Maybe it was because I’m a New Yorker and my ex-wife is a Californian, and New Yorkers are used to doing everything on top of other people, and if you don’t interrupt them they think you’re not paying attention.
Or maybe it was born of the fantasy that when two people fall in love they become One, evidenced by such tender displays of fusion as feeding each other, wearing the same color clothes, and finishing each other’s sentences.
The problem was, my ex-wife didn’t like me finishing her sentences. I fancied that it inferred a communion of minds and hearts, the kind of closeness people mean when they boast that “he knows what I’m going to say before I say it.” It implies telepathic understanding; we could use fewer words, economizing our intimacy.
Unfortunately, it turned out that half the time I didn’t actually know what she was going to say—and we were together for 20 years—and I ended up committing the conversational equivalent of cutting in line. She considered this habit, even when well intentioned, a form of trespassing, and said it made her feel invisible. To me it was just conversation. To her it was a hostile takeover.
Among the most common insights from our spiritual and psychedelic traditions are the boundary-dissolving revelations that “it’s all connected” and “we’re all one.” But in the rubber-meets-the-road world of real relationships, we’re not all one, and a certain amount of separateness is still an operational necessity. You may romanticize togetherness and boundary-less union—the two shall be as one, you complete me, I’m no one without you, one flesh and one heart—but this isn’t true intimacy. It’s enmeshment. Fusion of the sort that makes it hard for people to discern where they leave off and their partner begins, to hang on to the singularity of their own self amid their efforts to solder two into one.
We may go all gooey about the goal of oneness, but twoness is just as important, and more realistic. It’s giving a tip of the hat to the boundaries that naturally encircle people, and not denying differences or suppressing your integrity and authenticity for the sake of keeping up the appearance of oneness. Or the dream of it.
Psychologists call this task differentiation, and consider it the basis for healthy intimacy. “It’s not as cozy as togetherness, but it’s not as sticky either,” says David Schnarch in Passionate Marriage. “It can be as warm as you want, and it’s psychologically clean.” It’s also the basis of evolution itself, which aims for diversity, not sameness.
Maybe love is like the moth to the flame, or the mortal to the god. You can circle around the beloved all you want, but if you dare dive straight into the light, you’ll perish, as will your relationship. You have to keep your distance.
In other words, a certain amount of decamping within a relationship is critical, the occasional migration from togetherness. Cultivate some different interests, build in a little anticipation from time to time, the occasional partings that make the heart grow fonder, a bit of healthy distance from one another. And don’t try to finish each other’s sentences. Understand that the essential paradox of love—and the critical ingredient in erotic relationships—is that connection requires separateness, and to not merely tolerate but celebrate the space-between.
Besides, the closer you get to another person, the more apparent it is that they are indeed an-other, with not only needs and agendas that often run counter to yours, but boundaries that no one can put asunder and no amount of merging can overcome. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people,” the Czech poet Rainer Rilke once said, “that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
And if cultivating separateness feels too hardboiled, think of it as cultivating selfhood, which is the best thing you can do for the health of a relationship anyway—as long as the separateness you seek doesn’t turn fatally inward. As long as “parting makes the heart grow fonder” doesn’t devolve into “out of sight out of mind.” If your retreats from the other are counterpoised with advances, and you return from them bearing the gifts of your solitude and self-time, then your leave-takings aren’t likely to backfire, or turn into habits of evasion.
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Deconstructing the urge to merge, however, will confront you with not only personal patterns but historical and cultural ones, starting with the dream at the heart of the whole enterprise—the dream of deliverance back to the garden, or the paradise of amniotic life, or the supposed wholeness we had back in the primordial, before we were separated from nature.
We spend our lives seeking to overcome the sense of separation that defines so much of human experience—our essential aloneness in the world—and experiences like falling in love offer us a grand opportunity to see the walls come tumbling down and our exile and loneliness overturned. And our natural response to this sudden breach in our isolation is to cling to the one who helps bring it on.
So it’s asking a lot of yourself to deliberately resurrect the separation, to rebuild any part of the wall by holding a beloved at arm’s length, however briefly or intermittently, and for whatever good and healthy reason. But that will happen anyway when the less-than-ideal parts of your partner begin to show through, when the conflicts commence and the disappointments pile up. And when things fall apart, you’re naturally inclined to blame your partner rather than your fantasies.
A friend recently shared a book with me called The Mirror Effect, devoted to helping readers find their “magical match” by encouraging them to look for “a partner who has an identical mentality, spirituality, emotionality, life perspective, sexuality, ethics, and sense of humor. And who can finish your sentences. Your magical match will be like an identical twin. You’re always in agreement. And if it’s work, it’s wrong.”
You’ll forgive my harrumphing response to this, but I’m an identical twin, and my brother and I are anything but always in agreement. And we have from time to time definitely had to work things out between us, strive for understanding and forgiveness, struggle to negotiate conflicts and misunderstandings and come back to love.
Conflict is inevitable—is, in fact, proof that we’re not “one.” It’s not a sign that there’s something “wrong.” It seems to me that the authors are setting people up for very unrealistic expectations, if not heartache. Because if (when!) their magical match is suddenly not in agreement with them about something, or deviates from them around some opinion or mindset or sexual issue—or just when difficulties and challenges arise—they’re likely to conclude that there’s something wrong with their relationship rather than that they’re simply human, and this is the hard human work of loving another person. And the authors’ approach is not exactly a celebration of “viva la difference.” They’re equating differences with incompatibility.
In my opinion, the authors’ belief (as well as the cultural belief) that magical couples “share a single heart, mind and soul” and “complete each other” has done a lot of damage, for millennia. Two people do not share a single heart, mind, or soul. They each have their own heart, mind and soul. This is not a flaw. And each of them was whole before meeting the other.
As Kahlil Gibran famously writes in his poem On Marriage:
“Stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow
not in each other’s shadow.”
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