The theory and practice of the pure relationship

The following passage appears under a heading `Emotional Uncertainty in Relationships', in Shere Hite's study Women and Love. Hite's research is based on extensive comments obtained from American women about their experiences and feelings in relation to men. One woman responds as follows:

I have a constant feeling of never being satisfied for some reason. Either he's not calling, or when he's calling, it's not romantic, and so on.... When I try to talk to him, really talk to him, I feel like I just can't get through.... It seems to revolve around a constant question of should I be asking myself "Is everything all right in terms of him (does he still love me)?" or "Is everything all right in terms of me! How am I?" If I am unhappy a lot, and he won't talk to me about the problems or resolve the issues, should I say, "Well, everything is really OK because he's OK and he's still there and still loves me"? Or should I say, "This relationship is terrible and I will leave it because he is not making me happy"? Loving him makes it difficult to leave him.

Should I want to help him open up more, or should I worry about myself and break up with him? ... The problem is that first he says he's vulnerable and in love -- then later he denies it or doesn't act like it, acts cold. I ask myself, "Is the goal this man at any cost?" It's almost as if someone is egging me on to go into the deep end of the pool -- and then when I get there (with my emotions) and really fall in love, trust him, he says "What? Why me?" I've been so scared all the way, thinking to myself, no matter what happened, giving him the benefit of the doubt, "Let me trust, let me trust", not letting myself believe the negative signals, thinking he was just insecure or reacting to something I had done in my own effort to seem invulnerable. I've always been so afraid, wondering, "Will somebody stay?" ²⁴

These reflections are those of a woman who is not living with the man concerned, and describe a relationship in its fairly early

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stages; yet, because of their `exploratory' character, they give some insight into how relationships are constructed. Love is at the centre, and one might suppose that an exploration of intimacy, at least where a sexual component is involved, should concentrate on the nature of romantic attachment. The report recounts the experience of a woman, and although the point of view of the man involved is not given, we might conclude that gender relations should be the prime concern here. Without denying the significance of these features, I want to focus on other things. For there are core elements involved, as I shall try to show, which are also characteristic of other intimate and emotionally demanding relationships -- between, for example, same-sex lovers or between very close friends. These are the elements of the pure relationship. They can be spelled out (in ideal-typical form) as follows.

1 In contrast to close personal ties in traditional contexts, the pure relationship is not anchored in external conditions of social or economic life -- it is, as it were, free-floating. Consider, as an illustration, marriage as it once was. Marriage was a contract, often initiated by parents or relatives rather than by the marital partners themselves. The contract was usually strongly influenced by economic considerations, and formed part of wider economic networks and transactions. Even well into modern times, when the old frameworks of marriage had substantially disintegrated, the marital tie was anchored through an internal division of labour, the husband as breadwinner and wife preoccupied with children, hearth and home (although we should not forget that the labour force has always contained a considerable proportion of women). Some of these traditional characteristics of marriage persist, more pronounced among certain socioeconomic groups than others. In general, however, the tendency is towards the eradication of these pre-existing external involvements -- a phenomenon originally accompanied by the rise of romantic love as a basic motive for marriage. Marriage becomes more and more a relationship initiated for, and kept going for as long as, it delivers emotional satisfaction to be derived from close contact with another. Other traits -- even such seemingly fundamental ones as having children -- tend to become sources of `inertial drag' on possible separation, rather than anchoring features of the relationship.

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Modern friendship exposes this characteristic even more clearly. A friend is defined specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that that relationship provides. One might become friendly with a colleague, and the proximity at work or shared interest generated by work might help instigate the friendship -- but it is a friendship only in so far as the connection with the other person is valued for its own sake. This is why a sharp distinction is drawn between friends and kin. Even if they are now quite weak, there are obligations which relatives have towards one another, specified by the tie of kinship. Moreover, while these obligations may be general and vague, kin ties, where they are blood relations at any rate, cannot be broken off. Friendship attachments may have their own inertial elements, but in practice as well as in principle one normally stays a friend of another only in so far as sentiments of closeness are reciprocated for their own sake.

2 The pure relationship is sought only for what the relationship can bring to the partners involved. This point is the natural concomitant of (1), and it is precisely in this sense that the relationship is `pure'. No doubt all personal relations of any duration are testing and tensionful as well as rewarding. But in relationships which only exist for their own sake, anything that goes wrong between the partners intrinsically threatens the relationship itself. Consequently, it is very difficult to `coast along' in the way in which one can in a social relation dominated by external criteria. If one partner attempts to do so, the other is likely to be disaffected. The peculiar tensions this sets up are well evinced in other material contained in Hite's book, particularly that concerned with marriage:

