Toward Commitment

by Diane Rehm

  JOHN: I don't know about the genes. I would hazard it's more a function of the male ego and the Pygmalion complex. For a man to be in a position to be a teacher to someone to whom he is so powerfully drawn sexually simply enhances the attraction. The statue that I as Pygmalion was creating somehow got out of hand.

  DIANE: [laughter] What does that mean?

  JOHN: By virtue of your radio program, you became the learned individual knowledgeable about a lot of issues about which you know more and can teach me. But in those early days, being in the position of a Pygmalion was enormously flattering and satisfying. And my subject was so appealing. At one time, I recall seeing you in the lobby of the State Department. They were doing a film about the life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and they asked you to walk across the huge lobby as a stand-in for her. There were hundreds of people standing around watching this. I can still vividly recall a beautiful, stunning young woman there in the lobby with all the lights on. The whole incident simply enhanced your sexual appeal.

  DIANE: Did you ever talk with any of your male friends about me?

  JOHN: I don't recall doing so, and it would have been unlike me. In particular, after I'd finally proposed and given you my grandmother's ring, I didn't tell my friends about our engagement and upcoming wedding. I think this reflected my continuing ambivalence about getting married and sharing my life with someone else. Virtually nothing in my background prepared me for such an existence, and I was therefore both excited and anxious about the prospect.

  DIANE: I remember feeling annoyed that you hadn't told any one of your friends. Both of us came together to tell my boss, George Dolgin, about our plans, and he was delighted to have played a role. But I did sense that there was something missing from you: a desire to tell the world you were in love and about to be married! That should've set off warning bells, but if they were there, I chose to ignore them.

  JOHN: I do hope you remember, though, how excitedly the two of us together did plan the wedding—every single detail, from the restaurant to the food and flowers. I did want it to be a wonderful occasion.

  DIANE: Yes, I certainly do remember every delicious moment.

  JOHN: But one of the issues I want to return to is this state of blissful and dangerous attraction. How could we have embarked upon this relationship with greater knowledge about ourselves?

  DIANE: Doesn't that go back to, as you said earlier, Mother Nature? Today, young people do seem to take relationships more analytically. They approach them with more caution, taking into account what the other person does, whether this is the person I'd like to spend my life with. I think there's a lot more consideration of such matters. Yet look at the divorce rate—almost fifty percent of the marriages that take place today will end in divorce within five years. For all the analysis, preparation, and attention to whatever the problems are, I'm not sure that process really works.

  JOHN: So how should young people approach this difficult relationship? To relish the romance, on the one hand, and face the realities on the other?

  DIANE: I would urge six months of counseling, with a priest or a therapist, someone who can ferret out the kinds of problems these two people will encounter, instead of just focusing on the bliss. You and I had just one session with the Reverend Duncan Howlett, the Unitarian minister who married us. He asked you then, “How do you feel about marrying a woman who's already failed at marriage once before?” And your response was something like, “Fine.”

  JOHN: Yes, I had no problem with that. But I'm still trying to grope toward a way in which the romantic illusion will exist but at the same time rest upon some greater degree of selfknowledge, and yet not to the point where the illusion is destroyed. I do think that the illusion is an important part of the commencement, and even the continuation, of a relationship. It's a tricky high-wire act, and there may not be a net below.

  DIANE: But what's your reaction to six months of counseling before marriage, talking about the issues you and I have raised—money, profession, family, sociability, for example?

  JOHN: Certainly a step in the right direction, but modest by way of preparation.

  DIANE: What else can you do?

  JOHN: Somehow encourage people to talk about who they really are. That's the key. I thought I knew who I was, and then, in the process of forty or so years of marriage, I learned that, in many ways, I didn't know who I was. Indeed, I turned out to be somewhat different from the person I thought I was.

  DIANE: But isn't that the beauty of a relationship, that we become someone new, in the process of living with another human being? In working out those issues, we learn about ourselves. We change some of our ideas. We reflect the other's vision, instead of simply sticking to our own. I've grown, certainly, because of my own efforts, but I've also grown because of my relationship with you, my understanding of life from your perspective, not just mine.

  JOHN: I agree. If the relationship continues, it certainly does provide opportunities for learning and for growth. But I'm still fascinated by this threshold question as to how people can get off on a better footing, so that the relationship will continue or at least increase the chances of its continuing. I don't think we yet have in place the key elements of that minimal foundation.

  DIANE: You see, I think you're trying to create too rational an approach to what is basically a wonderful, irrational romance, a coming together. There are no perfect relationships. Every couple I know has gone through some or all of the difficulties you and I have talked about. They may have handled them differently, but they went through them. So trying to anticipate every one of those is impossible. Trying to know oneself completely is a long process.

  JOHN: I'm only looking for a matter of degree. But in my case, your beauty and intellectual curiosity did overwhelm me, and thereby undercut the need for a greater understanding of myself—and of you.

