourself, so therefore I don’t really want to talk about how you see yourself’.
An unsympathetic previous girlfriend did not want to know about his insecurities, his past problems. Perhaps she was trying to be ‘nice’ and reassure him that she loved him, and would not treat him as others have in the past. However, while she may claim this to be unconditional love, in fact, she is refusing to acknowledge him. She may do so as she sees love as an ideal ‘happy state’, unblemished. If she sees the flaws that Nathan points out for her, she may not like him for a while. So she is afraid of her own response to knowledge. But her failure to allow for the possibility of flaws in her partner, and of having times when she would not like something in him, is detrimental to the relationship. The relationship would have been stronger had she allowed for vulnerability, for imperfection.
Many couples suffer from this unrealistic belief: that good relationships are flawless, completely solid, without cracks, doubts, or times of reproach and angst. I found this out first hand when I was recruiting couples for this project. Many refused, claiming that their relationship was going well, and that talking about it to me could potentially throw it off balance. I too, guided by the numerous injunctions of the ethics consent form, assumed that interviewees could be easily damaged with the wrong kinds of questions. It was only later, through my conversations with couples that I realised that if talking and thinking threatened the integrity of their relationship, there was something awry in it already. Real relationships are slightly cracked, and are hardy. They have to be, to handle the challenges of life. The strength of such couples is that they can, and do, ask the tough questions of themselves – as we will see in Chapter 9. These relationships are not monolithic unities – they are unself-same, differentiated, they contain two unique people. This more realistic view of relational harmony and health has profound implications for relationship education. This view echoes directly with Gottman’s findings, 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 160 canvassed in Chapter 2: that healthy marriages do contain a certain proportion of ‘negative affect’, argument and disagreement. In fact, it is the couples who do not express such factors that most likely become prone to minimising problems and withdrawing from discussion, which erode intimacy.
From identity to relational logic It is important at this point to draw some more rigorous conceptual lessons from the experiences Nathan, Isabelle and Natasha offer for examination. We need to make a distinction between the discourses of sociality which still, even if covertly, reply on identity logic, from the participatory model offered by Bohm, Rogers and Buber so far. An example of the conceptual complexity in describing intimate encounters is offered by the work of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin.
In Bonds of Love (1988), Benjamin suggests that a new model of personal relations is necessary, as an alternative to the dominant subject/object binary oppositional identity logic underpinning most social theory, which legitimates a gender politic of domination. Benjamin critically examines classical developmental psychoanalytical theory. Ego psychology starts with an original symbiotic unity of mother and infant, from which the infant gradually individuates. Three stages are conceptualised: differentiation, practicing, rapprochement. The latter is a state of conflict and frustration with a world that is no longer perceived as controllable. The parent must be able to deal adequately with aggression and dependence, and must also accept he or she cannot make a perfect world for the child. Essentially, this is the Hegelian scenario described in Chapter 5. If the parent gives in and the infant wins this struggle, the parent has nothing real to offer him, and the infant feels empty (1988:35). If the parent asserts domination, the infant will think that the price of freedom is aloneness, and will learn to comply.
Benjamin argues that the post-rapprochement stage is also commonly conceptualised purely in identity terms. The infant is allowed to alternate between antagonism and ‘mutual understanding and shared feeling’ (1988:40), playing role reversals with the mother. Whether retaliating or 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 161 identifying, the infant is treated as a discrete entity capable of only being a controlling subject, or an unwitting controlled victim. Even Winnicott’s theory of transitional space, in Benjamin’s understanding, posits the infant as instrumentally using the world. Being with his transitional object – the blanket, the teddy bear, the infant, in her view, internalises the mother’s function, making himself a substitute to self-comfort during her absence. Once able to do so, the infant becomes capable of ‘establishing the boundary of inside and outside’, and jumping between these categories. Maturity, then, is equated with an ability to shift between subject and object positions, while maintaining the boundary.
In view of the material offered in Chapter 5 of this thesis, Benjamin’s understanding of Winnicott is clearly a simplification. The ontological complexity of Winnicott’s idea of unintegration is precisely in the infant’s capacity to exist without the need for boundaries, in a state of holding and being held, comforting and being comforted. The entire dependence on delineations and singular bounded identity comes under question in such experiences – and clearly, this thesis shows that such experiences are not limited to infancy, but in fact form some of the most profound experiences of intimacy in adulthood. The relational situation – be it in dialogue, in an experience of seeing a lover, allows for an experience of participation in a whole.
It is important to see, then, how Benjamin’s much-celebrated intersubjective model, which she offers as an alternative in her work, falls short of the relational view. Benjamin draws on Habermas’ expression ‘the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding’ (1988:19), to construct a field theory of development, where instead of instrumentally using otherness by either incorporation and internalisation, the infant develops capacities within an enabling spectrum of relationships. However, even within this field, the intersubjective view ‘presupposes at all times the presence of two interacting subjects (italics mine) who each contribute, rather than one subject who incorporates the action of others’ (1988:45). Benjamin argues that only with a model that can envisage two mutually recognising psyches ‘being with’ one 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 162 another and mutually sharing states of mind and feeling, rather than complementing each other or using each other from their differential positions, can there be a turn around from relationships of dependence and exploitation, and can there be an experience of sameness without obliterating difference (1988:48). However, while intersubjective theory does not privilege the subject, it still presupposes the essential nature of separate distinct identities ‘inter-acting’. This thesis shows that an altogether different ontological structure is possible, still.
Decisions: Responsibility and response There were many times in his life, Nathan confided, when he has questioned his commitment in his past relationships. His discussion of his friend’s impending marriage in Chapter 4 highlights the way his self-focused question, ‘What do I want?’ produced alienation. When entitlements are weighed, Nathan feels he has to assess whether a potential spouse is able to bring out his potential to his satisfaction. Fear and doubt justify putting conditions on giving any unrestricted absolute response.
This conundrum also played out at the beginning of Nathan’s relationship with Bella, but with different results. Nathan started the relationship with Bella while he was not yet fully separated from his previous partner, and was in two minds about the decision: ‘For ages after that, our relationship still involved me thinking that I’d given up something that I didn’t really want to give up’. After almost a year, he decided to go back to his previous girlfriend. Soon, he returned to Bella. They had a bath, and took ecstasy to work through the constraints and limitations of usual conversation. Only some time after this, Nathan said he realised that he treated the relationship with Bella differently:
N: For me, I don’t think I’ve ever been really committed until this relationship, and it’s probably only in the last year that I’ve made those strides forward. It’s still something I’m working out. There have been situations before, where at that point in my life I would have just walked out, it was so easy. It’s only since New Year’s Eve this year, I guess, that I acknowledge that, within myself and with her. We discussed it and I think it’s been productive in terms of cementing our relationship. 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 163
Or at least providing a stronger platform of honesty between us. That’s been good.
Commitment for Nathan meant that he was not going to pursue romantic possibilities with other people that would allow him to re-express himself again. Commitment was taking a certain stand towards Bella:
N: It means taking responsibility. It means more than that though. It means being prepared to say ‘I love you’ and to accept that certain expectations will be there on the part of the other person as well, and being true to those expectations.
So this is no longer just about his own feelings behind a performative ‘I love you’, but about Bella’s response and immediately, his responsibility to that. This is an ethical, implicated engagement. Now Nathan realises that focusing purely on his own needs was selfish:
N: I wasn’t really aware of how much hurt would come from that decision [to drag it on], for the people involved. And if I was confronted with the same situation today, I would know that a decision had to be made very quickly. You just don’t drag people along for a year. You have to be honest with yourself and honest with them and accept that it probably isn’t like a decision. You’re not going to always play the best hand. There will always be things that you regret, making the decision one way or the other. […] It requires responsibility, which entails some effort. There are so many things that – you’re already selfish, at least I was already selfish, and you’re encouraged to be selfish in your day to day living, so at some point you have to take responsibility for the relationship and realise that being selfish isn’t conducive to the success of the relationship. And the success of the relationship is staying together. You have to give up your selfishness. D: Is it responsibility to Bella or the relationship? N: Both. To her, the relationship, and myself. Because being a selfish person isn’t an ingredient in terms of the things I want to succeed for my long term relationship. It’s not conducive to anything, to possibly children down the road.
Originally, in Chapter 4, Nathan’s sense of responsibility was a self- centred one – he was trying to ‘do justice’: ‘What do I want, need, deserve?’, and ‘How can I do this not to hurt this person, and to be fair?’ But he and the other person were separate. Now his responsibility to himself comes only third, mediated through his relationship. Yet it feels right. Deeply experienced responsibility with Bella is in being aware of what the situation requires of 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 164
Nathan. It is in allowing himself to take a stand, to be caught in ordinary, everyday situations with Bella that require him in them. For Nathan and Bella, these were: taking a bath; taking out the garbage together in the evening, because Bella did not want to go out in the dark alone; figuring out who would drive so that Bella would get a break from driving sometimes; Nathan deciding not to tease her just to get a rise out of Bella; talking about raising children in the future and what will need to be done – being involved in the living out of the relationship, on a daily level, not standing outside, making abstract choices and decisions outside of any real living context.
This kind of responsibility is central to Buber’s I-You orientation; it is inherent to it when a meeting is genuine. A story from his autobiographical Meetings (2002) illuminates what it meant here. Buber talks of one morning when he thought he had an insight into the meaning of spiritual transcendence and mystery. He thinks it is something external to normal, profane life: ‘exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy’ (Buber, 2002:54). He is basking in the afterglow of this discovery, and is very proud of himself. In the afternoon, a young man comes to see Buber, with an urgent question, which would, as it turns out, decide his fate. Buber sagely gives him advice, showing off his cleverness and status. The young man leaves, and dies.
Buber realises that, in the most profound way, he had failed to help. What was required of him was to be there and respond to what he saw. To be present and available to this young man, to attend to his worry, was actually the religious calling to serve people: ‘[w]hen you are called upon from above, required, chosen, empowered, sent, you with this your mortal bit of life are meant. You are willed for the life of communion’ (Buber, 2002: 55). Purpose and meaning here do not need to be figured out through identity-bound questions – because
[m]an receives, and what he receives is not a “content” but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated while one is altogether unable to indicate what it is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us – it makes 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 165
life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. The question about the meaning of life had vanished. But if it is still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your senses. (Buber, 1996:159)
This is how Buber also views true marriage. Marriage as a social relationship, which must retain a sense of the common, not just identities:
Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of all true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another. […] Whoever wishes to renew a marriage on another basis is not essentially different from those who want to abolish it: both declare that they no longer know the fact. Indeed, take the much discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really egocentric – in other words, every relationship in which one is not at all present to the other, but each uses the other for self-enjoyment – what would remain? (Buber, 1996:95)
The chrysalis and the butterfly It is tempting, when concluding this chapter, to say that Nathan’s moments of seeing Bella sleeping, or doing things together, are the ‘real’ relating that couples should learn to emulate, while all else – doubts, questions, yearnings – are pathological. Yet nothing could be further from both Buber’s and Rogers’ arguments. Nathan’s relationship with Bella, too, has its times of anger, doubt, annoyance, categorising, and frustration. He, too, sees ‘issues’, at times. However, Nathan and Bella are somehow able to shift in both of their positions to arrive at a new common ground; to work with it, to stay on. There is a respect; there is a treasuring of their shared history, and a sense of achievement in having worked through problems and doubts.
Buber’s I-It and I-You modalities are two ways of experiencing relational life - a dual phenomenon - not either all relational and dialogical, or all problem and issue-based. It has the capacity to be both. In fact, Buber argues, we need to construct most of our life in the concrete and reliable sphere of things and identities. We cannot live without the ‘basic privileges’ of the ‘firm’ and ‘wholesome’ object world: it ‘offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge’ (Buber, 1996:84). This is precisely why women in Bittman and Pixley’s studies, in Chapter 4, wanted identities 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 166 attached to their housework preoccupations: that they were ‘cooks’, ‘secretaries’, ‘nurses’ and the like, and not just pottering around. Our society finds it easier to recognise and reward being some-one, not just being.
Compared with such proper serious stuff, moments like Nathan watching Bella sleeping can seem like ‘queer lyric-dramatic episodes’ (Buber, 1996:84), indeed - sentimental, short-lived, insignificant, inconsequential. They are gratuitous, given randomly, ‘come upon through grace’ (Buber, 1996:62). Nothing can be built on them, because they cannot be controlled:
One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. But in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human. (Buber, 1996:85).
Moments of relation allow us to relax our constant self-making, holding it all together. They enable us to experience the hum of being, hidden in the articles ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘am’, that are usually treated as purely instrumental to establishing equivalence: ‘We are people’, ‘We are looking’, ‘We are intelligent’. In the I-You relation, we just are. But such moments pass, and we are in blocked relations, implanted in I-It. Alienation and being critical congeal obstacles, leading to a loss of fluidity, suppleness. But such ways of being are sometimes inevitable. Distance, failure to hold or support loved ones, fears of dependence or being burdened, problematised understandings of what being together entails, lack of recognition or gratitude, will lead to calculations, assessment, evaluations of partner and relationship. These may be unhealthy, but by no means alien to life. Conversation alone, evidently from Isabelle’s example, cannot salvage a relationship when a complex range of other factors exists. But we must remember too, that the I-You, the love, encompass the feelings, the objects, the ‘its’. I-You is a change of the way we look, and is always there. And conversely, as Natasha showed us in Chapter 6, the very things and obstacles, treated in the right way, can bring couples together, can guide out of the impasse. Such is the ‘sublime melancholy of our lot’, Buber concludes, that every You eventually 7 LOVE ACTUALLY | 167
becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary… Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable – the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect. And even love cannot persist in direct relation; it endures, but only in the alternation of actuality and latency. (Buber, 1996:68-69)
This makes love so much more fragile, and precious.