Women are deserting marriage in droves, either through divorce, or emotionally, leaving with a large part of their hearts.... Most, after an initial period of trying, have gone on to find other places to invest their emotional lives. Woman after woman, after the initial years of "trying to get through" gives up and begins to disengage quietly, gradually, perhaps even unnoticeably. ²⁵

Yet ... the vast majority of women do not abandon the quest for love, or for a viable relationship:

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As one woman says, love keeps returning to us, resurfacing perhaps as some kind of key: `In some way which I cannot find the words for yet, romantic love contains the key to my identity -- to discovering myself, my inner being.' Many women feel this way. Why? Perhaps women are right to come back, to try again to make love work or understand why it does not ... most want not just `love', but the kind of real love they are talking about. And so it is no surprise that women who are in relationships so often still talk about a `deeper love' to come, have a hidden part of themselves that believes that there is more, more to life somehow.... And indeed, shouldn't there be? ²⁶

Again, one might think that it is love, or the demand for love, which is at issue here, rather than anything specifically to do with relationships as such. However love -- ambiguous and difficult notion that it is -- is really a codifying force organising the character of the sexual relationship, not in this context an independent value. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that men are as concerned to find close emotive relationships as women are, and as attached to them. ²⁷ They find such relationships harder to handle, and typically are less skilled at communicating their feelings and needs to the other, but these are different matters from the thread of discussion I am following. The difficulties of finding and continuing a satisfying relationship partly concern problems of love and gender asymmetries; but they also very substantially concern the intrinsic travails of the pure relationship. The feelings of `never being satisfied' within the relationship, described by the respondent first quoted, reflect the difficulties inherent in creating or sustaining a relation in which there is balance and reciprocity, satisfactory to both partners, between what each brings and each derives from the tie.

3 The pure relationship is reflexively organised, in an open fashion, and on a continuous basis. This, too, is apparent enough in the quotation on p. 88, in which the question, `Is everything all right?' figures as a leading motif. The more a relationship depends only upon itself, the more such a reflexive questioning comes to be its core -- and contributes to the tensions noted in (2). The self-examination inherent in the pure relationship clearly connects very closely to the reflexive project of the self. `How am I?' is an interrogation directly bound to the rewards the relationship

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delivers as well as to the pain it can inflict. (The `why me?' response of the partner is also a question relating to connections between self-identity and the demands of the pure relationship.)

The reflexive coordination of all close relationships today, no matter how distant they are from being `fully pure', participates in the broader reflexivity of modernity. A host of magazine and newspaper articles, specialist texts and manuals, television and radio programmes convey research information and debates about close relationships, continuously reconstructing the phenomenon they describe. Hite's own work stands in an interesting, but by no means untypical relation to such reflexivity. Her book, as with her previous studies, ²⁸ is based on standard questionnaire procedures used in innumerable social research studies. Her work, however, has reached a large audience, whose attitudes will conform to the outlooks which the research charts, at the same time as their reading of the research results might modify those outlooks and related behavioural dispositions.

4 `Commitment' has a central role to play in pure relationships. Commitment would appear generic to many forms of human social activity, and one might readily suppose that it is found in all cultural contexts. For instance, the true believer in a religious order might be said to have a thoroughgoing commitment to the values and practices in question. Yet conviction is not the same as commitment, and when we speak of the second of these in respect of close relationships today we are probably concerned with something that is historically new. Commitment, within the pure relationship, is essentially what replaces the external anchors that close personal connections used to have in pre-modern situations. Love, in the sense of contemporary romantic love, is a form of commitment, but commitment is the wider category of the two. What is the `committed person' in the context of a close relationship? She or he is someone who, recognising the tensions intrinsic to a relationship of the modern form, is nevertheless willing to take a chance on it, at least in the medium term -- and who accepts that the only rewards will be those inherent in the relationship itself. A friend is ipso facto a committed person. Someone in a marriage is likely to be so to the degree that the relationship is not kept going only by external involvements or by inertial drag of

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one kind or another. Commitment is recognised by participants to buy time: to provide emotional support which is guaranteed to persist through at least some of the perturbations which the relationship might undergo (although returns will almost certainly be demanded for this).

Commitment can to some extent be regularised by the force of love, but sentiments of love do not in and of themselves generate commitment, nor do they in any sense authorise it. A person only becomes committed to another when, for whatever reason, she or he decides to be so. The woman in the passage quoted from Hite's study feels she loves her partner, but her love does not supply the commitment she desires. Nor could it, because commitment must almost always be part of an effort-bargain; the pure relationship cannot exist without substantial elements of reciprocity. Rainwater's self-therapy programme recognises this, as do most forms of therapeutic endeavour. One of the reasons why the reflexivity of the self should produce more accurate and insightful self-knowledge is that it helps reduce dependency in close relationships. The well-functioning relationship, she says, is one in which each person is autonomous and sure of his or her self-worth. Where this is not the case, what I have called inertial drag sets in -- as is found, for instance, in co-dependent relationships. `Co-dependency' was first of all coined as a word to describe the position of individuals in relationships with others suffering from chemical addiction -- to alcohol or other kinds of drugs. The co-dependent person is the partner who, no matter how much she or he detests the relationship or is unhappy within it, is psychologically unable to leave. For reasons which are opaque to the person concerned (although they may be uncovered by individual or family therapy), he or she has become dependent on a relationship which provides few psychic returns. ²⁹

