No royal road to intimacy
Watching the coronation of Charles and Camilla made me feel a range of things ... it also got me thinking about longevity in relationships.
Out of the hours and hours of coronation footage on Saturday night, two images stuck with me.
The first was of (recently separated) Chris 'Chippy' Hipkins, NZ's Prime Minister, wandering into Westminster Abbey alone when most other people had walked in with partners. I felt genuinely sad for Chippy (and no, not because he's a ginger). He looked so isolated, ambling in there like he was looking for cornflour in Pak’nSave, so estranged, so ... Ted Lasso.
The other image was kind of in the same bracket but at the other end of the spectrum — it was that of Charles and Camilla standing on the balcony overlooking the gardens at the rear of Buckingham Palace, where the troops had mustered for that amazing 'three cheers for the King'. What struck me was how connected they seem to be, King and Queen, and for the first time in the entire program of pomp and pageantry I guess I warmed to what one commentator had already observed about Charles earlier in the day: 'He has the love of his life by his side now.'
That comment made me angry when I heard it initially. I still can't reconcile how Britons have forgiven and forgotten so easily what he did to Diana. I guess their gullibility shouldn’t surprise me — they did vote for Brexit, after all. But Teflon Charles … even his own son (the naughty one, the 'Spare') admits that Charles only survived the scandal of Camillagate because of years of propaganda by Palace PR. It was effective enough to turn the tide of how an entire nation felt about Charles’s bit on the side, who, by a minor miracle, took the Queen’s crown upon her head on Saturday as if the infamous tampon telephone call had never been tapped.
Cards on the table, there's a lot more behind how I was feeling about such things while the coronation coverage was on, namely a conversation the previous night with my wife about intimacy … more of which I may divulge later in the week (so watch this space and, you know, subscribe now).
What I want to draw attention to here is something dancer and TV personality Anton Du Beke said on BBC about the royal couple towards the end of the coverage: about how wonderful it is to watch them, and how they do everything together in such a connected way.
And begrudgingly I had to agree.
Which made me wonder about their secret sauce, and more generally the special ingredients that couples draw upon to preserve their connectedness and also their romance during a long haul relationship.
I wrote last time about Bill Maher putting that very question to relationship and sex therapist Esther Perel a couple of weeks ago.
'You've been married a long time, right?' Maher had asked on his show, Real Time. 'What are the obstacles that keep it so hot for you?'
'Obstacles' was a reference to her observation that desire is generated when attraction meets obstacle, which is the stuff of every romcom.
In her book Mating in Captivity, Perel argues the key to desire in a long-term relationship is uncertainty and unpredictability.
'There's a powerful tendency in long-term relationships to favour the predictable over the unpredictable,' she cautions. 'Yet eroticism thrives on the unpredictable.'
A sense of physical and emotional safety is basic to healthy pleasure and connection. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins put it succinctly when he explained that passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.
This is often difficult in a marriage, particularly among people whose idea of oneness is fusion, where differentiation has been banished from the relationship as if it’s a mortal threat. Otherness (strong differentiation between self and other), which is key to healthy relational encounter, is often better illustrated, and experienced, in friendships outside marriage, because that's where curiosity, imagination and play more naturally occur.
But for Perel, who's been married for 40 years, it's entirely possible to experience these things within a long-term relationship — as long as you're intentional about it.
She tries to explain to Bill Maher: 'I like to say it like this: many people today, especially in the west, are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships. Some of us are going to do it with the same person. So I've been married a few times, but with the same person. That keeps it interesting.'
Maher doesn't get what she’s saying. So he gets rude about it.
'I mean, it's a wonderful line and a great applause break, but what the fuck are you talking about?' he says. 'You're a maiden one day and the next you're a pirate?'
'That's your imagination,' she fires back.
But then she breaks it down for him.
'No, the thing is, you're not the same person in your 20s as you are decades later, so it's about renegotiating the relationship. The structure changes, the interdependence changes, what each of us wants to do, separately, that has to do with our own interests — a relationship is a living, breathing organism, that you need to reinvent and infuse, and that keeps it interesting.'
Perel pauses while the audience applauds (because they're tracking, even if Maher isn't).
'The majority of people end up thinking that their partner belongs to them,' she says, 'and therefore you don't put nearly that much creativity into the plot. I like to think that your partner is on loan, and sometimes you have the option to renew. And once they never belong to you, you actually remain curious and don't just think that you already know everything.
'What kills it is the loss of curiosity for the other person, as a human being.'
And how does any person stay curious about the other?
Well, that's the mystery of it. But it has something to do with a quote by Proust that Perel cites in her book: 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.'
That is food for thought and now I am full again. But I will get hungry again soon. More please.