When a young Rose Kennedy had had her bellyfull of Joe's playing around with other women and wanted to leave him, her father told her she couldn't go back on a lifetime commitment: it was forever.
Many years later Rose's daughter Kathleen fell in love with a divorced Englishman, Lord Peter Fitzwilliam, and wanted to marry him. But, when she heard about it, Rose Kennedy's deepest beliefs took hold of her. If you marry this man, she told Kathleen, you will be cast out of the Kennedy Family, disowned, regarded as dead. Not long afterward a private plane Kathleen and Peter were Flying in crashed into a German mountain and both died.
Why did Rose Kennedy treat her own daughter so cruelly, Kathleen, the favorite sister of all the Kennedy women, she who had already lost a husband to the war?
The reason was that Rose's father had taught her that Lord Peter was still married to his ex-wife, that if Kathleen married Lord Peter, she would be marrying a married man. Rose believed that once a person made a lifetime commitment to marriage, that person is married forever.
Rose believed that there was no exit from marriage. She believed, just as many other people have believed, that marriage was a kind of invisible house that two people got locked into whenever they were properly wed. They were wedlocked inside the holy estate of matrimony. This what Rose Kennedy believed; it was a belief that gave her the courage to stick with her husband and made her capable of disowning her daughter.
The status of divorced people, in this view, is something like the status of escaped convicts. Prisoners on the run may walk around town as if they were free people, but they are convicts in the "eyes of God." If we are married forever in the eyes of God, there is no escape from our commitment. Once in, always in.
My problem with this theory of marriage is that it does not make sense.
When two people determine to leave each other for good, and get a court to declare them unmarried in the eyes of the law, their marriage is dead and gone, a memory, a sad memory perhaps, but only a memory, nothing more. Any marriage can die. We may with all our hearts intend it to last for life. And we may believe that it should last for life. But if can die. There are exits.
Now let's look at marriage commitment from another point of view, one that puts up exit signs whenever we may want to get off. This view lies at the other end of the world from all that Rose Kennedy believes about commitment to marriage. We pick it up in what Ralph Karsten learned from his therapist.
Two months after he got a divorce, Ralph was walloped by remorse for having failed to keep his commitment. In the old days he would have gone to a minister with his problem, maybe for help in seeking forgiveness. But being a thoroughly modern person, Ralph went to an expensive therapist in Santa Barbara to seek a cure.
This is what his therapist told him: you should be grateful. You have completed an important stage on your of self-discovery. Your ex-wife has traveled with you up to this point, and she has helped you along as far as she has been able to go with you. So be thankful for her gift, and take it with you as you leave. If she has any style at all, she will return the compliment.
Ralph's therapist made good sense- given her idea of what a commitment to marriage was all about.
For her, a person's commitment to marriage is an investment in his or her own growth. Growth, that is, toward the happier, the better, the more satisfied, person he or she is capable of becoming. It stands to reason, then, that when a person's investment in a relationship has not yielded any growth for a while, it's time to get out of it, and to seek another relationship with greater potential for personal profit.
Look at this way, a marriage commitment is an initmate version of "Let's Make a Deal." There is something in it for you, something in it for me. When there is not enough in it for either one of us, one of us should call the deal off. No hard feelings.
Exits from commitment? You can find one at every intersection of your marriage. Whenever you get low on growth, it's time to look for one.
The "growth for me" theory of commitment is businesslike, hard-nosed practical, therapeutic-and eminently self-centered. My proplem with this theory is that when it is put into practice, it stifles real growth.
Real growth is healthiest when we put commitment to another person ahead of growth for ourself. There is such a thing as growing into maturity, becoming strong enough to stick with a relationship because we care about the other person too much to leave it. And maybe we grow a notch too, when we learn to accommodate ourself to the fact that no relationship brings us everything we want.
The right planter's mix for personal growth is a blend of realism with commitment. We don't grow into mature persons by chasing fantasies. And one fact about marriage in general is that every marriage in particular is imperfect. No one marries exactly the right person; we all marry someone who is only more or less right for us. We are all flawed partners. And if we accept this regrettable but invigorating fact of life, we may be ready for real growth.
We do not give ourself a good chance for growing personally if we keep hangaring after our fantasy of the ideal woman. Or man. We grow when we keep renewing our commitment to the only spouse we've got. We grow when we stop dreaming of a perfect marriage, and adjust caringly to the one we have. Our best growth comes when we forget about our own growth, and focus on caring instead.