  Anger

  John

  I grew up intuitively believing that the expression of anger was not only illegitimate but destructive. Like any sensitive child, I was aware of those occasions when my parents were mad at each other. The signs were reasonably clear. They included, for example, curt and chilly exchanges, scowls and other cheerless looks, and a palpable irritability. But on those occasions my parents maintained, however hypocritically, an air of civility. They were thereby able to sustain their anger while still attending to the demands of the household.

  The reasons for the anger were beyond my ken, emerging from the mysteries of adult behavior. Over time, I came to realize that my parents, like most adults, had much in common emotionally with children. They simply had cultivated ways of concealing those emotions and contriving a public persona. Nor did I understand what brought these bouts of anger to an end. I was grateful for the return of a modicum of warmth in their relationship, while bracing myself for the next onslaught.

  Throughout these episodes, my parents did not articulate but generally observed one cardinal rule: the anger was to remain unexpressed. It was to be contained within the thin skin of civility. The obvious implication was that if the anger were allowed to assume the full force of expression, the skin would burst. The destructive powers of anger would then be unleashed, and our fragile threesome would be gravely harmed.

  For the sake of self-protection, I therefore assumed an important responsibility. I became the guardian of the fragile civility, determined not to allow the skin to break. On one occasion when the civility was threatened, I reminded my parents of a popular soap opera of the day, whose title was Life Can Be Beautiful. My parents could not help breaking into laughter, and the danger was averted.

  Imagine, then, how threatened I was not only by Diane's ability to give vent to anger in loud and expressive terms but her inclination to do so. My paramount reaction was to say as little as possible in reply. I thought that I could thereby salvage, at the very least, some degree of civility. In truth, my attempted silence provoked Diane even more. Moreover, my behavior frustrated any effort to explore the reason
s for the anger and ways of dealing with it. It took me years to understand the constructive use of anger, but its expression still frightens me.

  A few times, my anger provoked me to destructive acts that left me with quite different feelings. During an angry exchange between Diane and me when we were alone at the dinner table, I seized my dinner plate, lifted it above my head, and then hurled it to the floor, food and all, as hard as I could. I can still relish the enormously satisfying sound of the plate shattering into smithereens. On another occasion, in a fit of rage, I once— but only once—lost control and struck Diane on her right forearm. I derived absolutely no satisfaction from this act—only a deep nausea. I remember her words vividly: “Don't you ever dare to strike me again.”

  Diane

  The extent of anger within me when I reached adulthood was probably more enormous than I had ever realized. Having held it in for so many years, knowing that the expression of anger within my family would not be tolerated, I was probably a volcano waiting to erupt. When my first husband and I became engaged, I broke off the relationship at one point, in the midst of my anxiety over my mother. I couldn't think straight. She was dying, and here I was talking about getting married, which I knew was what she wanted. But somewhere within me that reservoir of anger I'd held on to for so many years was revealing itself, and it came out, in its first expression, at my then fiancé. Ultimately, my anger at the stifling community in which we lived as well as my anger at and disappointment with my husband resulted in divorce.

  When John and I first began to date, the divorce was barely behind me. But the anger I'd felt in the marriage was now replaced by an enormous sense of freedom. No longer did I have to fight my way through every single day just to be who I was. Rather, I could work at the State Department and enjoy freedom from fear of judgment and retaliation by the community for expressing my views openly, knowing that this fear had lain beneath the anger and hostility I'd felt in the last days of the earlier marriage.

  Later, after my marriage to John, and after the arrival of our son, David, the anger resurfaced. At first, we would simply talk about my sadness and loneliness. Later, I realized there was no way I could get John's attention other than to yell, and cry, and, eventually, to scream. My anger at him derived, I believe, from a feeling of being deserted, of being replaced by his passion for work. Why couldn't he cut back on his hours, I demanded. Why couldn't he make time for us? Was his concentration on work a way of avoiding the intimacy I so craved? As the doors slammed and my voice's pitch rose higher and higher, I could see John withdraw into his place of hiding, behind a blank stare I could not penetrate. The more I screamed, the more he withdrew.

  As I look back, I reflect on my inability to vent my feelings of anger within my family, especially toward my mother. Perhaps John became a substitute for her: I could yell and scream at him, as I could never have done at her.

  It took years and years of therapy for me to understand the roots of my anger, and even more years to realize that the anger had begun to control my life. Even now, at age sixty-five, I find myself sometimes having to repress that urge to holler, and then to find ways to express myself in a reasoned and reasonable manner.

  Dialogue on Anger

  JOHN: I must say anger remains a really important issue to me. It goes back to my childhood. Some of my earliest memories relate to episodes when I sensed or knew that my mother and father were mad at each other, for one reason or another. On some of those occasions, they expressed their anger to each other, and I found the expression of anger particularly threatening. I don't have a full understanding as to why I was so affected, but it seemed that by expressing their anger they were, in some significant way, threatening their relationship not only with each other but also with me.

