Marriage

This is Cassie, my daughter, and Chris getting married in our back yard.  I think this must be when Rev. Eric Meter is asking Chris whether he . . . I don't think it was "take this woman."  Different words, more meaningful.  I made Cassie's bouquet, but someone else did her hair.  A part of the service I liked was when Eric asked the assembled company - me, Tom, and grandson Otto - whether we would accept and support this couple, and we said "We will" in loud unison.  Many of Chris's relatives in Canada were watching via video, and if they said "We will" I couldn't hear it.

It was cool when we three surprised them with chimes and bells at the end.  But the most impressive part of the service to me was when Eric spoke about responsibility.  The service was firm about that; marriage is about assuming responsibility, not only for the other person, but for this third thing you are inviting in - the relationship.  You will be required to give it time, to tend the relationship itself.

I thought how Tom and I sit down and talk when something is troubling one of us, usually me, or have a meeting when there are major financial decisions to discuss, like getting a furnace. And we routinely just sit with coffee and breakfast and the morning paper, and casually download miscellaneous stuff, our dreams, our daily schedule. That is marriage-tending time.  Then of course there is murmuring in bed.  You can't have an intimate relationship if you are not available for this kind of ritual.

We are coming up on our 26th anniversary in October, pretty good for people with disastrous early relationships.  I wish the same for Cassie and Chris.

Small-R relationships

[The small print in the image above says "Sure there are plenty of other fish in the sea. But you're not anywhere near the sea. You're in the desert. Alone."]

I read that there are more single people around than there used to be - I see it around me, too. And it seems most of these yearn to have a Relationship. An 84-year-old woman who divorced three decades ago just confided this to me, how this desire persists despite her surround of caring children and friends.

Talking about the possible causes for this desire could occupy us for a long time. We could look at one of my home-made koans, Who is that one you want to relate to? But I want to make a note on something different - our failure to pay enough attention to the relationships we already have.

I remember a time in my life when I had no Relationship, I remember often feeling alone in a bad way. Yet, in my life then were my grown daughter, and the kitten she named Greylin after the feline hero of my first novel and made me take. In my dumpy apartment building I got to know an elderly neighbor, Margaret, whose recipe for a sort of quiche ratatouille I still have - she must have given me some, and I must have asked for the recipe. My parents were both still alive, and my mother wrote to me every week. ( I had no idea how precious those letters would become.) My brother was still alive and living here in town, my sister was still in this country. I belonged to a Unitarian Fellowship that had been very welcoming to me. I had two women friends who are still friends today - that's almost 30 years now. I had a small social circle that included - gasp - Tom, and went out and did rowdy things together now and then.

It was harder keeping any relationship up in those days, when a long-distance phone call cost by the minute, and you usually didn't make them except to announce a death, something like that. No answering machine. No Skype. No facebook, no e-mail such as I used yesterday to ask my sister in Australia if her back yard attracts Lorikeets. No lovely e-mail cards.

But I didn't give much thought then about keeping up those small-R relationships. You could call that taking them for granted. You could say accurately that it wasn't very mindful - back then all I knew about Buddhism was that I had a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, whose mysterious pages I stared at now and then. The only kind of meditation I knew was the visualization I had learned in yoga, and it didn't seem to get me anywhere. Well, you know about Getting Somewhere.

Years later I saw a Unitarian video about daily devotions. One of the people it featured showed us how in his morning devotion he went through a little stack of photographs of - what did he say? his family, the people he loved - and asked of each one, "What does this person need right now?" I was struck by this. I'm sure I thought devotions were done for one's own self. Now what he did looks like a practice of compassion, putting Self aside to ask about the needs of those he loved. I felt that would translate sometimes into actions.

Even when we feel isolated, we are nested in family and a broader context. We have relationships at work, we live in a neighborhood, our every step affects the planet. There is what we used to call civic duty. Doing our part.

I recall a scene from the long-ago movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the woman goes riding a bicycle with Paul Newman to the tune of a cheery song we all got very tired of. She asks him something like this: "If it weren't for the Kid, do you think you and I would have a Relationship?"

He replies, "We do have a relationship." A little cowboy wisdom.

A Relationship

[autumn grasses at the wildlife center]
I have been thinking hard about relationships. First, I have decided, they do not have this hard existence we sometimes give to them, especially to the painful ones. Show me that relationship I thought, in a Zen way. You can't hold it in your hand. What there is, is the moment when I am with somebody, and attention and energy flow back and forth between us. Then we say goodbye, and it does not. Thinking about it does not keep it alive, though we often believe that. (Ask any grief counselor.)

Yet, the relationship also does exist, it has been built. My mind and that friend's mind hold the memory of every meeting, every word spoken, every event shared, every laugh or tear, though we have each perceived it differently. There is this heap of relationship in our minds, I guess, even when we are not thinking about it.

What has me thinking about this was a homely event, something that happened this year: a lost friend renewed contact. A precious friend, the last one left from junior high days. Hearing from her generated a thrilling kind of warmth that seemed to be mutual. We wrote back and forth, excited to catch up on our lives, to send pictures of our pets, that kind of thing. Then it stopped. A month went by and she didn't answer my last e-mail. Two months. I wrote. You know, RU OK?

She wrote back after a while, and said carefully that I needed to understand she doesn't answer e-mail promptly, that things can sit a long time until she feels like replying. With this some things fell in place about the relationship we'd had long ago, the one that had just dwindled away and died without being buried. I recalled the less attractive parts of our past years, our differences. How hard I'd try to be available with her when she showed up in town, how she then would go home and then I wouldn't hear from her.

What about this? I have friends who would point out that Wun has the right to define boundaries in a relationship exactly as Wun chooses. This is true. But it is very important to realize that both people have that right. Uh-oh.

It's not that my way is right and hers is wrong. In fact, I think that back in the day I remember having relationships like that. Saw old friends now and then, nobody much wrote; I was never good at non-electronic letters. We were all young and crazy and doing exciting things.

When Tom and I were about to get married, we had the minister to dinner, can you imagine I'm that old? He told us he liked to ask a couple, "What will you do if one of you wants the thermostat up and one of you wants it down?" At this time I didn't know anything about negotiating, which is actually a set of skills. I thought morosely, I guess I'd put on a sweater. Oh, uh-oh again.

Negotiating levels of intimacy and commitment, which is what I'm talking about I realize, is more delicate than that. Later in my learning curve, a therapist informed me that in any relationship the person who wants the least intimacy always wins. Think about it.

Where does that take us? or me, for I have written this to clarify what it's about. I think the salvation, when a conflict is this primal, is to step back and think like a Buddha. We both want happiness. We each have our own ideas about what makes us happy, our preferences. We respond to life with our own temperaments and all our conditioning. And, oh yes, it's not all about me. That should take me somewhere.