8
MEETING
The etymology of L. facis is uncertain: some scholars refer it to facre to make; others to the root fa- to appear, shine (cf. fac-em torch). Oxford English Dictionary online
This chapter looks at the notion of perception and knowledge between intimate partners, building on the insights of the preceding two chapters. Specifically, I offer the notion of the face to face meeting. The work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is central to my discussion. A complex range of topographical concerns becomes intertwined with an ethics of encounter.
Meeting Bill An ordinary experience helps me to map out the conceptual terrain of this chapter. In the 2005 Sydney Archibald Prize exhibition, there was a portrait of the Australian actor Bill Hunter, by artist Jason Benjamin.28 Staring Down the Past was a large canvas, where Bill is contemplatively looking out into the distance. It was easy to walk past this painting in the initial purposive rush of entering an art gallery. However, Bill’s portrait caught my attention. I have since come back to the image many times.
The detail that hooked me was the inflection of Bill’s right eyebrow. It reads like a mark of sorrow. From this, my eyes wander across the surface of the skin to the deep vertical ridges above the bridge of his nose, the maze of crisscrossing lines covering Bill’s forehead. There is a wonderful sense of history, of time, about this skin. It is a living membrane, not just a re- presentation of something else, as we hold portraits and even faces to be. The face, the surface, are Bill. There is more in it also – the sun that had
Oil on linen, 180x240cm. Winner of 2005 Packing Room Prize, Archibald Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Painting reproduced by permission from artist. 8 MEETING | 170 burned it when he’d been out in summer, the people who made him smile or cry, the suffering, grief, joy, shock, surprises. We would say that all these experiences are ‘on the inside’: as memories, or tendencies, and habits. But they are also present, living, alive, on the surface. This dichotomy of inside and outside is muddled here. When I looked at his face, I sensed a depth – a sense of fullness, that I could not quite locate. Was I inside him, looking from his inside outwards? It certainly felt so when I looked at his unfocused eyes, suddenly - with them, as if we were both looking in the same direction, contemplating. I wanted to see what he was seeing. My forehead creased in response to his worry lines. There was a confusion of places. The very reason why I never tire of looking at this image is the restful sense of being in this depth.
A newspaper article about the painting supported my hunch that something strange happens in this painting (The Age, 2005). The painter, Jason Benjamin, writes that the challenging part of painting an actor is catching him out: ‘[b]eing an actor, Bill can give you what look he wants. […] Getting someone to be themselves is bloody tricky’. Benjamin wanted to look ‘a little under the skin’. Bill confirms Benjamin’s inkling: he says that he tried not to give away too much, and only showed Benjamin what he wanted him to learn. The strange thing is, however, that when Bill saw the painting for the first time, he found it unsettling: ‘I think he has literally taken my clothes off there. [...] You wonder what he has seen there’. Benjamin saw something, captured more than even Bill knows or thinks about himself, but Bill recognises it as unmistakeably ‘him’. Looking at the painting. I experience something similar. I did not know anything about Bill as a person: about his personal life, or his professional history. But there was something intensely personal to me about it, nevertheless. Not identifiable, but just recognisable. There is a sense of awe in this meeting.
I believe that this experience holds insights about the possibilities of ‘meeting’ others in intimate relationships, also. Originally, when I started writing about my meeting with Bill, I thought that the central concerns I wanted to explore through my interview material were topographical. That is – when 8 MEETING | 171 partners say they know each other ‘inside out’, what do they mean? When they say they ‘accept each other fully’, is this ever possible, and if so, how? When they categorise each other, what happens ontologically – in terms of shifts between wholeness and totality? However, later, I realised that such questions are in fact misguided, because they are still planted in identity terms alone.
‘All of me’: Lily Lily had been living with Marcus since her late teens. The interview started with Lily talking about a recent happy experience in her life with Marcus. Lily said she was having a very stressful time combining work and study, and she was recovering from an injury. However, as she was sitting at home a few days before the interview, feeling a little down, Marcus came home and brought her an article cut out from the day’s newspaper, which he saved for her, because he knew she would not have bought it. It touched her that he’d been thinking about her during the day, and wanted to do something ‘lovely’ for her. Marcus often did such caring things for Lily:
L: He’ll bring me a cup of tea without me asking. It’ll just be something he'll do, because he’ll know that I want it. And it makes you feel aware that somebody is paying that much attention. Or in the middle of [pause] we’re just sitting down and we're playing backgammon or we’re talking or whatever else and he’ll look at me and say, oh, you know, ‘No, you need a tea’ or ‘You need a drink’ or you know, ‘Do you need?’ He’ll bring me a jumper or something without thinking about it. It’s just what he does.
Marcus knows Lily well: he has lived with her for a long time, and he makes a lot of effort to find out what she needs, to make her life happy. He looked after her when she was injured, held her hand when she hobbled with a walking stick, helped her go back to study. But his bringing of tea or jumper are not formulaic predictions based on his knowledge. He tends to her. Marcus may notice Lily is shivering, or her voice grows dry, then he checks whether his guess that she needs a jumper or tea is correct. He explores the options for her and lets her decide. The crucial question here is ‘Do you?’ – he remains open to her response, without self-consciousness or control. 8 MEETING | 172
Ultimately, Marcus gives Lily something she did not even know she needed, or wanted, through attention and response - key Buberian terms, as we saw earlier:
The idea of responsibility is to be brought back from the province of specialised ethics into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding. Responding to what? To what happens to one, to what is to be seen and heard and felt. Each concrete hour allotted to the person, with its content drawn from the world and from destiny, is speech for the man who is attentive. Attentive, for no more than that is needed in order to make a beginning with the reading of the signs that are given to you. (Buber, 1966:20)
Often, we say that in a good relationship, people know each other ‘deeply’. But does this topographical term accurately reflect the kind of knowledge couples find helpful? Lily described previous relationships where the other person’s knowledge was comprehensive:
L: It was all about being happy and affectionate to each other, and it was quite superficial. And yes, you had a close knowledge and you quite liked the person, and you knew all the nice things about the person, and you were interested in all the nice aspects of the person, but somehow the not-so-nice aspects, well, we’ll just be polite and leave them to one side.
There is obviously knowledge of the bad and the good here, but the bad is split off and swept aside, as the ‘bad lover’, while the good is praised and loved. The difference with Marcus is that he wants to see the bits ‘swept aside’, the shadows: Lily’s bad moods, tendencies to underplay her strengths. Lily is continuously surprised that she does not have to tell Marcus about such things, because he had been attending, and that he cares for her even though she is not being ‘lovable’. Lily says that she had been brought up in a family where to ‘deserve’ love, one had to act ‘affectionate’ and ‘happy’.
Marcus, however, allows her to be herself, to be real. He knows when she is ‘feeling hurt or miserable or really stressed about something, panicked, or anxious’, is ‘interested in that’, and ‘responds to that’. Lily did not ever associate this with being in love with someone:
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L: You forget that somebody cares that much and knows you that well, and loves you even though. […] Not so much loves you. [pause] Thinks about you and is so connected to what you are going through, somehow, you forget that there's someone else there going through this and that they’re aware that you're miserable and unhappy and all the rest of it. They still love you as who you are, because they can see underneath this terrible behaviour. You know?
Marcus is with her, during her hard times. He ‘sees underneath this terrible behaviour’, but it not a matter of dismissing what he sees, because the ‘real’, nice, Lily, is ‘underneath’ and separate from the teary Lily who needs help or support. To relate this back to my experience of the painting, this is it – this is Lily. Lily is all of these things, tendencies, qualities, and Marcus takes that on as is, on face value, and more.
Masks and faces, totals and wholes: Levinas and the face Many times, when I asked my interviewees to describe a moment when they felt close with their partner, they used the words ‘face’ or ‘mask’. Here is Marcus recounting the joy of noticing how Lily’s face changes:
M: There’s an element of joy which is never very far from the surface and it can be in the middle of a fight even, and you just look at the person and the way they look at that moment – the frown on the face or whatever – you know, makes me feel incredibly elated. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. It’s just euphoric joy. You know, it’s just like: ‘Uhh! You’re so incredible’. Like, it’s amazing. It’s wonderful. There’s just an element of that person at that moment which is shining through which just elates you, like and sometimes that will be then very much: ‘God I love this person. I’m so amazingly pleased that I’m around this person, because they make me really happy like this’. And sometimes, like: ‘Ah God. What a fantastic life I get to live’.
A little crease of Lily’s smile, or movement of her eyes, or a freckle, reveal something more, expand. Her face shines. Barthes talks about something similar in an essay on photography, Camera Lucida (2000). He writes about mourning for his mother. He wants to find a photo of his mother that captures her. One after another, the pictures are inadequate:
According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say I missed 8 MEETING | 174
her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not ‘find’ her. I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labour; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say confronted with a certain photograph, ‘That’s almost the way she was!’ was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, ‘That’s not the way she was at all!’ (Barthes, 2000:65-66)
It is not merely missing pieces that are needed here for a sense of the ‘whole’. Barthes keeps looking, until he stumbles upon one photo, and then another, which bloom. One of them is of his mother on a beach. He writes that he cannot even see her face in it, as she is too far away from the camera - but he just knows it is her. He recognises the gait, the health, the glow. In the second photo, something similarly strange happens. She is just a little girl in it, but Barthes recognises her kindness, which ‘had formed her being immediately and forever’ (Barthes, 2000:69). A no-thing, like a faint trace, but absolutely unique to her. Something supposedly so infinitesimal makes a whole. He finds her.
The physical, visual key in the image to such an opening is what Barthes calls a punctum. A gesture of the hand, the turn of the head, the way one holds a hand fan – traces, directions - ‘prick’ him and plunge him into a different space, where paradoxically, while remaining a detail, they fill the whole picture. So while some photographs of his mother are ‘merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth’, the two that he finds are essential; they achieve for him ‘the impossible science of the unique being’ (Barthes, 2000:70-71). So identity (being some-thing or some-one) has a composite, total logic, while essence (esse - being) is a paradoxical holographic phenomenon, held in the parts, of a whole. Just as Bill Hunter’s skin, face, the skin of the painting, come to life, so too Barthes’ mother’s photographs cease to be mere documents, but transcend themselves: no longer signs but ‘the thing itself’ (Barthes, 2000:45).
Narum, Jane’s husband, said he loved coming home, because he could relax completely with Jane, whereas he had to ‘put on a mask’ with 8 MEETING | 175 most other people. Leah, another interviewee, said that with partners before her fiancé Greg, she had to keep a façade on the less attractive traits she knew well that she had (impatience, swearing). When living together, however, she ‘couldn’t help herself’, but that was okay, because Greg took her as she was: ‘it was like [sigh], you know you don’t – almost you don’t have to put on some kind of face’. To wear a mask is to cover one’s face, to put up a barrier; but face to face, there is openness. Face here actually becomes no- thing – a liminal surface, a threshold. Emmanuel Levinas is a philosopher who speaks at length about the ethical significance of the face.
Much of Levinas’ writing has poststructuralist logic, and an emphasis on deferral and displacement. However, some of his work has a very different focus on presence, and is quite close to Buber’s ethics of I-You. In this thesis, I will only focus on this latter Levinasian argument, to be found in his Ethics and Infinity (2000), and some, in Totality and Infinity (1995).
In Ethics and Infinity, a series of broadcast interviews with Philippe Nemo, Levinas deliberates on the very assumptions of phenomenological enquiry – that is, the study of what there is. He argues that Heidegger’s, Husserl’s and Hegel’s work is preoccupied with a phenomenology of Otherness which reduces the Other to some version of the same, of the I - and he calls this an ‘egology’. Levinas argues that beneath the self-oriented ontology is, in fact, no-thing. He calls it ‘there is’ (il y a, in French). ‘There is’, he writes, is a sense of impersonal being – something he remembers first experiencing as a child, when falling asleep in his bedroom and feeling the ‘rumbling silence’ of nothing going on; or in the noisy emptiness of a shell put to the ear. It is ‘[n]ot that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation – there is’ (Levinas, 2000:48). The impersonal matter-of-factual nature of this hum is ‘neither joy nor abundance: it is a noise returning after every negation of this noise. Neither nothingness nor being’ (2000:48). ‘Being’ on the other hand, or the notion of ‘something’, signify a mastery over this ‘there is’ – the sun rises, things can be seen again for what they are, and ‘dominate it’ (2000:51). There are strong echoes here with Buber’s observation on the 8 MEETING | 176 simultaneity of I-It and I-You, and also with the archetypal awakening scene where the object world is rearranged by the newly composed self, in Nathan’s story of watching Bella sleeping. When Nathan just wakes up, ‘there is’ – nothing in particular, just presence.
‘There is’ experienced without meaning, Levinas argues, can be dreadful, anonymous, senseless and swallowing in its infinity, like the limbo of insomnia. What needs to happen, he suggests, is a ‘deposition’ of ‘there is’, through a social relationship with the Other (2000:52). And one profound way that this can happen is through meeting an Other, face to face.
