On the suffering of the innocent

This is a response to a post by a friend of mine, so if you want to know what triggered these thoughts, or simply what I'm referring to, read his first: http://tegidtathal.blogspot.com/ Steve, you can thank me later for the vast wave of new readership that will come to you through this link.

First of all, as I said in my comment to his post, I agree with pretty much everything he said (that "pretty much" being in there because my lib arts training has conditioned me against absolute statements about anything I have not spent seven hours considering in minute detail.) This is more of a spinoff, a reflection, a view from another angle, than it is a rebuttal. That said, I commence.

The statement that got me working was "it has absolutely nothing to do with you." This, as you must know, is not strictly true. Anything that springs from, touches on, or in any way concerns a relationship, by nature has something to do with both the people involved. That's the essence of a relationship. It would be more accurate, in the situation described, to say, "it is not caused by or reflective upon you." I agree that a man may have doubts about his own readiness to enter into a permanent, monogamous relationship, and that these doubts may not reflect at all upon the woman. In that sense they have nothing to do with her. In a different sense, though, they have plenty.

Imagine (and, like Steve, I should disclaim that this has not happened to me, it's merely a reflection of things I've observed and imagined) what it would be like to have the person you love, trust, and are counting on to be with you for the rest of your life, suggest out of the blue that you date other people. It would be hard not to be hurt, confused, and frightened by this. Even if you were fully assured that it was not a reflection of anything in or about you, the hurt would remain. So, while the man's doubts in our hypothetical situation may not be in any way related to the woman herself, they most certainly have to do with her, if only because they hurt her and leave her struggling to understand what's behind it.

This is how it always is. It is common wisdom to say that all problems in a relationship are caused by both people to some extent. Common wisdom is, in this case as in most, usually right. But what it overlooks, and what I think our current culture is all too anxious to overlook, is the reality that sometimes one person in a relationship acts, or feels, or changes, in such a way that the other person, though not in any way responsible, is deeply affected. The situation described above is one such case. Another (quite different) would be when one person converts to, or leaves, a religion. In both of these cases, the other person may not have any control or responsibility, either in causing or preventing the change, and yet the relationship will be profoundly affected.

We don't like this because we like fairness. We want, in some measure, to be able to understand the things that hurt us because we had some hand in them, however subtly. This (I am told) is why rape victims so often continue to feel guilt for what happened to them. Accepting guilt and responsibility is hard, but even harder is accepting lack of control. If something painful happened to me that I was partially responsible for, it means I have some measure of control over the situation. It means I can keep it from ever happening again. If something painful happened to me that I neither caused nor could have prevented, it means the world has power to affect me beyond my control. And that is a terrifying thought.

Taking it back to the level of relationships-- it is inevitable that in a prolonged intimate relationship, you will be hurt by the other person, sometimes in ways you have no responsibility for, and therefore no control over. And what is one to do, faced with this inevitability? It is tempting to run away, to shut people out, to never let anyone in close enough to have that power. This is not just a cliche I'm voicing. I say this-- I who have wanted nothing in my life more than I've wanted to love and be loved by one person, specially-- I have considered what I have suffered, unwillingly and without responsibility, in the past, and what I might suffer in the future, and I have wanted to bail. Alaska is my retreat of choice... I could sit there in a little cabin, with a big dog and a small cat, and write through the long winters, and send nice, courteous letters to friends and family and occasionally have someone up for a visit. Or I could move to New York City, which probably offers even greater opportunity for anonymity and seclusion. Either way, I would be safe, insulated from the dangers of intimacy.

It won't do, of course. To live like that would be to forsake the vitality in human life. It would be like trying to live as all bone and no blood. The giving and receiving of pain is part of the whole flow of human relationship, the mystery of letting yourself be touched by someone whose will is wholly separate from your own. Touch can be pleasant, or painful, or comforting, or irritating. But to be isolated from all touch would be to deny your nerves their function-- and science has learned that the body cannot long tolerate such denial.

And it is not as if we are being asked to do something new. Christ himself, the one person who perhaps could have avoided it, courted the friendship of someone who he knew was going to betray him-- and with a kiss.