Commitment is hard to build precisely because it presumes a mutual alignment within the pure relationship. It stands in uneasy connection with the reflexivity that is equally central to how the relationship is ordered. The committed person is prepared to accept the risks which the sacrificing of other potential options entails. In the initial phases of a relationship, each person is likely to be inspecting the activities of the other minutely, since too rapid an advance towards commitment on the part of one person

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may actively spark the withdrawal of the other from the nascent enterprise altogether. Hite's respondent demonstrates an astute sensitivity to just this aspect of her situation.

5 The pure relationship is focused on intimacy, which is a major condition of any long-term stability the partners might achieve. Intimacy has to be distinguished from the more negative phenomenon of lack of privacy, characteristic of most circumstances of life in pre-modern Europe and in many non-modern cultures generally. Physical proximity -- and, in modern terms, the absence of privacy -- were almost inevitable consequences of the architecture of day-to-day life in the small community, but were characteristic of the life of more affluent groups too. ³⁰ Within households, but also in most other contexts of daily life, people were almost always in close range of one another. The development of `personal' life during the early period of modernity has been well documented by historians, even if the nature of the causal connections involved is a matter of considerable dispute. Intimacy is the other face of privacy, or at least only becomes possible (or desired) given substantial privacy. ³¹

Bensman and Lilienfeld have stressed the growing concern to achieve intimacy in modern societies: `the demand for intimacy persists to the point where it is virtually compulsive.' ³² They explain this situation in terms of the alienating effects of the development of large, impersonal organisations in the modern world. Much of social life becomes run along impersonal lines, within contexts remote from the ordinary individual, and over which she or he has little or no control. A flight into intimacy is an attempt to secure a meaningful life in familiar environments that have not been incorporated in to these larger systems. I shall return to this thesis later, since other authors have also suggested something similar. I do not think it is entirely accurate. The search for intimacy has a positive valence. It is not just based on negative reactions to an enveloping world of large-scale systems and social processes. Privacy makes possible the psychic satisfactions that the achievement of intimacy has to offer.

The expectation of intimacy provides perhaps the closest links between the reflexive project of the self and the pure relationship. Intimacy, or the quest for it, is at the heart of modern forms

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of friendship and established sexual relationships. Most manuals of therapy, including that of Rainwater, make it clear that intimacy is usually obtained only through psychological `work', and that it is only possible between individuals who are secure in their own self-identities. A therapeutic study referred to earlier sums the whole thing up well: an intimate friendship or partnership, the author says, is `a choice between any two people who make a commitment to each other to share a meaningful lifestyle'. ³³ She describes several types of relationship which are distinct from one within which a developed intimacy has been attained. Some relationships are full of conflict, and persistent rows or bickering become normalised: emotional pain becomes a familiar part of the relationship, and without it the relationship in fact might be broken up. Conflict-ridden relationships contrast with `de-energised' ones. Here there is little direct antagonism between partners, but little in the way of a strong bond either: inertia sustains the relationship. The partners get along with one another in a reasonable enough way in day-to-day matters, but are often bored with and resentful of one another. A `convenience' relationship is one in which the individuals concerned have overtly or tacitly agreed that they will `settle for' what they have got in the light of external rewards, or because of the difficulties they might experience if the relationship were dissolved, or for the comfort of not being alone.

All of these `get by' relationships contrast with intimate ties, which require a commitment to `the quality of the relationship'; where the relationship threatens to lapse into one of the other types, `a decision to recommit to each other and make whatever changes and choices necessary to grow close' has to be made. A commitment to `one's own personal recovery' is also needed if one of the partners is unable to develop the integrity demanded for the pursuit of intimacy. ³⁴ Intimacy, the author stresses, requires a defined measure of privacy on the part of each partner, because a balance between autonomy and the sharing of feelings and experiences has to be obtained if personal closeness is not to be replaced by dependence. According to such a conception, intimacy obviously is not to be confused with sexual ties. Developed intimacy is possible in non-sexual relationships or friendships; and a high level of sexual activity might be maintained in a

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conflict-ridden situation. On the other hand, sexual involvement is often part of achieving intimacy -- and also part of the reflexivity of the body, which I shall discuss later.