Two interlinked modalities play out in meeting Otherness: sight and possession. We ‘feast our eyes’; to say that we ‘see something’ is equivalent to saying we ‘get it’. Levinas says this metonymy is pervasive:
Vision is a forgetting of the there is because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite. […] Vision loves to grasp. Vision opens upon a perspective, upon a horizon, and describes a traversable distance, invites the hand to movement and to contact. [...] By the hand the object is in the end comprehended, touched, taken, borne and referred to other objects, clothed with signification, by reference to other objects. (Levinas, 1995:191)
Looking at something is often a way of treating the Other as an object to assimilate, through comprehension or memorisation. In meeting a person face to face, Levinas suggests, something different often occurs:
I think rather that access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you can describe them. The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes one is not in a social relationship with the Other. The relation with the face can surely be dominated by perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to that. (Levinas, 2000:85-86)
Levinas’ description of this encounter echoes strongly with Buber’s I-You relation. Meeting an Other face to face opens up a space where individual features recede, giving way to a whole, while identity-terms are temporarily superseded: 8 MEETING | 177
Ordinarily one is a “character”: a professor at the Sorbonne, a Supreme Court justice, son of so-and-so, everything that is in one’s passport, the manner of dressing, of presenting oneself. And all signification in the usual sense of the term is relative to such a context: the meaning of something is in its relation to another thing. Here, to the contrary, the face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not “seen”. It is what cannot become content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. It is in this that the signification of the face makes it escape from being, as a correlate of a knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being. But the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. (Levinas, 2000:86)
What Levinas is saying is that in the encounter, the face ceases re-presenting a person, as we often assume it does (on ID documents, for instance). Though physically a part of a person, it opens up into a whole.
Akin to Buber’s I-You relation, facing an Other for Levinas is immediately ethical. The face ‘speaks’, ‘it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility, which is the authentic relationship’ (2000:88). The face holds an unspoken imperative to be present, to respond: ‘[w]hen in the presence of the Other, I say “Here I am!” This “Here I am!” is the place through which the Infinite enters into language, but without giving itself to be seen’ (Levinas, 2000:106). This is a declaration of presence, and of implication:
The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility, this moreover, whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing something concrete for the Other. To say: here I am [me voici]. To do something for the Other. To give. To be human spirit, that’s it. The incarnation of human subjectivity guarantees its spirituality […] (2000:97)
Absolutely essential to this kind of relation is the recognition that one’s place cannot be taken by anyone else:
My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me. […] Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse. This charge is a supreme dignity of the unique. I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, and non-interchangeable’ (2000:100- 101).
If we consider this idea in the light of interview material in this thesis, for instance, Nathan’s testimony, we can see that in fact, Levinas captures the 8 MEETING | 178 very essence of what it takes to be in a committed authentic relation with an Other. When Nathan talks about realising his responsibility to Bella after she tells him she loves him, or in situations where she asks him for help; he has to be there. No-one else can take his place. No-one else could take his place in the bath, talking about hurt feelings and reconciling. It is his call alone to help her with taking out the garbage, at night. And instead of hiding or choosing the fantasy option of fleeing and looking for someone easier, Nathan stays.
The Levinasian ‘ethics of optics’ (Benson, 2002:117), and his very sharp observation on the alienating effect of knowledge when it replaces sight, are pertinent to my discussion of meeting loved ones in this chapter. Levinas is very clear that approaching others rationally, through knowing them, reduces:
I think of Descartes, who said that the cogito can give itself the sun and the sky; the only thing is cannot give itself is the idea of the Infinite. Knowledge is always an adequation between thought and what it thinks. There is in knowledge, in the final account, an impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality cannot have the same structure as knowledge. […] The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still and always a solitude. (2000:60).
Knowing the Other in a comprehensive (i.e. cataloguing) sense, as we saw clearly in Lily’s testimony, can be reductive. Her previous lovers knew her extensively, but she remained distant from them, separate. In the next section, too, we will see how some ways that Marcus tries to know and understand Lily can be alienating.
Diagnosis and self-care: Marcus When we are not looking with the eye of the heart, love is indeed blind, for then we are failing to see the other person as bearer of an acorn of imaginative truth. A feeling might be there, but not the sight; and, as the vision clouds, so do sympathy and interest. We feel only annoyed, and we resort to diagnostic and typological concepts. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
In the beginning of this chapter, Lily said that it was remarkable that Marcus accepted her moods and still cared for her, that he saw her wholly, and did not judge. It makes sense that she is unhappy when Marcus does the 8 MEETING | 179 opposite, which he sometimes did. Lily often felt insecure about her figure. She became upset when Marcus decided that she had a disorder, and then treated everything Lily said and did in relation to her body as symptomatic of that condition. She said that while she knew she had a problem, it bothered her that Marcus assumed he was the more rational person and then treated everything she said as ‘pathological’:
L: That bothers me really deeply, because it makes me think that he doesn’t have respect for the fact that even if I were pathological, that I’m still a person there and that I still have intelligence there, even if I’m neurotic, I’m not stupid. […] And I just feel like he’s not only overstating things and privileging how he’s seeing everything obviously the correct way, but he’s treating me as though I’m really irrational and really incapable of speaking for myself and saying what I think. And even if it’s not a nice thing, even if it’s something that he disagrees with, maybe that’s still a relevant thing to consider.
She feels that Marcus dismisses the things he disagrees with, and wants her to just see a specialist who would ‘fix her’:
L: I don’t like it that he can just throw it away, just throw it away as something that, you know, it’s just this extra thing that’s not really real and can be reasoned out and if I saw a psychiatrist, if I only saw a psychologist or a psychiatrist I could get fixed – that wouldn’t happen anymore. And I don’t like that he has that view that I have to, you know, I have to get fixed, there’s something wrong when he disagrees with me. I find that a bit offensive. I find that really hard to deal with. That’s the thing that I think I find the hardest.
So even though Lily admits there is a problem, what upsets her is that Marcus pathologises her, as a whole person. Everything she does either confirms his diagnosis, or is presumed to be done in defiance of it. The problem is not an ‘extra thing’ – it totalises her. Here the punctum works in a negative way – it overwhelms. This is a characteristic Rogerian failure also, of allowing for potentiality of becoming, instead of the fixity of identity.
Another instance where similarly, Marcus appears to have attributed Lily’s thoughts or behaviours to a set label is in regards to housework. Lily feels that whenever she picks up on the way Marcus leaves some jobs around the house incomplete, Marcus becomes angry and assumes that Lily is just 8 MEETING | 180 acting out as a ‘feminist’. He tells her he identifies as a feminist, himself, and ‘knows all that stuff’. Lily feels that he dismisses her grievance on account of its attachment to an ideological position, not his behaviour. It’s not ‘real’: ‘I think he thinks that I'm resorting to a theory in a book that has nothing to do with reality’. Having decided Lily’s compliant is not genuine, Marcus does not listen to her requests about how she’d like some tasks to be done, and both get annoyed with each other.
Lily’s words also confirm the frequent ineffectiveness of excessive efforts to be rational and objective. In fact, when both Marcus and Lily try to be like this in discussion with each other, they are flung to opposite corners, either defending their positions or maintaining a respectful but alienating distance:
L: We will both tend to be very defensive of our own feelings, because we’re trying so hard, and aware of the fact that we’re trying to be very rational with each other. Trying to be very rational with each other and trying to be quite objective, as objective as possible, trying not to push our own agenda, I suppose. Trying not to say well, this should balance against this. You know, like, you know, my interest doesn’t mean more than your interest in the matter – trying to appear to be very objective.
Clearly, in a healthy differentiated situation, something quite different happens: the clear separation and distinction between positions disappears.
Marcus repeated during his interview that he was often concerned about Lily’s wellbeing. He found her ‘fascinating’, and often talked about her with friends, in order to figure out how he could make her life nicer:
M: I want her to be happy and I’ve been trying to help her become happy since I’ve known her. And she’s now happy and she hasn’t been it’s sort of. [pause] I can’t love someone and not want them to be as happy as they can possibly be and so you’re constantly trying to figure out ways in which you can. [pause] Influence things that are within your influence, be they your behaviour or some elements of your partner’s behaviour which you can see is quite destructive. […] The more I can understand, or think I can understand, then, the greater chance of success I’ll have in figuring out the best ways to make Lily’s life a life that she is happy and comfortable within. [pause] Not that this will 8 MEETING | 181
make her happy, but so that she’s in a situation and a place that she feels secure and comfortable and happy enough to be able to resolve the things that she needs to resolve.
The intention is, without doubt, a heartfelt and loving one, but I think it had rubbed off on the way Marcus began to speak about Lily during the interview. Unconsciously, his answers to questions about the relationship sometimes veered in the direction of statements about ‘the way Lily is’. Marcus also felt that he knew her on some issues better than she knew herself.
The particular segment of his interview which appears to confirm Lily’s feelings about his taking of the position of a ‘rational’, better-knowing partner, was indeed when Marcus spoke about his efforts to ensure Lily follows up on her treatment with a health professional:
M: …she saw her once or twice, then Mary had to go away for a month, because she was having a hip replacement. She was due back this week and every night I’ve sort of said to Lily, ‘Look, you should call Mary tomorrow.’ She’d go, ‘No, no’. She doesn’t want to talk about it. You know and, of course, she doesn’t call Mary the next day. I’m like, ‘You’ve got to call her, because you’ve got to make an appointment to see her, because you’ve just got to do it, you know. It’s what you are doing and you can’t just keep putting everything off’.
The ‘should’ and ‘you’ve got to’, and the generalisation of ‘you can’t put everything off’ echo Lily’s perception that Marcus assumed he could tell her what to do.
It is significant that immediately after this segment, Marcus revealed some possible reasons for being so forceful about helping Lily get better. When Lily annoys Marcus, Marcus finds he cannot deal with the feeling of being annoyed or angry very well:
M: I hate feeling cranky, generally. I have many reasons for that. Umm, with my, you know, my family and I have all sorts of other reasons. I hate feeling cranky. I hate feeling shitty with people. To the point where, if someone does something which is going to make me feel 8 MEETING | 182
shitty with them, I feel doubly shitty. Because I hate the fact that I feel shitty with them about it. I’m quite good at letting things go, so I’ll get cranky but then, I’ll just let it go. And sometimes letting things go all the time can build up, because you have not really been letting it go. You trick yourself. […] Sometimes she snaps and gets really angry quite quickly and anger’s not something I deal with very well. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t like anger. I can deal with anger that’s, that’s sort of based on something that’s open within the situation. Like, ‘I’m angry about something’. But somebody just getting angry at you when, you know for what may be a reason but isn’t a clear situation, just tends to make me – I don’t know. I tend to either just sort of go really quiet, which she then gets the shits, you know, ‘Why are you sulking?’ ‘I’m not sulking.’ You know? ‘I’m just not wanting to interact with that right now, because if I do, it’s going to not be pleasant.’
Marcus told me that when he was growing up, his parents fought a lot. His father had an affair and a child outside the marriage. Even though his father had promised to leave his lover, unbeknown to Marcus’ mother, the relationship continued. Marcus knew about this, because his father confided in him. Both his parents felt they could unburden their adult problems to Marcus, and he was often overwhelmed by this responsibility. Marcus also had to look after his younger brother, who could not cope well with their parents’ violent rows and his father’s verbal abuse. Marcus felt he took on the role of the mediator and peacemaker: ‘I always tried to find – make things cool. To smooth things over. […] So I like to smooth things over and keep everything calm and everyone happy and you know: “It’s all good. Come on. Calm down, it’s okay, it’s okay. No one meant to be nasty”. You know, like that.’
Early family experiences are indeed a powerful influence on couples’ relationships. In Lily’s case, also, her family’s insistence on her performance as a ‘good’ lovable daughter who had to earn love shaped the way she expected loving relationships to be. This is precisely why she was amazed that Marcus cared for her when she was depressed and was not ‘deserving’ of love and affection.
Because Marcus is used to ‘making everyone happy’, he extends this onto Lily. But it is obvious that this is also still part of his own self-soothing 8 MEETING | 183 process, his way of managing his own anger, or sadness, or ambivalence. He says that Lily is not very good with being ‘not ok’ about certain things in their house, but he, too, is not ok with ‘being not ok’. He too applies the fixing talk to himself, in his effort to be the perfect happy mediator:
M: If I want things to be different in this relationship, then I’ve got to fix up the way I’m behaving within my life before I can start expecting Lily to change her life for me, or her behaviour patterns for me. I need to really fulfil the ones I am not fulfilling – what I could be fulfilling for myself right now. […] I find it the best way to be happy in life is just to be happy. You know. ‘Just come on! Just be happy!’ [laughs] ‘You can do it! You’ve just got to decide to be happy.’ But you know, it doesn’t necessarily work like that and so, you know.
Marcus, without doubt, sees some sides of Lily that she may distort, or that she cannot see. His attempts to help her with her health, or to boost her confidence in her ability to undertake further study, or just cheering her up, because she is sad after her injury, are all based on real issues in this couple’s life – they are not fictions. Marcus is able to reflect back to Lily things she may not see, but that will help her. To remind the reader, Bill Hunter, too, was amazed to see that even though he tried not to give everything away when he was painted, Jason Benjamin somehow succeeded in capturing elements of Bill that were uncannily personal to Hunter. Bill was not just what he showed, but much more. Lily is not just who she thinks she is, or what she shows – she is that, but also, what Marcus may see or experience in being with her (and many other people, too).
The damaging thing happens, however, when Marcus assumes that he has the superior ‘rational’ vantage point, and claims authority on making prescriptions. This is not about whether Lily would have benefited from help - Marcus undoubtedly means well, and is serious about Lily’s wellbeing. Nevertheless, Lily thinks this can be patronising and disrespectful. Now, let’s see how another couple deals with similar situations.
Wearing sunscreen, taking medicine: Jane Jane and Narum met on a high school excursion in Europe. They both grew up on the same street in a small village in Iceland. They quickly found they 8 MEETING | 184 enjoyed each other’s company, even though their interests were slightly different. Jane and Narum moved in together soon after and married when they were going to Australia for a year, to pursue postgraduate study.