  DIANE: What would they get angry about?

  JOHN: I don't really recall the issues. We know that theirs was not an easy relationship and there were a lot of mutual disappointments and frustrations. I can't recall a specific episode, but I can recall so vividly a dark cloud that was cast over this little family of three persons when anger was expressed by one or the other. I believed that if anger wasn't expressed, then it didn't exist. And I think that's the notion I carried into our marriage. To express anger is to release all of these sinister, dark forces, whereas if you don't talk about your anger, then the situation remains “normal.”

  DIANE: So when you and I came into our relationship, one of us was given to express anger, and the other to suppress it. When I would express anger at you, did it scare you?

  JOHN: Absolutely. I was seized by fear, because I didn't know what to do, having grown up with this notion that you don't express anger, because if you do, it becomes all too pervasive and all too destructive.

  DIANE: So you couldn't fight back, is what you're saying?

  JOHN: Exactly right. All I could do was to remain silent and hope and pray that your anger would dissipate as soon as possible and we'd move on. The notion of discussing the anger, the expression of the anger, the reasons for the anger—that seemed like a very hazardous and dangerous thing to do. Far better to treat the episode as if it had never occurred.

  DIANE: Whereas in my family, there was hollering, there was yelling, all of it directed at me for some perceived misbehavior, or an attitude that wasn't appreciated, or some chore that had not been completed, which turned into expressions of physical anger on their part toward me. When you and I married, it seemed to me that you tried to hide the anger, and pretend it wasn't there; there you were, this stern face, this closed face, icy demeanor. And you wouldn't tell me what was wrong. John: Well, that was acquired behavior which permitted a little boy, as best he could, to set up a barrier so that the anger wouldn't spill over.

  DIANE: Without realizing it, both of us brought our own sense of what anger was, how anger should be dealt with, from our own families into the creation of our own small family, without even being aware that that's what we were doing. We were not thinking about each other, and our own family, as a new entity. What we were doing was reflecting what we had experienced.

  JOHN: Playing the old records without dealing with the issues between us. You're absolutely right. But in emotional terms, you were using a nuclear bomb, or threatening to. That was just too much for me to deal with. Therefore, to even begin to get into the area where one could talk with some degree of rationality about the anger was just very difficult for me. The thing that really undid me was the power—and I'm almost prepared to say the eloquence—you brought to the expression of anger. It wasn't just a modest amount, it was something really big.

  DIANE: [laughter]

  JOHN: Therefore, it redoubled my determination to hunker down and let the storm pass and return to normal as fast as possible.

  DIANE: And, of course, that would simply drive my anger further.

  JOHN: It's just a classic case of how one's childhood experiences continue into a marriage, and how, certainly in my case, for some years they really crippled my ability to deal with anger and to give it a constructive aspect, which I've learned does exist. Anger doesn't always have to be destructive. It can be the beginning of a constructive dialogue related to the issue in question.

  DIANE: Even now, there was a moment here at the farm just the other day when I said something to you about putting something somewhere, and you immediately got very defensive, as though I was somehow expressing anger at you when all I was doing, in fact, was saying something that needed to be said.

  JOHN: That's right. It demonstrates my hypersensitivity. I'm very quick to perceive both the existence and the expression of anger. I'll tell you something about this. Let's assume that I'm in the subway, going downtown, and I hear an angry conversation between two total strangers. Do you know that that affects me? I am literally drawn into that, and the fact that they're expressing anger at each other troubles me, even though these are total strangers I'll never see again.

  DIANE: But you know, I feel the same way. I can sit in a restauran
t and overhear a conversation like that and be frightened for those people, and frightened for myself.

  JOHN: And that's exactly where I am. I can recall an occasion in group therapy when one member of the group got mad at another, and the therapist looked at me and said, “John, you have a smile on your face. What's that all about?” And we began talking about it, and I realized that the smile was an effort on my part to make believe the anger wasn't there, or that it would go away. And the smiling, you see, was a way of blunting it and putting it to the side and moving on. The last thing that smile implied was an ability or an inclination to deal with the anger.

  DIANE: And for me, when I saw that smile—I saw it many, many times as you sat there—it drove me crazy, because it felt as though you were totally ignoring me.

  JOHN: I understand that, but the smile was not directed at you. It was directed at the situation, and my desperate need to get away from it as fast as I could. And the smile was one way of masking the problem.

  DIANE: The question then becomes, why have things improved? We've both had a lot of therapy. But something has changed within us to help us deal better, more directly, with anger. For instance, I think I don't express my anger the way that I used to. I think I've learned to far, far better control it.

  JOHN: Oh, I would agree. I think it's more temperate, and also freer of what I call the “destructive absolutes”: the nevers, the evers, the alwayses. When people get mad I think they reach out for the universal, all-encompassing words.