Here's a nice twist: instead of giving us a good reason for giving up a lifetime commitment, our need to grow is a prime reason for keeping it.
Let's recapitulate. Rose Kennedy believed in lifetime commitment, but she closed her eyes to the reality that sometimes we need an exit from commitment. Ralph's therapist saw exits anywhere we want to leave. But she did not believe in lifetime commitment.
Common sense lands us in the middle.
Now I must say that it makes sense, sad sense, but real sense, to say that some people who make a life commitment cannot keep it for life. There must be an exit for them.
When is it right to exit from commitment? I'll put some possibilities on the table, and we can discuss them in turn.
When Is It Not Possible To Keep A Commitment?
Ask Becky why she finally cut loose and left Frank after sticking with him for fifteen years. She will tell you that she left because it was impossible for her to stay. She had to go.
It became obvious about a dozen years ago that Frank was an alcoholic; he needed help, but raged like a lanced bull whenever Becky or anyone else urged him to get it. Frank was not an amiable drunk: he ravaged Becky with hate when he was in his cups, whipped her with barbed words and, now and then, when the torrent of his rage broke the dam of his fears, with bare hands. Had she stayed, her life, like her love, would have been as good as finished.
One way to look at it is that Becky did not go back on commitment when she left Frank. She came to the conclusion that Frank had killed her commitment by making it impossible for her to keep it.
Other people feel choked within a marriage to a a fine person who would kill himself or herself before abusing the other. Their partners are not cruel, or unfaithful, or insane. It's just that their two characters are so dreadfully incompatible with each other that one or both of them feel smothered by the combination.
Karen, a friend of mine, still admires the man she divorced a couple of years ago. He is generous, faithful, and has all sorts of other moral qualities that she was taught to admire in a person. But, as she tells it and as she feels it, he doesn't have what she needs most. He doesn't have the power to communicate care for her in a message she can hear. He stays detached and gives her the feeling a spy must get when she is caught and her government washes its hands of her, leaves her out in the cold with no hope that anybody will be in touch.
Maybe it's partly her own doing; she doesn't have the ears to hear what he really wants her to hear or the eyes to see what he wants her to see. I don't know. Nobody knows, except her. And I can't be sure that even she knows. But when I ask her why she doesn't go back to him, she says, "To go back to that marriage would kill me."
Somehow, for her, it was impossible to keep her commitment even though when she made it she meant with all her heart to keep it.
Everything I believe about commitment wants me to remind Che that people give up hope too soon, see their problems too quickly as catastrophes. I want to talk to her about hope, because I suspect she decided too soon that staying was impossible.
But I also believe Che when she tells me that for her it is not possible to keep commitment she made and meant for life.
When Does Keeping A Commitment Lose Its point?
Ask Bruce why he is getting a divorce from Samantha. He will tell you that this marriage has lost its point.
No point in staying, he says, when the point of staying is gone. TRUE? Consider his story and decide for yourself.
Samantha was a religious lady, sober as a nun, and just about as chaste. She was committed to decency, even as her mother was before her, she loved decency perhaps more than life, certainly more than love, and as her decency heated up her passion cooled down.
She thought she was chaste, but what she really was was mean. She could take a bead on Bruce's soul, smack him with her contempt, and slice him apart the way a fisherman fillets a halibut. To her, Bruce's gift of passion was only a male's disguise for animal list. And she made him understand quite clearly that she was not willing to be sacrificed on the pagan altar of his degraded desires.
For Bruce, keeping commitment was a long-term lease on humiliation. He felt like a puppy being spanked for being in heat. Keeping commitment became a euphemism for dying alone on the dry sands of Samantha's savage decency.
Samantha claimed that she was committed. But she had only one-half of the equation. She had consistency but no care. She was predictable but refused to be present. And sometimes half a commitment is worse than no commitment at all.
Was there any point in keeping it? Did Bruce's commitment have any point when Samantha rejected his gift of sexual love and could not give him the gift of care?
Let's admit it: a lifetime commitment to stay together "no matter what" can run up against some conditions that make keeping it impossible or, if not impossible, then pointless. In a world where married people can abuse each other, demean each other, be disloyal to each other, and be generally destructive to each other and their children, it is not realistic to assume that everyone who makes a lifetime commitment can keep it for life.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
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