Jane admitted that she had a ‘complex’ about being fair-skinned, and whenever she got the opportunity, she sunbaked. Narum usually told her to wear sunscreen. A few days before the interview, she burnt her skin, because she did not apply sunscreen cream. Yet she remembered with fondness that even though Narum warned her, he took care of her burns without grumbling:
J: He still rubbed after-sun lotion on me and didn’t tell me I told you so, and was really nice about my complaining about it and things like that. It's also very characteristic of him that I have these flaws that he knows about and he tries to warn me beforehand, but even when I don’t take his advice he won't berate me about it. He’ll just pamper me, even though it’s something that I should have been able to avoid. So… D: So what is it about him? What do you think, sort of underlies it? J: I don’t know, it’s [pause]. I just think it sort of shows that even though I have these flaws he will still like me – a bit silly, but [pause]. Yeah. I would get more annoyed if I were him but he doesn’t get annoyed. He sort of just takes it in his stride and tries to make fun of the problems and my faults. And yeah, it’s very nice.
By all accounts, Narum is very rational and cautions Jane about a real risk, but he lets her make her own choice. He says his piece, Jane acts as she sees fit, gets sunburnt, and Narum then responds to what is at hand – her skin. He makes fun of her complex and her stubbornness. But it is her skin they are dealing with, not Jane. They both have a laugh and move on. He is happy not to read anything into it. The fact that Narum does not dwell on having been right, on Jane not listening to his advice, implies that he does not turn this situation to being about him. And Jane cherishes the fact he loves her like that: that she can ‘stuff up’, but she does not ‘fail’ because she is not perfect. The important thing also is that because he does not try to change her, she sounds quite sorry to have put him through the worry and trouble.
A more serious instance when Jane did something similar for Narum occurred at the beginning of their relationship. Soon after they moved in together, Jane discovered that Narum was taking antidepressant medication. 8 MEETING | 185
She was very annoyed with herself at first – for not noticing the little signs, and for thinking that Narum was just reserved, quiet, ‘the strong silent type or whatever’, as Scandinavian men can be. When she discovered that Narum suffered from depression, her view of his tendencies shifted. She saw his withdrawing as part of the condition: ‘I tried to not blame it on him or his character. I had to think of it as part of being sick, and deal with it’. They saw a therapist together, who helped them:
J: It was a bit difficult at the time. But you know, we cried, we laughed, we worked through it. It was good to have help, to go to some third party and talk to somebody who actually knew about what the sickness was about, and why I should not expect him to talk about it more and why I should try to get him to talk about it, even though it was difficult and it was like, you know, hauling something out of him, but that it needed to be done.
Gradually, Narum stopped taking the medication as his condition became more stable. Jane is clear that this experience made their relationship stronger:
J: That it happened as early in our relationship, it meant that we had to work through something together, and probably today it means that we’re a bit closer. Once you’ve actually seen somebody in that vulnerable state and recover from it, it means that you have sort of a, a bit of a different type of feeling towards the person. It’s not just love for an image of that person, you also know what it’s going to be like when it’s not good, when it’s not all fun. It does help to make the relationship stronger – if it doesn't break you apart, obviously.
So instead of the superficial love for a cardboard cut-out stereotype, a fantasy image of a husband, Jane encounters reality: a vulnerable, mortal person:
J: Umm, it was scary to see him being vulnerable. I guess I had. [pause] A bit of a fantasy, you know, that the guy is supposed to be the strong one in the relationship, and I was only 19 at the time, but it made me see him more as a person than as a type. And, I don’t know what sort of feeling that produces – it means that you feel both protective towards that person and also that he would be able to protect you at the same time. So it's a reciprocal feeling. But yeah, it changed the love feeling a bit – from fantasy to… [pause] from stereotypical ideas of what love is supposed to be to a very personal thing.
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There is something poignant and powerful about this paragraph. Seeing Narum sick, in need of help, vulnerable, scares Jane but she does not run off to replace the faulty Narum with a better model (a suggestion that could be drawn from Chapter 4). She stays. Seeing Narum weak makes her want to protect him, help him. Her initial immature fantasy is replaced by a real human relationship. This is not the love that weighs up whether its object is worth the investment. In this sense, it is impersonal – not meritocratic, commensurate, considered. But in this inclusive, expanded, generous form, it is profoundly intimate.
What makes the difference between Marcus’ efforts to help Lily, and Jane’s? I am not entirely sure, but can make some guesses. Though Marcus had always supported Lily while she got help, and she agreed she needed it, his particular way of insisting may have triggered her resistance, and she became more defensive. She may then perceive him as telling her what to do, or wanting her fixed. She may sense how much it has to do with him, and his fears or inherited intolerance for conflict. Jane, on the other hand, seems to be with Narum all the way through the process. As we will see in the next chapter, this may have something to do with her view of the place of her relationship in her life.
In concluding this chapter, we need to account for the thematic problems this chapter raised. I started with some topographical questions about meetings. What do we see, when we encounter someone? Do we see surface, or depth, and how are these interrelated? What is the ontological connection between fragments and wholes? These questions arise often in relationship pedagogical literature, but I am afraid they are not addressed particularly thoroughly.
Sometimes we read that we must know everything about our partners, know their value systems and habits from families and previous relationships, so as to be able to understand the motivations behind their outward behaviours. Clearly, what is assumed here is a straight cause and effect model. Psychoanalytical theory is especially famous for complicating this 8 MEETING | 187 linear progression, by questioning whether symptoms are ever simply re- presentative of deeper problems, or are actually generative and a strategy in their own right (see Phillips, 2002). In PREP specifically, couples are sometimes directed to seek ‘hidden issues’ behind everyday seemingly trivial arguments; deeper problems like lack of respect, acknowledgement, or recognition (Markman, et al., 2001:138-139). Cognitive-behavioural theory, however, reverses the order. It directs us to address the ‘outward’ behaviours first, to change ‘underlying’ structures and thought patterns. Thus, we are not to make ad hominem judgements, personalising grievances by attributing them to people’s character. PREP’s ‘negative interpretation’ suggests we must not generalise and build global assessment of our partners.
We can tie ourselves in knots if we stay with the topographical model that presumes there are fixed and clearly defined insides and outsides, precisely because it is still completely identity-bound; because it presumes clear boundaries and separations of concrete things. But as we know by now, relationships are not always like this. The profound blow that Levinasian and Buberian philosophy deals to this is that in the encounter, Narum, or Lily, just are. Narum is unique. He is not clearly identifiable or compartmentalisable (‘professor’, ‘beautiful’, ‘sick’). Narum is Narum, unique. There is no longer a question of why, and where from, and how come. Jane is with him. This is, indeed, the meaning of re-spect, literally, looking twice. This makes some sense of the PREP hidden issues also. Lack of recognition, respect, acknowledgement, gratitude, are temporary blind spells, myopia, cataract. There is a failure of access, or open sight.
What keeps someone like Jane there, with Narum? Why does she stay? To this, I turn in the next chapter.
9
STAYING
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you're bored means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.
John Berryman, ‘Dream Song 14’
How do couples in contemporary society view the role of commitment in their relationships? Four testimonies examined in this chapter show that while the alienated view of lifetime commitment is common, many lovers recognise that being together enriches their sense of wellbeing and growth, and this in turn enriches their relationship. Commitment turns into an intrinsic compulsion, a calling. Socially sanctioned boundaries here do not make a committed relationship, but can certainly help a couple feel grounded. This chapter concludes with a reflection on the common challenges of commitment, and the intellectual traditions that help us deal with these.
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Marriage as contract Feminist political theorists such as Carol Pateman (1988) and Marcia Neave (1995) famously debate whether patriarchal marriage had ever been a proper legal contract. In its traditional form, marriage was a ‘contract of adhesion’ - parties could not alter its terms. It is argued to have held the wife’s status as that of her husband’s property and domestic worker (Neave, 1995:146-147). The common law doctrine of coverture dictated that wife and husband became one legal person. The wife was required to live in the same physical location as her husband; she gave up her earnings to him; the children were legally his, and the husband owned the sexual property of wife’s person, thus making marital rape a legal impossibility (Pateman, 1988:124).
With the passing of these legal principles and the immense changes in the status of women, the contractarian view of marriage had become common today. ‘Celebrated’ by a legal representative of the state and witnessed by members of the community, marriage changes the couple’s legal status by giving them mutual privileges, rights and obligations.29 Current divorce law in most Western jurisdictions allows individuals to treat marriage as a rescindable agreement, whose integrity depends on the satisfaction of the spouses with their arrangement.
An explicit conceptualisation of marriage along these lines surfaces in theory purporting to develop more effective ways to conduct marital therapy. Confirming my commentary about the pervasiveness of the economic way of thinking (see Chapter 4), political scientist Francis Castles and social worker and family therapist Elizabeth Seddon (1988) suggest that the alliance of economics and marriage therapy is long overdue. They argue that models of marital breakdown have ‘conspicuously failed to borrow from [...] micro- economic theory of the firm and the theory of political organisations’,
Leaving aside the problematic exclusion of same-sex couples by the Marriage Act 1961. 9 STAYING | 190
[y]et marriages do break up because one or other partner is dissatisfied with the product and feels that a better deal may be available elsewhere or, indeed, that a defective product is less satisfying than no product at all. (Castles and Seddon, 1988:114)
Marriage, they argue, can be conceptualised as a ‘matrix for conferring a constantly changing package of individual and collective satisfactions’ (1988:120), akin to Becker’s Z utility function. As such, it is akin to a service- providing firm with ‘performance levels’ to varying degrees discrepant with ‘pre-existing or evolving preferences or expectations’ (1988:113). This leads Castles and Seddon to suggest that marital therapy can benefit from the work of economist Albert Hirschman, who discusses the options open to disgruntled customers in Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). A similar entitlement/satisfaction argument, I remind the reader, underlies bargaining models suggested by social theorists such as Bittman and Pixley, and England and Kilbourne, to create justice in the family home. Parties are to keep their ‘investments’ as ‘threat points’, and plan proper exit strategies. When something in the relationship is not what one ‘bargained for’, this becomes a ‘deal breaker’.30 Hirschman’s recognition of the importance of constraint in organisations is, in fact, useful for intimate relationships, as we will see a little further. However, first, we need to see what impact demands for satisfaction directed at relationships have on actual couples’ lives.
‘We are as good as’: Corey In Chapter 4 of this thesis, we met Corey. A year into his relationship with Andrea, Corey had what he called a ‘brain explosion’ and left Andrea to have a series of short-term relationships with other women. He did so to live up to the expectations of being a young man. He quickly realised that his adventures, in his words, did not ‘deliver the same sort of satisfactions’ as a relationship does, and, having weighed his options, Corey returned to Andrea.
Even though living with Andrea at the time of the interview, Corey was worried that he still wanted to flirt with other women; to feel that he was
30 This term has become especially popular in dating literature and Internet material. 9 STAYING | 191 attractive to others. When asked if he could see himself marrying Andrea, Corey gave the following response:
D: Would you consider getting married? C: I would consider it. The reasons why I would consider it would be to make other people happy. I mean that in the sense of. I don’t think Andrea and I [pause] Neither of us are religious… [pause]. Neither of us has any need to make ourselves sweet with God or whatever. I know that other people have different expectations. I don’t think my family would care. My dad or my mum would probably fall back on the side of religious. But she lets me make my own decisions. Andrea maybe from her grandparents on her mum’s side. I think they would like to see her get married, but I think it would be more an interest to see grandkids. So if it was really important to Andrea, in terms of, say, her family or something, then I would do it, but I don’t think it will be. Maybe just simplify things, get married in a registry office, but that’s it. D: Do you think it would change your relationship? C: I mean it might symbolise [pause]. We’ve already talked about buying a house, having kids and shit. So those issues are not waiting until we decide to get married. We pretty much [pause]. We are [pause]. I mean in a sense we are as good as. Does that make sense? I don’t think of our relationship as any less permanent. So that aspect of it wouldn’t change.
Marriage here is for others – family, or God. It is associated with external expectations, and with starting a family. Marriage would just be a simplified civil ceremony. It would simplify things in terms of others’ expectations. The ceremony would only be symbolic, because by having discussed issues such as houses and kids, Corey and Andrea were, in his eyes, ‘as good as’ married.
When Corey concluded his interview, he gave an interesting and complex response to my final question:
D: What do you ultimately hope for in your relationship? C: I hope that it will continue to make me happy. But [pause] That whatever sorts of needs I have can be accommodated [pause] within [pause] the relationship and that [pause] together we can sort of [pause] Work out what it needs to make us happy. I think sometimes there is a sort of line between, let’s just say, reifying, do you know what I mean like – to reify a relationship is to make ‘the relationship’ this thing. But the relationship is just a construction of what goes on between the two of us living our lives together in some senses, but also 9 STAYING | 192
separate. So I guess it’s important to remember that the relationship is supposed to make both of the people happy.
Corey’s ambivalence is open to see. First in this passage, he says he wants the relationship to deliver personal satisfaction, to make him happy. Then he attempts to differentiate the idea of the relationship just accommodating his needs, with it accommodating both Andrea and himself. They need to work out together what they need. Even though this is still a demand put to the relationship, Corey and Andrea are both involved here. There is a hint of a sense of responsibility in the relationship - that Corey is part of it and cannot just demand things from it. However, he returns to his alienated position immediately, while musing on the importance of remembering that the relationship, ultimately, is ‘supposed to’ satisfy. Again, he is assessing it from the outside. By implication, when the relationship stops delivering satisfactions, it has to be reconsidered and aborted. The relationship remains an ambivalent, unsettled situation for Corey. He is still weighing his place in it and does not seem caught in it, no matter how much he discusses ‘having kids and shit’ with Andrea.
When I interviewed Corey’s partner Andrea separately, she talked of when they resumed the relationship. Andrea was surprised that, after having been ambivalent for a long time, Corey repeatedly said that he was ‘content’ and would marry her - if she so wished:
A: I mean I was kind of a little surprised when it came to me moving houses, and Corey suggested moving in together. And a little bit later, you know, started to say things, like, ‘If you wanted me to marry you, I’d do that now for you’.
