Coming Apart. Daphne Rose Kingma

the meaning of our relationships—the tasks we undertook in them, the gifts we received from them—that we can survive their endings with our selves and our self-esteem intact.

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      Exploding the Love Myths: Why Are We Really in Relationships?

      JOHN AND DEBORAH FELL IN LOVE when they were both in their late twenties. They'd both had a number of puppy love relationships and were now eager to settle down. He'd been out of college for a couple of years and now was working as a bank management trainee. She was just finishing college.

      They had a number of friends in common. She was attracted to his steadiness—“He was so peaceful and comforting”—and he was drawn to her liveliness and affection—“She really adored me.” The shy beginning of their romance (“I was the one who called him for our first date,” Deborah confessed) flowered into a series of dates and excursions, mutual appreciation of one another, and the feeling that there was no reason whatsoever why there shouldn't be more—a lifetime of what already felt so good to them. After living together in peace and delight for more than a year, they decided to get married.

      When Marie and Neil fell in love, everyone thought they were the perfect couple. Neil was a dashing 6'5″; Marie was a dazzling, willowy blond.

      “It was love at first sight,” according to Marie. “He was just my type of man, grown-up, handsome, accomplished. He met all my criteria for a mate, and when he chose me in return, it was more than I ever could have asked.

      “It wasn't just surface, either. We had a lot of things in common. We were both in business. He was a few steps ahead of me when I was starting out and available to give me the guidance I needed. He was my hero and my colleague. My ideal. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Six months later, we got married.”

      In general, when we tell the stories of falling in love, they follow a very specific format: They fell in love, got married, and lived happily ever after. In our unconscious mythologies of love, we see marriage—the cementing of a relationship through the ceremony of marriage—as a destination. We assume that marriage itself is the goal. We assume that love will drop us off at the doorway of a committed relationship and that once we have walked through it, all will be well. More of the same until the end of time. We expect that the high-riding, ebullient, positive feelings that cause us to fall in love will sustain us through all the years of our relationships, that love will dissolve our differences and conquer all. We presume, in a sense, that relationships are about the supremacy of love, that they will meet all our needs and last forever.

      However, as the very existence of this book testifies, there is more to a marriage than simply setting it up. A lot goes on in the house of love and, rather than being a destination, relationships are often just a roadside inn, a stopping place on our journeys through life.

      So if relationships aren't, in the end, about living happily ever after, about love that conquers all, then what are they really about, you may ask. Why do we really fall in love?

      The reason we fall in love is to help us accomplish our external and internal developmental tasks.

      Developmental Tasks

      In our lifetimes, we are each trying to do a single thing: to create our selves. We are all trying to solve our basic psychological problem—which is to answer in depth and to our own satisfaction the question, “Who am I?”

      What this means is that as we proceed through our lives, we are all trying to get a sense of our own identity. In order to do that, we create a series of life experiences that either help us discover who we really are or confirm who we have discovered ourselves to be. This process of self-definition or self-discovery occurs through what I call “developmental tasks,” and it is our relationships, more than anything else in our lives, that help us accomplish the developmental tasks through which we define ourselves. That's why we choose the people we do and that's why they choose us. That's also why relationships begin and end.

      Developmental tasks are stepping stones in the developmental process. Learning to walk after learning to crawl is a developmental task for an infant, just as attending college after completing high school is an intellectual developmental task for a young adult. The completion of each of these tasks marks the putting into place of another piece of the personality, a further identification of the self, a further coming to terms with who one really is.

      Whether we are consciously aware of this or not, we are all, at any given moment in our lives, engaged in this developmental process. We're all going about the business of becoming, or trying to become, ourselves. We're all trying to grow up and leave home: to get educated, to decide whether or not to have children, to survive financially, to solve our addictive problems, to pursue our artistic impulses, to integrate our sexuality, to enhance our self-esteem, to get recognition. All of these are developmental tasks, and we look for whatever assistance we can find to move through one particular developmental stage and into the next.

      There are several kinds of developmental tasks. One set is very external and task-oriented. It has to do with what we are trying to accomplish, achieve, or cause to happen at any given moment in our lives; for example, learning to walk, learning to read, leaving home, going to college, starting a business, having a child, building a house.

      Another kind of developmental task is a psychological developmental process, where the tasks have to do with our personal psychologies. In this process, the set of tasks has to do with solving some emotional problems, such as taking possession of our sexuality, our anger, our masculinity or femininity, our personal power, our creativity, or self-sufficiency, to name a few.

      Since we are human beings, the most natural form of assistance for us is other human beings, and relationships are the most natural form of obtaining the assistance of other human beings. Love is the medium whereby we offer one another this assistance, and, by this definition, a good love is one in which a fairly equal amount of assistance is being given and received by both partners.

      This doesn't seem like a very romantic view of love and may even be seen as selfish. But the truth is that the creation of our selves is what is really occurring under the charmed umbrella of our romantic relationships. Rather than being selfish, this is a definition of love that provides an opportunity for real appreciation of the special qualities of both participants. In this sense, it is the fullest view of love.

      While relationships very often help us achieve our external developmental tasks—and we often have a very obvious awareness that this is happening (“He helped me finish college,” or, “She helped me start my business”)—what is of more interest, and perhaps of more importance, is that relationships help us accomplish our emotional developmental tasks. They do this because they are by their very nature emotional. We tend to overlook what we accomplish emotionally in relationships because in general we are not aware of the emotional processes in our lives. But the fact is that consciously or unconsciously we all are always in a state of emotional evolution, and nothing spurs our emotional development more than our intimate relationships.

      Since external developmental tasks are pretty much self-evident, I am not going to spend much time talking about them here. What I do want to make clear is the nature of our psychological developmental tasks because they affect our personalities so profoundly.

      Psychological developmental tasks in relationships fall basically into two categories: (1) making up for specific deficits from childhood and (2) discovering the emotional meanings of our childhood stories.

      Most of us don't treat our personal pasts as being in any way important except perhaps as the foggy preface to the lives we're living now. We tend to think of childhood and adulthood as two distinctly different episodes of self, not as a single continuous lifetime with the threads of childhood woven deeply into the fabric of the present. As a result, we tend to give ourselves very simplistic reports about our childhood: “Of course I was happy; my parents did everything they could,” or, “It was awful, but so what—it's over now.”

      No matter what