A lifetime commitment is often scuttled at the launching because we are not smart about the person to whom we make it. A person doesn't release himself or herself from a lifetime commitment simply because he or she has no grit, fidelity, no character. People often leave a commitment because the person they made a commitment to was the sort of person doomed to be trouble.
I said before that we don't know what we are doing when we make a lifetime commitment. It is just as true that few of us know who we really are when we make one. Or who the other person is.
Two people fall in love. Crazily, wondrously, insanely, beautifully. Blind to who each other really is. How can they know? They are lunatics-for the time being.
They come from different schools of life. They have different parents, had different childhoods. They have developed diffirent levels of tolerance to pain. They have different religious and different morals, different ways of coping with disappointment, different talents for hurting each other, different sets of neuroses.
The message in all this is that we need to be wiser, more careful, more understanding, when making a lifetime commitment.
Neil Warren, a psychologist with twenty of I very ears experience in counseling people whose commitments are in trouble, gave me a list of the most common mistakes people make when they make lifetime commitments:
They commit too quickly.
They commit before they are mature.
They have unrealistic expectations.
They commit while drunk on romantic love.
They have a wretched self-image.
They don't know how to communicate.
They don't share the same faith or values.
Unwise choice, dubious commitment. We do make commitment keeping hard for ourselves later by the choices we make earlier. In fact, we can make it next to impossible in the end by making bad commitments at the start.
But there is something else worth thinking about: a mistake at the start does not have to mean failure at the finish.
None of us marries the one perfect person for us; to be honest, there is no such person. But most of us can accommodate ourselves to the less-than-perfect person we did marry, even if we were not swing straight when we married him-or her.
Often when two people decide that they married the wrong person, they are really refusing to let each other be the special individuals they are. They hold the thoroughly wrongheaded notion that two committed people ought to be totally alike. And they also believe that if people remain very different from each other, they have cause to split.
When I think of people I know who have not only kept their commitment, but who have developed an unusually good relationship over the years, my mind gets a fix on two friends who are as different from one another as two people could possibly be. He is spiritual; she is earthly. He is detached; she loves to be intimate with people. He is dependent; she could manage almost anything by herself. He is offended by vulgarity; she laughs at anything that is funny. He is always careful; she likes to take risks. He sees life in blacks and whites; she embraces all the grays and shadows of life. He hates conflict; she dares take on anyone. They are very different.
What has kept their commitment alive in spite of all the stress of their differences? It has been the creative power of the care they have nourished for each other even when their differences have pushed them apart.
But they do not choke each other with care. Just the opposite. They care by giving each other permission to be the different sort of person each of them is. They care enough to leave each other alone, enough to celebrate the gifts each brings within his or her character. These two people have turned commitment into joy, mostly because they have gradually learned how to set each other free.
It took me long too discover the difference between active caring and permissive caring. In active caring we do things to help someone. In permissive caring we let people be who they are and do what they need to do.
Active caring was easy for me, I was prepared to do just about anything for Che. In anybody's league I was a devoted husband. If she went away for a few days, I would clean the room for her while she was gone because I knew she hated the job.
But there was a cheap, selfish hook in this kind of caring. I was really proving to myself-and to her- that I was a caring husband. An ancient gambit, boring, and silly, too.
But in my heart I failed at the most critical challenge of caring-giving Che permission to be who she was, and permission to give me the gifts that she had to give. She had a lighthearted gift for smiling the roses, whenever and whatever she found them, even if it meant putting off some chores. I had a gift of plowing through obstacles and getting things done. Quickly, now.
I thought, early on, that I had a calling to convert Che to my kind of work ethic. But my missionary efforts made us both miserable. Then she gradually taught me the secret of permissive caring-the thoughest kind of caring for a work-obsessed person such as myself. But as I learned the freedom of permissive caring, I was ready for a more interesting partnership between two very different sorts of characters.
Permissive caring is one way of living with the fact that we chose the wrong person. A creative way. It is the way of permitting our partner to be the very person we didn't know we were marrying. And of discovering that what looks like incompatibility can become a duet of differences.
I do not mean to say, of course, that everyone who makes a bad choice of commitment can survive the original mistake. Sometimes living together is destructive as, for instance, when one person is incurably brutal. In that case the sooner the commitment is undone the better.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing.