Corey’s words, as she remembers them, make it sound as though marriage would be purely something Andrea would want, and that he was willing to do that for her as a kind of favour. When he ‘proposes’ to her in this way, the question unsettles her and she, too, downplays the significance of such a step, even though at some level, she appears to want it:
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D: Would you consider getting married? A: Yeah. I think. I mean Corey has. [pause] He has said a number of times: ‘If you wanted me to’. For various reasons, which have nothing to do with Corey, I kind of resisted the idea. I kind of think ‘Well, why do you have to? Why do you have to do that?’ You know? This is what I say, and Corey hasn’t sort of expressed strong disagreement to this. My kind of condition is, it would be really nice to have a big event, you know, celebrating ‘us’, because I do think we’re at the stage where we both intend to be together and we’re committed to one another, but we don’t need some sort of [pause]. Don’t need the ceremony to prove that to one another. We don’t need a ceremony for it although it’d be kind of nice to have one. D: You don’t think it would change your relationship? A: No. Not at all.
Andrea, too, reduces marriage: first, to just the wedding, and in turn, the wedding, to just a ‘nice big event’, a ‘ceremony’. It is clearly seen as superficial, superfluous to the real relationship that already exists, an unnecessary show for others. What really matters is between Corey and Andrea, and they do not need to prove the validity of their union, or pledge its longevity to others.
Corey and Andrea separated a short time after this interview. Corey and I spoke informally, and he said that he realised that he was not prepared to put someone’s interests above his own. He also noted that just living together, it turned out, was not enough.
Marriage as a ‘symbolic representation’: Nathan In Chapters 4 and 7, we met Nathan. Nathan was concerned about a friend’s recent wedding, because this friend was ‘buying into’ certain mainstream values such as consumerism and stereotypical patriarchal gender roles:
N: They [the friend and his fiancé] went to all this excess to present an image of themselves that just follows all these typical expressions of femininity and masculinity and romance. When I see them relate to each other, I can see that he is happy with the woman he’s got, so far as it conforms to a certain image of husband and wife and house and expressions of wealth. But I know that he’s dissatisfied.
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Nathan suggests that his friend had a superficial understanding of being married - as simply emulating an image of married life built on social expectations. Nathan was adamant that he would not want to follow these, and would be particularly careful, should Bella and he marry, not to use words that could even invoke such connotations:
D: So would you call her your wife, or partner? N: No. Just because there is too much value in those terms. I don’t know how it would feel, once I did marry her. But I remember my mate got married and he referred to her as his wife. It just invokes some kind of conception that she just can’t get away from him. We weren’t husband and wife before we got married, but all the conditions were there for us to make an expression of our love for each other to other people. What changes? We’re just expressing it publicly. She’s not my wife, she’d still be Bee to me. I wouldn’t wrap her up in another term. It is too easily taken up into other narratives. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t know how she’d feel. There might be situations in which I would do it, as a way of shortcutting other peoples’ expectations of what the relationship is between us. But I never think of her as my wife. She’d still be Bee to me.
So Nathan insists that his and Bella’s senses of who they are already involve their relationship, and marriage would not change or add anything new. It would only express what is already there. Here, he repeats this idea:
N: I would consider getting married. Even though we both say we probably wouldn’t, because what’s the point. If we care about each other, there is no point going through this economically taxing expression. […] So if I’m going to be in a relationship and be married, you want to make an expression, a symbolic representation to other people, that this person that you’re getting married to offers you all those things, at this moment in time. So I would like to be married, I would like to make some sort of symbolic representation to the people that matter to me and to her.
Chapter 4 outlined in more detail the kind of criteria Nathan presented to the relationship. Like Corey, Nathan distinguishes here between the ‘expressive’, ‘symbolic’, or ‘representative’ side of marriage, and the relationship he already has with Bella, which needs no external validation.
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Corey’s and Nathan’s views confirm Giddens’ observation about the prevalence of the ‘pure relationship’ concept in our society. The legal and social obligations associated with traditional marriage, family expectations, as Giddens (1992) argued, are seen as polluting the purity of self-legitimating, private romantic unions based solely on the feelings and peculiarities of the couple. Both Corey and Nathan are apprehensive about the association of conformity and loss of individuality with the social institution of marriage. Both men reduce both the wedding ritual and metonymically, the marriage, to an external expressive, symbolic or representative shell, while what matters is the private relationship between them. Both Corey and Nathan are acculturated in the heroic quest paradigm and are wary of slipping into conventional life that may not end up being exactly as one chooses or expects. The daily rituals of living together – waking up to the same person each day, doing the dishes, taking care of sick spouses - do not promise quite the same ego-thrills as a life lived in the hope of the ever new.
Yet as seen from the outcome of Corey’s relationship, and the lessons Nathan learnt about self-centred demands, relational life cannot be sustained when it is constantly unsettled by instrumental quests for self-certainty. So are there any other models of being together we can turn to? I offer an examination of the notion that Corey and Nathan are likely to be resisting, and see if it is very different to the contractarian model of commitment.
‘Superglue’ marriage Perhaps the best-known example of the model of irrevocable marriage that trumps the individual wills and interests of spouses is the traditional Christian, and more specifically, the Catholic institution of marriage. The latter does not recognise divorce to this day, and couples can only seek an ‘annulment’ – a doctrinal ruling by a tribunal that a valid marriage never took place. Countries with legislature still drawing on Roman canonical law, such as Malta, do not have civil divorce to this day and only permit Church annulment. In Ireland, civil divorce became legal as recently as 1997.
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Certain states in the US offer the option of ‘covenant marriage’ to couples, which is an attempt to reinstitutionalise fault-based divorce and the religious principle of marital indissolubility. Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona have offered couples this option alongside the standard no-fault option, since the late 1990s. Entering a covenant marriage involves premarital counselling and an affidavit of complete self-disclosure. Covenant marriage allows for divorce only based on proof of fault – such as adultery, a felony conviction, long-term abandonment or domestic abuse. Couples have to stay separated for an extended period, and are obliged to undertake mandatory counselling. There had been some debate in the US about ‘setting the clock back’ and the reintroduction of religion into law (Spaht, 1998-1999; Sanchez et al., 2002). The Australian House of Representatives report, To Have and to Hold, gave favourable mention to this legislative strategy to make divorce more onerous (1998:196-198), and there are other commentators active in promoting the merits of covenant marriage in Australia (see Maley, 2003a, 2003b).
Staying married, even when dissatisfied, can also appear valorised in some marriage pedagogy literature, such as some aspects of PREP.31 The PREP handbook, Fighting for Your Marriage, for instance, suggests that when a person is serious about following its teachings, bar serious ‘victimisation’, no marital woe is a reasonable ground for divorce (Markman, et al., 2001:31). Whereas before the wedding, any risk can be constructed as potentially damaging and a cause to call off the wedding, once the paperwork is signed, all bets are off. Markman et al. and some other therapists, like Weiner-Davis (1992), sometimes go as far as saying that marriage can be sustained by the dedication and effort of one partner alone. When one perseveres with taking responsibility for his or her actions, and keeps the hope that such efforts will influence the recalcitrant partner, this will be a good thing:
We are here to tell you, and tell you strongly, that you need to hold up your end of the relationship even when you don’t think your partner is doing his or her share. […] Do positive things for your partner and the relationship. […] Decide to let negative or annoying comments bounce off you. […] Be the best
Largely reflecting its religious influence – Scott Stanley is a devout Christian, and a Christian variety of PREP exists. 9 STAYING | 197
person you can be in your relationship. […] A great marriage is predicted not so much by your finding the right partner as by your being the right partner. (Markman, et al., 2001:31-33)
The objective of staying together here turns into a goal in itself, making all behaviours and changes instrumental to it. This is what Corey quite correctly referred to as the ‘reification’ of a relationship.32 A strong religious undercurrent runs under such a position.
Contrary to initial impressions, the contractarian and ‘superglue’ models of marriage have something in common. The first reifies control in the hands of the ‘stakeholders’, who should pull the plug when they encounter the mess and complexity of real life together. The ‘superglue’ model, too, must shut out the realities of living with a fallible partner to an extent, through either indulging in fantasies of individual omnipotence and idealised togetherness, or through valorising suffering. Both, to a degree, have to shut their eyes to the fact that relationships are difficult when they are real, and that they can fail. Both valorise individual effort, just in different ways. The first says – you can do anything, keep negotiating and counting. But the second ‘superglue’ model, too, must involve a lot of self-censoring. Trying to hold a marriage together is still an effort – because if one were truly submitted to whatever will be, they would be open to having to respond to the possibility that the relationship can break up, and has a certain life and logic of its own. Because it sets staying together as an end, this latter model must still curtail and structure, and in the end, people must wrestle with such problems themselves.
There is some merit to the suggestion that a degree of constraint is beneficial to relationships. As with many social situations, boundaries play an important role in helping us settle and work in a more liveable space – whether it be in devoted spiritual practices, or writing, or practicing an art. Some marital studies, too, suggest that unhappy couples interviewed some years later can be happy, and express appreciation for the formative years of
In literature that considers the impact of divorce on children, such as Wallerstein et al’s Legacy of Divorce (2000), this injunction gains a strong moral dimension. 9 STAYING | 198 hardship, which brought the couple closer together and made them stronger and more mature (Parker, 2002; Markman et al., 2001). Constraints like mortgages, children and joint undertakings are an incentive to work out differences, even though challenging people’s patience. Hirshman’s organisational theory perused by Castles and Seddon can indeed be relevant. Hirshman shows that the boundaries of a social system create an incentive to work towards improving it. However, in order to maintain a sense of agency, boundaries cannot be prison walls. There are three options available to a person caught in a system: going elsewhere (‘exit’), sticking it out in silence (‘loyalty’) or addressing the problem to change the situation (‘voice’). Proactive reflexiveness about problems will only occur when there is some loyalty to the institution, yet there is also an option to leave - as this gives leverage to voicing problems (in Castles and Seddon, 1988:118). Yet both sociologists like Bauman and Sennett, and conservative lobbyists like Wallerstein and Australian ‘family values’ interest groups such as the Lyons Forum, the Australian Family Association, the National Marriage Coalition and the various associated Christian lobbies, harp back for irrevocable marriage vows as panacea to restoring public health, social stability and moral order, and mandate couples to stay together. Yet the veneration of ironclad bonds, I believe, is profoundly anti-relational.
Now, here is an interview with a couple who discover through the experience of past relationships and their present marriage, how commitment works for them. This is a very different experience of fidelity, more aligned with the insights of Levinas and Buber.
A safe place: Oksana and Misha Misha and Oksana met at work, while Oksana was going to marriage therapy with her first husband. After it had become obvious that her first marriage had ended, Oksana and Misha started dating, and later married. Oksana’s first marriage came after an eight-year courtship. She felt that when she married her first husband, he started behaving in the ways of a single man: frequently staying out late, and becoming secretive and withdrawn. Oksana had a strong commitment to the institutions of marriage and family, but found herself 9 STAYING | 199 unable to have children, while married to an emotionally immature and unsupportive partner:
O: I really thought we would’ve stayed together forever and had four children, but I thought marriage was more hard work by then, and now I don’t. I can remember about two years after I was married, somebody said to me, ‘What’s marriage like?’ They were doing the same thing. I said that I thought being married was like being at the beach. Some days you’ll go there and the weather is fine and it’s a really nice day. Other days you’ll go and it’s stormy and the waves are up.
Oksana describes her second marriage to Misha as a ‘solid base’, and a ‘perfect home in each other’. They nurture and support each other. What is interesting about the next passage from her interview is how divergent her view is from the common understanding of freedom in our society. Without the promise of marriage, Oksana feels that anxiety – about what one can and cannot expect from a partner, where their future lies, what other possibilities lay elsewhere - takes up a lot of energy. Marriage changes this:
O: There is a lot more freedom in a solid relationship. For me, it helps to make it more solid, in a way. […] If you are married, things are fairly clear. I can then devote so much more time to all the other things I want to do in the universe. So when I know that, it’s then not this constant questioning for myself, of where the boundaries are, because I know where they are. There was one final reason too, which I think you should add in, which is that if people are married, they are more likely to do their best that they’ve given everything they can to the relationship, before tossing it away.
The formal vows give this couple a sense of being grounded. Note that this is not an insular, gated ‘safe haven’ of narcissistic personalities that Lasch and Sennett fear privatised relationships had become. This is a sense of belonging to a concrete situation, which frees Oksana’s energy to conduct meaningful work as a teacher, and to participate in the life of her community through her volunteer work. Similarly to Nathan’s relationship with Bella in Chapter 7, marriage with Misha does not shrink Oksana’s world in the way her previous troubled marriage reduced her life to worrying about her husband and their marriage. Clearly, the delineation of public and private is much more interesting and complex here than being mutually exclusive. 9 STAYING | 200
Oksana was very clear, drawing from the lesson of her first marriage, that the injunction of PREP and other normative discourses, to ‘stay together, no matter what’ was unrealistic and potentially damaging. She could not change her first husband’s behaviours or decisions, and gave her marriage the best effort she could have. Oksana felt that commitment without real reciprocity or dedication by both partners was an ill-conceived ‘blank cheque’ promise:
O: You might try it on. It might appear real. But, you know. I think there are lots of dangers that could happen by that. People could feel jailed in by it. They can feel guilty if they’re feeling they can’t meet up to it. I think there are a lot of problems that can come from that. But at the same time I can understand why people want that.
Living up to an unconditional promise denied the reality of what life can throw up, and that people change, and sometimes a relationship cannot accommodate this. Commitment for Oksana was, instead, an active participation in the life of the relationship, or ‘checking in’:
O: To me, what I read about fidelity, well it’s about the small, daily things about honouring that commitment. I sometimes see an edge of me that sometimes feels the need, for security purposes, to have that. But at the same time, I see that it’s about building commitment, rather than demanding it. Building commitment to small activities that treasure or honour the other person. It’s usually the things you do for your partner, or the things they do for you, the things you appreciate about them, being themselves in the world, that is the thing that inspires you to commit to them and be with them.