6 The pure relationship depends on mutual trust between partners, which in turn is closely related to the achievement of intimacy. In the pure relationship, trust is not and cannot be taken as `given': like other aspects of the relationship, it has to be worked at -- the trust of the other has to be won. In most pre-modern situations, in which personal relations were stabilised by external criteria, in the sense noted above, trust tended to be geared to established positions. Kinspeople could by no means always be trusted in such settings, as the plots and counterplots between relatives scheming to obtain power in royal households demonstrate. Yet kinship obligations probably were accepted most of the time, and provided reasonably stable environments of trust within which day-to-day life was ordered. Stripped of such qualities, personal ties in the pure relationship require novel forms of trust -- precisely that trust which is built through intimacy with the other. Such trust presumes the opening out of the individual to the other, because knowledge that the other is committed, and harbours no basic antagonisms towards oneself, is the only framework for trust when external supports are largely absent. ³⁵

To build up trust, an individual must be both trusting and trustworthy, at least within the confines of the relationship. Since it is so closely connected to intimacy, trust implies the same balance of autonomy and mutual disclosure necessary to sustain intimate exchanges. What matters in the building of trust in the pure relationship is that each person should know the other's personality, and be able to rely on regularly eliciting certain sorts of desired responses from the other. This is one reason (not the only one) why authenticity has such an important place in self-actualisation. What matters is that one can rely on what the other says and does. In so far as the capacity to achieve intimacy with others is a prominent part of the reflexive project of the self -- and it is -- self-mastery is a necessary condition of authenticity.

How is trust created in relationships? Again we can turn to the therapeutic manuals to provide a guide. Wegscheider-Cruse offers a range of practical proposals for building trust which

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derive from systematic research on relationships. One should `take time to listen to each other daily,' since communication is so central to intimacy. Such talking and listening should not always be limited to trivial events of the day. Where there are substantive issues to be faced, they should be seriously discussed. Partners should `stick with one issue until resolved, and then be done with it', for `rehashing the same issues lessens trust and creates new problems.' Old disputes that fester unresolved are often more likely to destroy trust than new difficulties, which may be easier to face. One should `get to the feelings behind issues,' because surface appearances may hide the true dynamics of a situation, and communication which is not `in depth' cannot get at these. Other recommendations include nurturing an atmosphere of caring, aiming for a variety of recreational pleasures mutually engaged in, and learning to express anger in a constructive way. ³⁶

7 In a pure relationship, the individual does not simply `recognise the other' and in the responses of that other find his self-identity affirmed. Rather, as follows from the preceding points, self-identity is negotiated through linked processes of self-exploration and the development of intimacy with the other. Such processes help create `shared histories' of a kind potentially more tightly bound than those characteristic of individuals who share experiences by virtue of a common social position. Such shared histories may be quite divergent from the orderings of time and space that prevail in the wider social world. Yet it is important to emphasise -- a point that will later be developed in some detail -- that they are characteristically interpolated within that wider world rather than cut off from it. Shared histories are created and sustained, in fact, substantially in terms of how far they integrate participants' life-plan calendars.

The pure relationship is above all dyadic, but its implications and influence are not limited to two-person settings. A given individual is likely to be involved in several forms of social relation which tend towards the pure type; and pure relationships are typically interconnected, forming specific milieux of intimacy. These milieux, as will be discussed in the following chapter, express an institutionally affirmed division of private and public arenas.

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Pure relationships come into existence primarily in the domains of sexuality, marriage and friendship. The degree to which intimate spheres are transformed in this way plainly varies according to context and differential socioeconomic position, in common with most of the traits of modernity discussed in this book. Relations between parents and children, and more extended kin relations, stay partly distinct from the purview of the pure relationship. Both remain substantially tied to external criteria: biological connections which form key conditions for the sustaining of the relation. But each also becomes permeated by some of the influences generating the pure relationship. In so far as kinship relations are stripped of their traditional duties and obligations, their continuance tends increasingly to depend on the qualities enumerated above. Either such relations become attenuated and nominal in character or they are reformed through the reflexive achievement of intimacy.

Parent-child relations are something of a special case, because of the radical imbalance of power involved, and because of their centrality for socialisation processes. The close bonds established between parents and children are formed in a context of infantile dependency, but they are also the psychological nexus within which the young child develops capacities to initiate intimate ties in later life. Yet in conditions of modernity, the more a child moves towards adulthood and autonomy, the more elements of the pure relationship tend to come into play. A person who has left home may keep in constant touch with his parents, as a matter of obligation; but reflexively ordered trust must be developed, involving mutually accepted commitment, if the relationship is to be deepened. Where a person becomes a step-parent of an older child, the connections established from the beginning take on the characteristics of the pure relationship.

What to do? How things are: these matters are linked through institutional reflexivity. What applies to the self, and to the domain of pure relationships, applies equally to the sphere of the body. The body, in other words, in late modernity becomes increasingly socialised and drawn into the reflexive organisation of social life.

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Date: 2016-04-22; view: 774