| Merle Shain |
| Excerpts from Courage My Love Copyright 1989 |
| They've been making a pretty good case lately for sticking up for your rights but very little is said about the other part of the work, making sure the other person's rights are looked after too, and when you are talking about a relationship, their rights are as important to you as yours. So if you get stuck in a place where you are always defending yourself, or pacifying them or being manipulated, or doing a little manipulating yourself, you are on the enemy's side, helping to bring about your own doom. Because there can't be two sides in a relationship, only one, and everyone who is thinking them or me has to learn to give that up. There is always duality in a relationship, always contradiction. The Greek myths try to teach us that, by exacting heavy penalties from those who try to simplify reality by denying contradictions. Even the fairy tales try to warn us that the bad and beautiful are always with us when they portray the prince as a frog and the princess as an old crone, although they always hold out the promise that we can change that once and for all with the right combination or words or deeds, and I think that is where they go wrong. Conflict is for me a sign of caring, as certain as if you are saying, “You are worth it for me to be who I am, so I am not withholding myself.” No one can be real if they keep themselves to themselves, so the greatest risk is not to risk. And the second greatest risk is not to let the person whose love you seek be themselves. Real life is very different from a fairy tale that ends when the frog becomes the prince and never becomes a frog again, and the old crone is transformed into the beautiful princess before our astonished eyes. In real life they change back and forth from day to day. That is just the beginning of the story and what happens after is the tale. And the only thing that matters is if you can love them as they are, and they can love you back. So you can pray to the Giver of graces, and ask that He guide your path. But I wouldn't waste time praying for the perfect person to commit to, or help in making the decision as to where and when to commit. I'd pray for wisdom to help you learn how to give yourself, and lessons in how to enjoy another, and maybe a little help with finding a way to transform the contempt that comes with familiarity into an intimacy that breeds respect, because that's what you need to master the art of cherishing and hence get cherished yourself. Monogamy is the art of making someone feel special so that they can make you feel special too. And so it involves the task of scaling the secret staircases till you reach the place where they've hidden their heart and you have hidden yours. And on the way, slaying the dragons that guard the doors of both. The dragons of indecision and inadequacy, or expectation and misconception, the dragons of illusion and delusion, the dragons of blindness and boredom, of negligence and need. And this getting to know another, and getting to know yourself, in ways too profound, too revealing ever to be plumbed outside of love, is the most daring work I know. And those who think of it as sheltered and lacking in imagination know not of what they speak. It takes far more emotional courage to lay open your heart to another, more fortitude to unmask another and find ways to enjoy the person who is there, than it ever does to dance away and cry defeat. There are people who believe that everything is a slow wind down from the days of grand passion to the poor thin thing of everyday. And insist that if a fairy godmother offered them three wishes, they'd wish for the prince or princess of their dreams. But I know they'd be wasting their wish as those in fairy tales almost always do. The job is not to change the love object into another, but the eyes that do the seeing into the eyes of love. And to change the concept of commitment from something you make to the perfect object to something you make to perfecting yourself. When people talk about commitment this is the work they mean, whether they know it or not. It's true it takes a certain intelligence and a generous spirit, and occasionally a bravado that you do not feel, but most of all it takes a willingness to take it on. To accept it as the work that must be done, interesting work when you think of it and no harder than most. And daily work, not seasonal or special occasion work. Work that must be done each and every day. But that's its special charm. If you do your work right, you should never be unemployed. “It's not a having and a resting but a growing and a becoming,” Matthew Arnold wrote in an essay called “Sweetness and Light,” meaning that life is a process rather than a station you arrive at, and so, of course, is love. And so when you make a commitment, a declaration of loyalty, and a pledge of loving conduct, it is a promise to honor the other person so that they can honor you, and hence is a commitment to a way of proceeding, and a commitment to yourself as much as it is to them. Commitment doesn't just mean to stay with someone through thick and thin. It means to make something work, and to help it keep on working, so each of you can trust yourself to the other in that private place, knowing that the other will do what has to be done, whatever that something is. And knowing that you always have the spiritual margin to get derailed again, and yet still grow old together with everything intact. “I am,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward Angel, “a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?” Why not? one almost wants to add. Whatever it is that asks you to believe in life comes from being needed, comes from feeling your value in another's eyes, and while a family fabric is a wanton weave of wants which often threaten to take you over, the pact you make with others to protect them protects you as much as it does them. And when you collude with someone to let them lay a claim on you, you cherish yourself as you cherish them. I know some people talk about the first days of love as if they are the best, as if what follows later is just the time you must put in, the price that must be paid for the day that was seized way back when you were young, but there is something about the daily-ness which to me is the most seductive of all -- more addictive than languorous nights, more tempting than borrowed love. And almost anyone who has had it once will tell you its sights and sounds, its smells and its sensations resonate long after the stolen moments have faded, and that they pull at you like an undertow even when you wish they'd go away. “I'm not ready to make a commitment,” I hear people saying, meaning that they want to be able to leave if things get tough. Or that they don't think this relationship is perfect enough to warrant that kind of investment of themselves. I understand these feelings. I have had them myself. But making a commitment isn't giving something up. It is becoming something more. And as such it is its own reward. Not something contingent on someone else. I know that isn't ever really clear until you do it. And that it's hard to see how you can commit to another human being and get not them but you. I know it's hard to see how that could happen. But it is nevertheless still true. |
| Pages 99-104 |
| Thank you for visiting this page! I hope that Merle's words have been as much an inspiritation to you as they have been to me. Blessings on you, and may you find the courage to love with all your being -- body, soul, and heart! |
| CLICK HERE to return to the previous page of excerpts from Ms Shain's 3rd book, Hearts That We Broke Long Ago. |
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| Courage My Love is the last book Ms Shain published before her untimely death in 1989. She is sorely missed, but I trust that she will live on through the loving words that she has given to us. |
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