Commitment makes effort worthwhile, and everything done for the relationship in turn strengthens commitment. Marriage with Misha opened up possibilities she never imagined:
O: I never thought I would be able to be so happy in my life as I have been. I kind of lived my whole life up to meeting Misha and having my life with him, and there were lots of things missing that I could have been having, but I didn’t know I was missing them, because I hadn’t had them. Then suddenly I would get all these great things. My life was never this happy before, and I didn’t think it would ever be this happy. And I couldn’t have planned that, because it wasn’t in my realm of experience. Certainly not as a child, or in my previous marriage. 9 STAYING | 201
Even though this is a retrospective view, and undoubtedly there were happy moments, both in her childhood and in her first marriage, Oksana has no doubt she is in a better place as a person.
Misha adds valuable insight into the necessity of mutual participation for a genuine relationship to be experienced:
M: I don’t think you can have one person being responsible for a marriage. Um, because it’s not really a marriage any more. It’s one person chasing another, sort of thing. So it has to be both parties making it happen. Otherwise it’s not a relationship, it’s a lopsided affair.
Misha is not talking about weighing up what he got against what he gave to Oksana. Throughout the interview, Misha referred to genuine points of connection as ‘meetings’ – being acknowledged for one’s effort and care, being seen and recognised. I imagine it is precisely the absence of this recognition by a spouse that becomes so damaging if commitment is prescribed regardless, as sought by the ‘superglue’ marriage model. PREP would have Oksana sticking it out with her first husband even though, as a couple, they may never have been able to relate in a way that would better their lives. Commitment for Misha is not to something, but in the little things, the care. It is lived and sustained daily:
M: It isn’t something that I say, you know, ‘I have to be committed to this’, you know. It’s not a lock-in, sort of contractual thing. It’s something […] which happens as a result of lots of things happening to make commitment worthwhile and to want that commitment.
Oksana and Misha’s view of fidelity is, in fact, close to the sacramental view of marriage. It is interesting that social theory can gain much from this very poorly understood concept, distorted even by conservative lobbyists who rely on theology to legitimate their advocacy. Ironically, their view ends up being not very far from Corey’s alienated view of religious marriage, as something people do to ‘make themselves sweet with God’. As social scientists, we can benefit from the relational insights of the ontological framework offered by some work in this area. 9 STAYING | 202
Marriage as sacrament In Christian theology, a sacrament is an ‘outward sign of grace instituted by Christ’ (Lawler, 1993:14), and usually, sacraments are bestowed by a second party to its recipient. What is different about the sacrament of marriage is that the couple ‘ministers’ this sacrament to each other. They do so through their publicly declared vows, and then in their daily life: genuine marital love is ‘ritually expressed in the exchange of consent in the wedding ceremony and in a thousand acts of loving conduct throughout their lives, that provides the human matrix which is taken up and transformed into sacrament’ (Lawler, 1993:20). The sacrament is not a ‘thing, which believers receive’ but is realised through the couple’s consent and acceptance, through the gift of selves they give to each other (Lawler, 1993:18). According to the Trinitarian principle central to Christian faith, the communion between lovers participates in a larger reality of the spiritual dimension of life, with the latter ‘modelling it, gracing it and guaranteeing it. This presence of grace is not something extrinsic to this marriage, but is something essential to it’ (Lawler, 1993:14). In turn, couples are urged to inspire others with their love and participate in the life of their community through their ministry. A church document titled ‘Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage’ defines marriage as a vocation, whose values and benefits are intimately personal yet openly social (Vatican, 1996, quoted by the Bishops' Committee for the Family and for Life, 2006, web). Love here is more than just pure emotional release or passionate affection - it is ‘wishing well’, ‘loyalty, service and obedience’ (Lawler, 1993:20).
Clearly, this is not all to marriage, as obviously, divorce, especially in the Catholic tradition, is still highly problematic. A couple cannot simply claim to need separation because they have stopped ministering the sacrament to each other – precisely because of the divine presence in their relationship. However, the relational insight of sacramental logic is valuable nevertheless. And so are the terms like ‘service’. A word like this grates a modern ear pricked to find exploitation, but its lived ordinary meaning was spoken about in this thesis. Service is Narum’s care for Jane’s sunburnt skin, Nathan’s decision not to grumble when he takes out the garbage with Bella, Marcus’ 9 STAYING | 203 unself-conscious service of bringing Lily tea or a blanket - ordinary everyday things people do to serve their loved ones, without a hint of the heavy burdensome connotations of servitude. These things are just done, because they need to be done. The notion of authority behind the archaic ‘obedience’ is also exemplified a little more clearly in the next passage from Jane’s interview.
‘I am a better person’: Jane Jane, whom we met in Chapter 8, spoke of an incident when she was using a computer, and became angry when it malfunctioned. When her husband Narum tried to help, she became irritated with him. As he was walking out of the room, she threw a pencil at him. This somewhat comical violent incident (she missed him) became formative.
J: We talked about it, and I apologised copiously and made a good meal and we laughed about it afterwards. My personality is very flawed in that when I get annoyed, I have no control over what I'm saying and things. But after this instance, I just sort of tried to work through that, umm, in silence, rather than start yelling like I did when I was a kid. I was a very bad kid. But yeah, it wasn't something that we needed to work through, like a couple; it was something that I needed to work through myself. But he did help me by just letting me talk about it. [pause] He told me that we can't have happen too often, that I need to control my temper if [pause] if he's supposed to still respect me, I guess. So in that way it was an issue, but the fact that I knew that it would or could potentially have a bad effect on my relationship meant that for the first time I tried to deal with my temper.
Let’s carefully consider what happens here. Narum is angry, but does not put Jane down, he walks out. He tried to help, but Jane was already irritated with something else, and takes this frustration out on him. Later, he tells her about what impact her behaviour may have on his respect for her. This is not quite the same as their sunscreen episode in Chapter 8. Then, he just took care of her skin. Now this touches something deeper, and may affect their marriage. Narum does not trivialise Jane’s outburst by just accepting it, glossing over it with what would be a distorting affirmation. He actually affirms what he sees – Jane throwing a tantrum. That is what happened. Narum teaches Jane something important about herself through this, that she 9 STAYING | 204 otherwise would not learn or even see. He shows her something unpleasant about herself. The important thing is that Jane accepts this and takes it very seriously. Why?
Jane wants to be a better person to have a good marriage with Narum, because being with Narum makes it all worthwhile, and Jane feels she is a better person for it. These dynamics are entwined and cannot be separated. It is not as if Jane just wants the relationship as a trophy. She recognises she is part of it, she makes it, but it also sustains her:
J: I guess actually, that our marriage was instrumental in that I'm a better person today. […] If you're living with someone and you want to keep living with that someone, because you love that someone, you do try to work through your own deficiencies in order to make up with them. […] Because you obviously want to make that person happy, and you cannot do that by yelling at them. You know, you try to figure out why you're doing this and how to stop doing it.
Note how different Jane’s sense of responsibility to her marriage and to Narum, are from Corey’s and Nathan’s demands from their relationships. Being together is constitutively significant here. Jane and Narum would not be the same people outside their marriage. Jane trusts Narum to help her grow. She trusts his judgement; she respects him. There is no sense of inferiority in listening to Narum. His authority and her acceptance of it are part of their growth process.
This is a form of commitment where there is an inherent sense of compulsion. As such, it relates to the idea of calling in Buber’s work: ‘[t]he relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once’ (Buber, 1996:62). Jane and Narum do what they do, because their marriage calls them to it; it is in other words a vocation, in its archaic sense. A vocation, contrary to what we may imagine, is not a ‘bolt from the sky’, an injunction or imposition. No-one is dictating what to do to Narum and Jane; they are strong individuals and are not religious. But they want to be together. They are able to be non-self-centred, open to notice what their relations need from them.
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The subtle connection between the personal and the relational is highlighted here. Excessive inward reflection is, indeed, a narcissistic excess of our culture, but clearly here, a healthy relationship with herself, an improved understanding and acceptance of Jane’s own family history and personal tendencies, are intertwined with caring for Narum and helping him grow also. This comes up when Jane explains that she needs to recognise when she is tempted to displace her own ‘unfinished business’ onto Narum, such as being angry with him when she is in fact ambivalent about something within herself:
J: I often feel that I shouldn't like cooking or I shouldn't like doing household tasks, because this means sort of a subordinate position or something like that. And I get annoyed at myself for feeling that, and I think I often project that onto him. And I get annoyed at myself for actually letting that pressure affect me, because I do enjoy this, and I should be allowed to enjoy it. D: What do you do about it? How do you deal with it? J: I'm being annoyed at myself, but I'd get annoyed at him, because it's easier to say that oh, ‘You're being a chauvinist pig’ or whatever, than to actually work through the feelings you have with how you're supposed to be an independent woman at the same time. I actually like doing some of the tasks that you're not supposed to like to do. But I have realised that it's not his fault, and I really do, like, have some complexes about liking to cook.
Jane struggles with the stereotypical role of a woman, but she personalises it, tries it for fit, and works out how she can live honestly with it, and with integrity towards Narum. To have an honest, real relationship with Narum, she meets herself - in a Rogerian sense.
What is significant about Jane’s instance of trusting Narum’s reflection of her angry outburst is that she allows herself to be real, and, in this, extremely vulnerable with Narum. In being sick, and trusting her to care for him previously, Narum was being real also, and not just a stereotype of male behaviour (see Chapter 8). Not all lovers are able to have such milestone points in their relationships. So why didn’t they leave? Jane puts it simply: ‘I don't want anything specific from it [the marriage]. I just want to go through my life with this person’. Jane and Narum actually lived together for a long time 9 STAYING | 206 and only married because this made paperwork easier to obtain, to come to Australia. Clearly, it was not an adherence to any religious principle that led them to the decision to marry (in fact, Jane’s grandparents protested against their cohabitation, for some time). As a couple, they both separately said their life was better together. They wanted to spend time with each other, even doing nothing – like watching TV, or washing dishes while one washed and the other read Agatha Christie novels aloud, for entertainment, There is no rush about this time, neither is it frightening. Jane and Narum want time as a space to grow into. This notion of time as a gift that spouses give to each other is central to the work of Anglican philosopher Rowan Williams.
Grace In a seminal paper titled ‘Body’s Grace’ (1989), Williams writes that the central element of sacramental commitment is the experience of grace – the transformative relation of being witnessed, of being seen as significant and wanted. Genuine intimacy relies on surrender to the other in the hope of being witnessed, desired, treasured and accepted. Nathan’s partner Bella puts it succinctly:
B: When you’re not in a committed relationship, there is more uncertainty about yourself, how you look, how you are, how the world perceives you. But intimacy in the context of our relationship is feeling really, really close and being able to lose yourself in the other person and not being afraid of that. Not feeling so vulnerable to what other people might think, I suppose. Definitely about sharing close moments. It’s weird, because intimacy, you automatically think sex or sexual relations, but it’s not necessarily about that for me. It’s about being able to sit quietly and not talk, have food and enjoy it.
We trust that when we open ourselves in this way, we are not going to be abandoned. When a lover stays, even when they see something they may not like or may get frightened by, be disgusted by, this is a profound experience of facilitating the ‘business of human growth and human integrity’.33 This is Isabelle’s experience of being with Jason, both of them hurt yet open to each other; this is Bella’s acceptance of Nathan’s struggles, as opposed to his intolerant previous girlfriends. We are most vulnerable in this
No pages numbers, internet article. 9 STAYING | 207 kind of relationship. If witnessing is not symmetrical, if we are with a partner profoundly unable to hold that space, we are left in a potentially life- threatening or exploitative relationship where we can be judged or instrumentally used for self-gratification and self-fulfilment. Vulnerability does not disappear with time, but only grows as lovers allow themselves to be shaped by each other.
Undoubtedly, as a Christian theologian, Williams is talking about the lifelong promise of marriage. But he does not wince from calling the superglue religious model of marriage ‘perverse’. Precisely because of the seriousness of what is pledged to – a mutually formative relationship, in which we can be used, which has so much capacity to damage - marital vows cannot be treated as ironclad bonds. Williams insists that the dogmatic view of marriage – whether religious or secular - objectifies it into a lifeless permanent tie, curbing the real living process that being together entails. ‘The worst thing a minister blessing sexual unions can do’, Williams argues, is reduce fidelity to a ‘legal public bond, enforceable by religious sanctions’ that vilify the necessary dangers and risks of growth. Even though marriage ideally is for life, it is distorting and ‘wicked’ to weld it into an absolute, irrevocable unity. For witnessing to take place, a creative difference, a space must remain in the relational nexus. That is, the traditional injunction ‘to have and to hold’ espoused by policymakers like Minister Andrews, does not repeat the same idea twice. ‘Having’ – grasping, owning, clutching onto a spouse, is not the same as holding them and being held, with a space between, connected. The very life of the relationship goes when people clutch it by the throat, or when social sanctions seek to preserve it in formaldehyde.
