"You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep the Spring from coming.” Pablo Neruda
This week my partner and I celebrated 32 years together. When we met, we moved in together after a week. In spite of this enthusiasm there was never anything inevitable about us reaching this milestone or our relationship being successful. Inevitability implies a dead certainty. And personally, I think there’s only one of those; I chose the words ‘dead certainty’ carefully. In my view, the only inevitability in life is that you are going to die. Some sooner, some later, but all of us at some time or other. Mostly life is about choice and chance.
My partner and I have always laughed a lot together, but we’ve also had moments when we’ve clashed. I’m a swan, she’s a firebrand. We’ve had to navigate challenges and learn to accommodate our different approaches. I’m a go away and think about it, she knows straight away what she thinks. (Course, neither of us is always right, either!)
It was a chance encounter when we met. I was a fairly new arrival in a new city and went to a drama group called Pyramid. It was the inaugural week of that group. I didn’t feel like it, but I knew that I couldn’t keep sitting in my very strange, rented accommodation (my landlord was live-in, and he had some weird habits, and my other flat mate was often busy: the entirely delightful Chris Blunt.)
Pyramid began with an introduction circle game. Mary, my partner, introduced herself and then a guy called Joseph introduced himself, and then it got to me and everything in me wanted to say, ‘and the baby Jesus.’ But of course, I didn’t… but I did share that thought, and that was our first connection. A bit of silliness. We went out afterwards, and then the following week we went on a date. We never went back to Pyramid.
Whenever you take a major step: moving in, leaving a job, starting again: there are adjustments. Choices are made. But they are definitely choices. You can choose whether you react to a new environment by changing everything, or by taking a back seat and seeing what happens, or by maintaining the status quo but all those approaches are choices. No one is making you demand that your partner stops smoking, for example or give up watching their favourite TV show – you are choosing to make that demand. It might be an entirely reasonable position to demand that change, but it’s not inevitable. (My partner has never made these kinds of demands, of course. As well as being a swan, I am not brilliant at being told what to do, especially if I don’t agree with it, we neither of us are, and we learnt that VERY quickly.)
And in making that choice to demand that change, you have to live with the consequences of it. You have to live with every part of the consequence of it. The bits where you feel it’s the right thing because of your entirely reasonable ambitions or hopes, and the bit where they’re upset by your demand. You really have to take full responsibility for everything you feel when they don’t or won’t comply. Or if they comply but with less enthusiasm than you’d hoped. How you feel is on you.
The reason for this post is not really about my partner and me, or smoking or favourite TV shows but about the very key and real difference between a dependence on the view that something was inevitable (an easy way out – not my fault gov) when in a relationship context or a work context against accepting responsibility for the choices you make, wholly. And it’s true that there isn’t always time to do it the way you want to do it, or say everything you hoped you’d say, or find the time or the place, or you hold back because you’re afraid of hurting someone or of them being angry with you: but those are all still choices. And you still have to live with them.
And it doesn’t make you right either – demanding your partner stops something even if it is on the surface ‘the right thing’, even if, having studied all the options, you’re convinced it’s ‘the right thing’ that doesn’t mean it is the right thing for them, or your relationship. And if they get upset or feel hurt by your demand or your decision – that’s for you to sit with too. It might be short-lived, or their unhappiness at your choice might endure, but taking responsibility for your own feelings, and your own decisions means that you’re not fooling yourself. Don’t blame someone else for your choices or how you feel about that choice when it’s not met with enthusiasm and don’t blame inevitability.
We’ve all been in situations – my partner and myself included – where it would have been better if we hadn’t behaved in a particular way. But the reason my partner and I are still here after 32 years, still laughing, and still arguing from time to time is because we both have integrity. And we’re both reflective. We don’t lie to each other. And we don’t shirk responsibility for the choices we make or don’t make, even when it’s hard, and for that reason, and only because of that, we can always find it within us to keep on.
At our civil partnership we read this quote from Adrienne Rich, and it’s what we live by:
“It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.”
From Women and Honour, Some Notes on Lying.