Psychotherapist Thomas Moore (1994) reminds us also about the importance of honouring the ending of some loving relationships. Moore writes that we cannot apply the mechanical and structural thinking of the technological world to relationships, as though they were machines to be fixed. He suggests that we need to honour their own inexplicable logic (1994:xii). A relationship ‘usually signals its limitations, as the signs of old age signal death (Moore, 1994:192). The broader sense of the need to acquiesce 9 STAYING | 208 with loss, to accept death as a natural part of life, is a religious sensibility that recognises that we cannot expect to go through life by being purely pragmatic, self-reliant, and rational. Endings and beginnings are mutually implicated as we see in Oksana’s story. They are not identically distinct polar opposites (Moore, 1994:197). Relationship endings are best explored not using the narcissistic terms such as ‘failure’, leading to self-blame, self-pity and judgement (1994:198). Divorce, Moore reminds us, does not mean ending but comes from the Latin divertere – turning, a diversion, a change from the predicted and planned:
When our thoughts about endings are based on moralistic judgement, we create a culture filled with guilt, fantasies about impossible perfection, and the wrong kind of responsibility. […] If, on the other hand, our thoughts of ending were coloured by genuine piety and an acknowledgement of life’s centrifugal forces, then without overlooking the pain we might also see the wisdom in a relationship’s ending. (Moore, 1994:199)
In the instances of genuine relating, Williams writes, marriage is the ‘creation of a context in which grace can abound, because there is a commitment not to run away from the perception of another’. It is a commitment to stay with what is at hand, rather than getting carried away with fantasies of life elsewhere. As therapist Polly Shulman writes, marriage ceases to be an instrument to self- development, but is the delineation of a workable space the right size for people to fill and build their lives in:
Marriage is not supposed to make you happy. It is supposed to make you married. […] When you are all the way in your marriage, you are free to do other useful things, become a better person. A committed relationship allows you to drop pretences and seductions, expose your weaknesses, be yourself, and know that you will be loved, warts and all. A real relationship is the collision of my humanity and yours, in all its joy and limitations. (Shulman, 2005:20)
Paradoxically, it is in limiting space that a greater sense of spaciousness can be found. So why did Nathan and Corey, as well as many others today, fear this?
The pathos of the ordinary In her polemical book Wifework (2001), Susan Maushart describes the ennui of living out the ‘ever after’ subsequent to the wedding day. As a young, 9 STAYING | 209 educated woman, Maushart is horrified to find herself involuntarily and somewhat compulsively scrubbing the bathroom in her new home on her first day as a newlywed, and cooking her new husband a meal of cheese macaroni from her mother’s recipe. Soon, she starts to resent that her husband expects her to look after him totally, and she somehow falls into this role quite naturally, despite her upbringing and conscious objection: ‘I’m a PhD student, not a Barbie doll’ (2001:21). She treats any work in the home as being solely done for the benefit of the husband. Even making love is indentured labour: just ‘another way in which women routinely service the physical and emotional needs of their male partners at the expense of their own’ (Maushart, 2001:169).
All of the work done by a wife in the home becomes separate from the serious business of ‘real life’, elsewhere. She divorces her first husband. After the brief respite of ‘becoming herself again’, she was ‘right back where she started from’ with a new husband and a new child, but now with doubled vengeance of being a wife and a mother, ‘alternately resenting it, revelling in it, feeling guilty about it’ (Maushart, 2001:26). She divorces the second time, and this time even parenting as a single mother feels like ‘child’s play after several years of dealing with a complex, overworked, emotionally immature, middle-aged professional every night’ (2001:28). She finds the house more spacious, the cooking less onerous, and her energies multiplied.
Maushart’s husbands could well have been complicated, needy and traditional men who expected a wife to take care of them. But what really interests me here is her ‘sinking feeling’ when she was married, that somehow, where she ended up was not ‘it’: We thought we were making it up as we went along. Improvising freely, wildly – perhaps badly at times. As a wife, I often felt awkward and unconvincing. I never realised I was acting from a script. That my ‘role’ as a married woman was crafted for, far below the level of my own consciousness, impelling me to behave in ways I neither understood nor approved of. I do recall that the break-up of that marriage was like waking up from one of those unsettling dreams which you explain by saying, ‘Well, I was me, but I wasn’t me, if you know what I mean.’ (2001:26)
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The overt subject of Wifework is similar to that of Bittman and Pixley’s Double Life of the Family - the gap between the ideal of equalitarianism, and the culturally and biologically ingrained habits and role assignments in the family home. Maushart reveals what sociologists argued all along – that socialised norms are, perhaps, deepest and most natural to us, as opposed to the self-assertions. But the stronger covert theme in Maushart’s story is the struggle between expectations, ideals, and what life actually presents - the daily routines it is made of. Washing the dishes and looking after kids is apparently less real than the far graver world of work and grown up trappings like stockings (2001:29). Surely, happiness lies in more heroic individual pursuits. Here, again, we can see how strong our adherence to identity logic really is. This is the very recognition that is to be found in labels, job titles and remuneration. Thus, Maushart concludes, any findings of marriage fulfilment must be ‘largely the result of two people dedicated to lying, obfuscation and fantasy’ (Maushart, 2001:208). This extreme cynicism leads me to think there is something else going on here, also. What is the nature of the ennui Maushart is experiencing? What can be done about it? As Williams shows, it is not unlike that of devoted spiritual life.
Akedia Maushart’s predicament seems very close to what Rowan Williams had identified as one of the greatest challenges of monks in isolated desert communities in the early centuries of this era - akedia. Akedia, also called the ‘demon of noonday’, is literally fatigue or exhaustion, but here specifically refers to spiritual and physical lethargy, listlessness, dispersion of thoughts, or being inattentively immersed in useless activity (Williams, 2005:95-96). Akedia visits the monk as he carries out routine daily activities: it is
[f]rustration, helplessness, lack of motivation, the displacement of stresses and difficulties from the inner to the outer world associated with the ‘passions’. In amidst routine, one can become weary and restless – surely more progress could be made elsewhere, doing something else, does anyone register this, does this make a difference; or even – is this selfish, should one help someone else, wouldn’t that be more useful? Anywhere but here, anywhere but now. (Williams, 2005:96)
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The everyday encountered day to day wearies and revs up the mind. Williams offers a translation of this into contemporary terms:
I have signed the fifteenth letter of the morning and made the fourth uncomfortable phone call. I have emerged from a meeting about next year’s budget, and I am getting ready for a session with our investment advisors after lunch. After which I have to go and take an afternoon’s school assembly. Probably in the evening, I’ll have to institute a new parish priest somewhere. All of it is all right. All of it has also got to be done. But I think, “Was it all for this?” (Williams, 2005:97)
A whole fantasy world opens up, of all the better places one can be and the more exciting and important things to do:
Somewhere else I can be nicer, holier, more balanced, more detached about criticism, more disciplined, able to sing in tune, and probably thinner as well. Somewhere else there is a saintly person who really understands me (and won’t make life difficult for me). (Williams, 2005:99)
A tempting but pseudo-altruistic strategy one can try is helping others, by bestowing ‘love’ on others. This instrumental search for an object of charity is quite different to the call to respond to another’s need, Williams writes. The problem is that when monks reacted to akedia and left their community or their cell, they would often have experiences that showed them that they carried their anger and discontentment with them. The old issues recurred in new environments, showing that the problem was not external but intrinsic. And perhaps this is what people find frequently in their second marriages, if they have not adequately addressed the grievances of the first. The distractions, the grumbles, the demands, can easily stay. Thus, Williams writes, sometimes,
[l]earning to stay where you are becomes one of the hardest lessons of the desert, harder than apparently tougher forms of asceticism. Bearing your own company and the company of those immediately and unavoidably around you requires some very special graces. (Williams, 2005:95)
The only starting point for change is where one is. This is difficult, because ‘none of us wants to start where we are’ (Williams, 2005:98). What helped the monks deal with this condition, paradoxically, is that they did not 9 STAYING | 212 have access to the many distractions of the outside world, to displace responsibility. Isolation and some restriction on movement actually made it easier to recognise what the real distraction really was. The monk was weaned from the ‘games we can play in our relations with others for psychic exercise and reassurance’; the ego was forced to flounder, whine, posture, plead, but finally, accede (Williams, 2005:98). Holiness was not in heroics of ecstasies and feats of self-denial, but was relentlessly ‘prosaic’: doing whatever there was to do next, be it eating, sleeping, drinking, washing or basket-weaving:
The only thing I find that helps is to let myself be simply drawn into the present moment. It means making a point sometimes of looking at what is on this side of the window pane in the office or putting my hands on the arms of a chair and feeling the fabric. And breathing, saying, “Well, here I am. This is what I must do next; the basket weaving stuff.” (Williams, 2005:97)
This has strong echoes with Zen monastic disciplines, summed in a succinct haiku: ‘How wondrous this, how mysterious! I carry fuel, I draw water’ (P’ang Chu-shih, in Hyers, 1973:87). This is not a self-indulgent apologetic, an irresponsible ‘living in the moment’. This is actually real responsibility, of staying with what is.
What is absolutely necessary to help the monk settle down is what Williams calls the practice of ‘pledging’ oneself to the local and concrete situation one is in. Marriage is an example of pledging: setting liveable limits for oneself, as opposed to the fantasy world akedia conjures up, of an indeterminate infinite (here – too large and exhausting to count and take stock) myriad of possibilities that beckon and seem to be within one’s control. In coming to terms with one’s necessarily limited, concrete, bodily, localised, imperfect condition, one can actually live and grow:
You have to “espouse” reality rather than unreality, the actual limits of where and who you are rather than the world of magic in which anything can happen if you want it to. The fantasy world is one in which I am not promised, espoused, to my body and my history – with all that this entails about my family, my work, my literal physical surroundings, the people I must live with, the language I must speak, and so on. […] 9 STAYING | 213
The pressures (the passions) are there in great strength, and we need disciplines to remind ourselves and each other of why the ‘pledged’ body is such an essential notion for human growing. (Williams, 2005:107,109-110)
The fantasy world drains us. As we sometimes find out, it is far more tiresome to think about what to make for dinner – the exotic recipes sitting in our fancy books and shown in television shows - than to take a piece of fish and fry it.
Williams’ work suggests we need to honour the relational space of growing relationships. The ordinary, daily routines and rituals, approached unheroically (that is, unselfconsciously), are not meaningless distractions from something else, something more important. They are life itself. I think this grounded realisation has much to teach today’s couples, so used to the compulsions of life in the fast lane. Stillness and patience are the glue of relationships. In the words of Clarissa in the film The Hours, who was speaking to her cynical life-weary friend, ‘This is what we do, Richard.’
CONCLUSION
The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die. So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots. Which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why.
Margaret Atwood, ‘Happy endings’
It is time to bring together the analytical and empirical findings this thesis offers. I hope that it does more than advance a purely academic understanding of sociality and intimacy in late modernity. I anticipate that it can inform and ground a relationship pedagogy that is more real and relevant to couples’ lives, and that it is a substantive response to the ‘superglue marriage’ ideas promoted by conservative policymakers, lobbyists and religious educators involved in this field. I hope this thesis shows that the ontology of the sphere of the social where relationships are lived is far more complex than just a collection of atomic individuals, bonded to others permanently, engaging in exchanges.
Overall, as the first chapter of this thesis shows, contemporary social theory had been pessimistic about the new forms of intimate relationships in late modernity. With the exception of Giddens, who was optimistic about the way ‘pure relationships’ did not buy into structures of meaning imposed by the imperatives of authoritarian social institutions, sociologists have largely critiqued the solipsistic and hyper-rationalising tendencies of contemporary relationships. The social sciences can be suspicious of social work, psychology and education professionals, who are seen to structure lives and relationships purely in reference to self-concepts. In different ways, social theorists like Beck and Bauman highlight the contingent and unsettling CONCLUSION | 215 qualities of the milieu within which the social actor today attempts to initiate and maintain intimate relationships: a post-industrial, socially conservative order increasingly driven by economic imperatives. The psychologists and counsellors who seek to help people deal with these conditions and build stronger relationships are deemed to rely on therapeutic or pedagogical paradigms that reify self-enterprise and individual responsibility, be it through assertive communication, building self-esteem, or financial autonomy.
In response to the criticism that ‘family values’ initiatives ‘pass the buck’ back to private individuals, this thesis shows that properly informed and methodologically sensitive community-based and state-sponsored initiatives can help couples’ relationships grow. Even though lobbyists such as Kevin Andrews were undoubtedly on the ‘right’ of the liberal political spectrum, their activism in this area had brought increased Federal funding to a range of services supporting families in the broader community. Evaluations from programs such as Centacare’s marriage education courses show that couples feel that they benefit from, and appreciate the community-based programs, even though many do not attend by choice. As Appendix D shows, couples value the chance to meet couples at the same stage as themselves, and to share knowledge with them; they value the opportunity to be supported in building their relationship and discuss what is important to them. Families do pass on patterns and ways of addressing the challenges that modern life presents, and society can play a helping role, and not leave individuals trapped in their situations - because the latter is not freedom, as Lasch would suggest. People often do need to learn what healthy boundaries are in relationships, how to handle difference – because these are not ‘natural’ skills, but can help couples grow. Importantly, we must extend such help not only to engaged couples. Both the Government and the religious institutions need to prove their commitment to people’s wellbeing beyond the point of their decision to marry – through funding relationship enrichment programs, helping couples in their lives together; and necessarily, through supporting post- separation programs. Currently, the latter are underdeveloped and under- funded, as both the religious programs and the State privilege the prevention paradigm. CONCLUSION | 216
This thesis shows that, ironically, the very social theory which critiques methodological individualism often cannot avoid complicity with it. By praising the abstraction of committed relationships from family networks, cultural traditions, impersonal commitment, someone like Giddens finds himself alongside the economist Gary Becker, who is critical of the limiting impact of culture and tradition on structuring of relationships in the most efficient and pragmatic way. In offering bargaining and game-theoretical strategies to ensure justice in contemporary marriages, theorists such as England and Kilbourne reinforce the paradigm of relationships as dyadic exchanges of emotional and material investments. Partners are encouraged to self-objectify and self-sell in relationships; to bargain for individual satisfactions and benefits. Costing the home and family life in market terms reduces their meaning. This thesis shows examples of people’s lives where relationships that start to be based on calculations of exchange and satisfaction become alienating and uninhabitable.
This thesis suggests that in reminiscing about the bygone days of ‘steely bonds’, Bauman and Lasch, amongst others, not only hark back to a time that never was, but also side with religious pro-family ideology that pathologises and stigmatises the intrinsic companions of growth: death, and loss. Bauman’s criticism ignores the evidence that clearly shows that lack of availability of easy divorce never actually held people together in real terms. The social stigma attached to divorce and the lack of options of financial or social survival away from the marriage for women, have, no doubt, played a part in keeping many marriages together. However, I challenge Bauman to suggest that such restrictions should be brought back to create a healthy social fabric today. The fact that people can make decisions and choices surely makes things more difficult, but freedom always carries with it the burden of responsibility.
A more sophisticated understanding of relationality, as dialogical, and not monolithic or guaranteed, is necessary to enrich a new discourse about intimacy. The subtle complexity of the title of Andrews’ report, the phrase To Have and to Hold, is that it does not repeat the same idea twice. To ‘hold’ a CONCLUSION | 217 partner is not the same as to ‘have’ him or her. This is, indeed, why people seek solace from the imponderable lack of control ‘holding’ partners or relationships, in ‘having’ things by buying and consuming. One simply cannot ‘have’ or ‘manage’ a relationship in quite the same way as one would their share or property portfolio. This thesis shows that it is sometimes harder to learn not to grasp, and to let go, precisely because it takes less ego.
Social subjects are quantum creatures: negotiating the need for individuality, choice, solitude, with the social wiring of norms, familial expectation, the need to belong, to be loved and be intimate with others. One is not either homo economicus or homo sociologicus, but both: we do count, and yet we do experience connections beyond calculation. This thesis shows that a healthy ability to be with oneself without using others instrumentally is, in fact, a profoundly social skill. It shows that there is an important distinction between individuality and individualism: with the latter built on alienated identity-affirming fantasies, and the former, on the appreciation that one is unique and incomparable. The sense of meaning comes from the ability to meet the difference on one’s partner and oneself, and not treat him or her as a Hegelian derivative of, or a complement. This thesis shows that purely instrumentally applied self-centred ‘assertive communication’ cannot guarantee a healthy relationship, ironically, even though one may ‘get’ what one wanted. It shows that desire is hardly the most rewarding game in town. Instead, when we let go of fantasies and engage with what is at hand, what calls upon us is our relational life – this feels right, real, somehow inherently worthwhile, and worth sticking around for. Being with others facilitates a paradoxical dialogical state that includes identity positions in a state of wholeness, of fullness. An ethics is dictated by such moments of meeting others. The Rogerian helping relationship, Buber’s I-You relation of presence and responsibility, the Levinasian immediate implication of an open meeting, all enrich and develop the complex ontology of this ethics, which moves us out of agency- and identity-privileging epistemologies.
What kind of relational pedagogy, then, does this thesis inform? The following observations can be made. CONCLUSION | 218
The institutional discursive tools for self-production can normalise, and the ‘endless mill of speech’ of continuous assertive communication, as we saw from the testimonies of Natasha, Isabelle and Corey, can generate objectified ‘issues’, ‘obstacles’ and ‘faults’, and reify the self. However, our sense of self is always socially mediated, and this is a far more complex process to understand. Empathetic witnessing enables us to be, in a holistic sense. Good educators and counsellors do encourage more self-awareness in this process, but a healthy sense of difference and uniqueness is an experience of individuality, rather than narcissistic autonomous individualism.
An instance when the significance of trusting the relation crystallised for me as an educator was in the last weeks of completing this thesis. During a course I facilitated, I encountered a couple where the woman was visibly upset. Her fiancé was refusing to practice reflective listening with her, because he felt that it was mechanical. He said that he understood very well the principle behind it, but this was ‘what counsellors did’, and not something that belonged in his marriage. Meanwhile, his fiancé was crying. She said that being given a structure within which she could speak for herself and he could not interrupt, offer advice, or tell her she was irrational, ‘gave her a voice’. The woman could have been crying for a range of reasons. But on the face of it, the one thing her fiancé was unwilling to do was acknowledge what was at hand – distress - and respond to it. This man did not need mastery of a complex discursive technique, but the much less, but paradoxically, also far more sophisticated aptitude – of being present with his partner, as she was. Undoubtedly, one could argue that as an educator, I was imposing on this man a normative framework which holds that talking, listening, and emotionally supporting and empathising with one’s partner, are desirable abilities in an intimate relationship. Most likely, this man’s father and grandfather were not expected to do such things. However, we do live in very different times. And this couple’s life, I believe, will be better for this fact.
What does the role of a skilful relationship educator entail, based on the findings of this thesis?
CONCLUSION | 219
An experienced counsellor and marriage educator, who coordinated the Centacare MRE program from 2003 to 2007, offers some clues:
What I enjoy most about this work is seeing a connection between them [the couples], the energy created by discussion with the group. I am not too sure what is happening when they are doing the couple exercises but when the group discussion I know what is happening you keep feel the vibes and love to facilitate, love to see them bouncing off each other. (Centacare MRE coordinator, 2005, pers. comm., 8 December)
The educator makes connections: between couples in a group, between partners, between parts of their individual experiences, and within him- or herself. The task of the educator is not to fix, or to have all the right answers, or to guarantee that participants’ relationships will never fail. Equipped with such impossible goals, a relationship educator will be crippled by a fear of the group, will be defensive, and will feel overburdened by the immense responsibility for them. Most crucially, the educator will not be able to respond to feedback, to hear or see what couples need. In other words, he or she will not be there. The real shift comes when the educator gives up this fantasy, and assumes a far humbler but infinitely more creative position – a role we can compare to that of a gardener. A gardener prepares the soil for planting seeds by aerating and fertilising it; removes plants that interfere with growth; controls pests; builds supports to train the growing shoots; and ensures the right volume of soil for the roots and a distance between root systems. But the gardener also knows that she or he cannot make anything grow. That is what the plants do. Each plant interacts with its environment and its neighbours in ways that produce a unique plant. If a gardener kept weeding out all deviants, there would hardly be a plant left in that garden. If she or he saw the task as ensuring that no plant would die, he or she would quickly lose faith in this vocation. In the same way, while a relationship education practitioner must be mindful of the way healthy relationships operate, and their value, I would argue that as soon as keeping the couple together is set as the goal, genuine learning for that session is over.
CONCLUSION | 220
I began to understand this in an embodied way early in my work, when once, I overheard a heated exchange between a couple in a course. Instead of walking past as I would before, terrified of the responsibility of possibly having an impact on a couple’s future life by saying or doing anything, or asking the wrong question, I skipped a heartbeat, sat down with them, and asked them if I could listen and help them talk to each other. It was a frightening moment, yet they agreed. After a few turns of accusing his fiancé of being timid, the man came to a point where he admitted that her lack of confidence reminded him of the way he used to be as a child. Seeing this in her made him feel angry with himself, and protective of her, yet all he knew how to do was shout and become angry with her. Stillness filled the room at this point for me. Something had happened in this moment, both for this man, and for this couple. When I walked out, they thanked me for listening. I was surprised as I had done nothing, and yet this was, in fact, not true at all. It was, in fact, my training and practice that enabled me to practice my intuition and presence in this situation, and fulfil the role of a mediator. I felt privileged to have been trusted to participate in this process. Something alive, a moment of creation of new meaning, took place. Such moments remain scary for the most experienced educators, precisely because if they are genuine, they are meetings, full of the awe-inspiring dread of the unknown. But this is precisely the reason why we do such work.
Real intimacy is tough stuff. It challenges some of our most cherished illusions: that with the help of reason and calculation, our relationships will be just as we want them; that we can use past experience to eliminate pain and mistakes; that we can continue to indulge in our self-seeking fictions while being with others. Instead, it asks for gentleness in our holding; for generous eyes; for a strong spirit and a tender heart.
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APPENDIX A
ORIGINAL QUESTIONNAIRE
Approval No 032030 Name …………………………. Contact details email …………………… phone …………………… Date of interview: ………………. 1. What did you look for in a potential partner? 2. How would you describe yourself? 3. How would you describe your partner? 4. What attracted you to your partner? 5. How similar/different are you? Has this changed and how? 6. How would you describe your relationship with your own family? Does this play a role in your relationship? 7. How would you describe the role of your cultural upbringing in your relationship – a burden, baggage, obstacle, springboard, guide? 8. When did you know you were ‘in a relationship’ with your partner? What was the shift? 9. How would you describe your relationship now? 10. How much time do you spend doing things together and apart? 11. What are your thoughts on the idea that being in a relationship requires effort, or work? 12. Would you say there is a person in your relationship that is responsible for its ‘upkeep’? 13. Could you say there were roles in your relationship? If so, what are they? 14. What term do you call _____ (partner’s name) when you speak about him/her to others: Partner, Boyfriend/girlfriend, My other half, My better half, Lover, Husband/Wife, Mate? Why? 15. (If not married) would you consider getting married? Why/why not? How do you think this would change your relationship with ______(partner’s name)? If you got married, would you call him/her your husband/wife? Why/why not? Do you want to have children? 16. What does commitment mean to you? How does it play out in your relationship? 17. Could you say that you had ‘priorities’ in life? Where does your relationship come in? Where does _____ (partner’s name) come in? 18. In your opinion, what does it take to sustain a good relationship? 19. What does ‘good communication’ mean in your relationship? 20. Can you think of a specific instance when you had problems in this particular area. Was it a specific event that triggered the problem/conflict? Was it resolved, and how? What impact did this have on your relationship? 21. Can you think of a time when you felt particularly close to _____ (partner’s name). What does intimacy mean in your relationship? What fosters it and what ruins it? 22. Household work: your thoughts on the issue? If you have some experience of living together, do you feel this question is handled well? Why/why not? 23. Think of a recent time an important decision had to made that concerned both of you. Did you feel it was handled well? Why/why not? 24. What do you hope for in your relationship?
APPENDIX B
REVISED QUESTIONNAIRE
Approval No 032030 Name …………………………. Contact details email …………………… phone …………………… Date of interview: ………………. 1. Tell me about a specific instance during the past week when you felt very happy in your relationship with _____ (partner’s name). How was it different to your everyday experience? 2. What makes you feel closest to your partner? 3. Tell me about a specific experience during the past week when you felt angry/cranky/annoyed/upset/frustrated/disconnected in your relationship with _____ (partner’s name). What triggers a feeling like that? What effect does it have on your relationship? 4. How committed are you in this relationship? Has your commitment ever wavered? Is commitment a feeling, a state, an attitude? Describe in detail. 5. Do you ever argue or disagree? What usually happens? Please describe an example. 6. What makes your relationship work? What are its stronger areas? Areas to develop? 7. Have you ever experienced a ‘breakdown in communication’ with your partner? What happened, and what did you do? 8. What are you like as a couple? How similar different/have you changed? 9. Do you trust your partner? What does this entail? 10. Would you have children with this person? What would affect your decision whether and when you would have children? 11. What do you hope for in this relationship?
APPENDIX C
CENTACARE INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE
Approval number 052114 NAME: DATE: 1. Tell me a little about how you got into this work. 2. What is Centacare, and is it specific to Sydney? If it is nationwide, how do the relationship education courses differ? 3. When was the agency/program founded? 4. What is the most enjoyable and fulfilling aspect of this work for you? Give me an example. What about the frustrating aspects? 5. Can you describe the programs that Centacare offers. Format Things covered What target couple 6. What in your opinion does a couple ideally gain from doing a Centacare marriage preparation course? What can you hope for as an educator? 7. What is the most common feedback you get from couples about the course? Would I be able to see some evaluations from couples? 8. Do you share PREP’s understanding that you can predict a couple’s path from the way they are before marriage? Are there any couples you would discourage from getting married? Why? 9. What have been the guiding criteria for the selection of research bases for the programs, i.e. PREP and PREPARE for instance? In your opinion, has this been a successful choice? (Funding from government? Any special relationship with PREP?) 10. Do you think it is appropriate/necessary for educators to legitimate the program by appeals to ‘science’? What does its success lie in? 11. Do the programs reflect the religious affiliation of the organisation, and how? 12. How do you feel about the balance of the theological/spiritual, and psychological content of the program? Does it work? Are there any incompatibilities between the way these two approaches operate? 13. What other programs are available to couples, and how do you see this one in relation to them? (Efficacy, content) 14. From your own experience, and perhaps follow-ups Centacare has conducted with couples – what do couples gain long-term from doing a marriage education course? If it ‘works’ or ‘helps’ – how? 15. How do you feel about the idea of couple inventories, such as PREPARE? What do you see as its benefits? Shortfalls? Do you see their use becoming more widely encouraged? 16. What is your opinion on the new government initiative of Relationship Centres?
APPENDIX D
CENTACARE SYDNEY MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIP EDUCATION EVALUATION
Q.6 (Extracts)
6. ‘What did you like most about the program?’
• ‘The opportunity to meet other couples & talk openly about relationship issues.’ (Kensington)
• ‘Realisation that no couple relationship is perfect and there are ways to cope, skills you can learn and help available.’ (Waverley)
• ‘Different – made us stop to think about how we work as a couple. Made me positive about working through difficulties.’ (Enmore)
• ‘Learning new things.’ (Liverpool)
• ‘It provided us (as a couple) a place to chat about our relationship and tools to deal with things in the future.’ (Liverpool)
• ‘Interaction with others, tools for dealing with arguments.’ (Lane Cove)
• ‘It was a focus on the two of us which sometimes being busy does not happen. Also learnt to be mindful of what and how we approach communication regarding difficult topics, and the fact that we can think differently.’ (Miranda)
• ‘Seeing people in the same position as us.’ (Miranda)
• ‘That it created an environment to help and grow in our relationship.’ (Enmore)
• ‘Getting to meet with other couples & realising that we are a normal couple like everyone else.’ (Enmore)