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How to Wreck a Relationship Part One of an Occasional Series
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The Desperation to Be a Couple
The marriage that LGBT people seek legal sanction for is an institution with a 50% failure rate. That poor record in itself would earn failing marks for any institution. But that doesn't mean that all of the still married 50% are extremely happy. Take a look around you at straight relationships. How many of those that have made it so far are truly fulfilling for the human beings rattling around in them? One of the seldom-examined reasons why relationships fail is that our culture doesn't prepare us to develop the kind of deep, intimate, unconditionally loving partnerships we really want. Our culture keeps relationships dysfunctional because dysfunctional relationships sell its products. Contentment and unconditional love don't. They're counter consumption. So, we've been bombarded with dysfunctional messages from every angle about how to get, have, keep, and define relationships. Many psychologists do point out that these messages are unhealthy. But the messages linger because they teach values that sell us a lot of stuff. They convince us that what we really need are purchasable preparations for our relationships, purchasable coping mechanisms to use while in relationships, and purchasable soothing distractions to use when ending them. Our culture talks endlessly about something it calls love, but it just isn't love- or human-oriented. It's oriented to coping. Its values sell us what we need just to get by, to put up with, and to settle for something far less than a relationship that will feed our souls. Here every so often, then, we'll examine each of the cultural messages that ultimately hurt our relationships, cause us to get into bad ones, keep us in relationships that aren't working, and teach us to seek in committed partnerships what partnerships really can't give us after all. The primary and most devastating of these messages is also the one most mainstreamed. It's everywhere. And it's the most difficult to let go. Our fears of loneliness and our abandonment issues won't let us give it up. We are told, and we deeply believe, that we must be in a committed relationship with another person in order to have a fulfilling life. On the one hand, we'd probably all say that a single person's life can be fulfilling. One is a whole number, and all that. On the other hand, we're so conditioned to put all our eggs in the coupling basket, that much, maybe most, of what we do in life has as its goal to find someone. We're always looking for that chance to attract our next hope. "Where can I meet someone?" "How can I meet someone?" "Who'll be coming to the get-together that's worth pursuing?" "It's always the same old people at that place." "Is there anyone out there for me?" It's a desperate search. For some people that's more obvious - we talk about them being so desperate. But for most of us, the destructive message still says that our greatest joy, our greatest fulfillment, our greatest chance for happiness and contentment is found in finding Mr. or Ms. Right. That one person and the experience of coupling with that one person, we believe, hope, and pray, will once and for all save us from our loneliness. We won't have to fear being alone this weekend, or in our old age -- when we're sure that we'll be so pitifully decrepit that we won't be able to attract anyone from any species in the whole universe. That one person, we believe, will provide the only true and deep meaning anyone can ever have. After all, what else is life, especially the good times, for, then to share it with one other person?
Of course, a relationship with that one person will also prove that we're really worthwhile after all. We must be, because, look, we can get and keep someone. We're not like those other losers who can't find a partner.
These feelings put far too much pressure on any relationship. They set us up for failure. They guarantee our disappointment and mis-directed frustration and anger. They result in a growing sense that we're settling for much less than we want from our partners. They prepare us for the grass-is-always-greener feelings that move us from one temporarily fulfilling relationship and its slow collapse to another, and then another. If we've been absorbing the anti-gay cultural messages, we're also supposed to blame these problems on our sexual orientation. But this isn't a gay thing. Our critically ill culture just doesn't want to change, to learn how to sell products without it, or to fully admit that buying things not only won't fulfill us, but will drive us deeper into hopelessness, if not debt. So, it tries, instead, to convince us that these partnering problems are just a part of the unfulfilling nature of homosexuality. And, surprisingly, many LGBT people believe that. So, when we're ready to change things, we go into therapy, seek supportive groups of people, or decide on our own to reject this message, not because we're changing something gay about us. We do it because we want to savor something different than society's junk food recipe for human relationships. We do it because we know better than to settle for the straight-acting relationships that frustrate straight people. We do it, in other words, for the same reason that some heterosexual people reject societally-conditioned straight relationships for healthy heterosexual ones. To be best prepared for a committed partnership, marriage, or whatever we want to call coupling, we need to be deeply happy with singleness. This can't just be talk. It must be a contentment with not having a partner and a desire to do things for other reasons than to find someone. We must get to the place where we just aren't invested in the question. Life must become a chance to live our own passions because we enjoy them, to be interested in people because all people are fascinating beings, to be a friend to others, to develop a circle of close friends based on being supportive, caring, persistent, and loving friends of each other not on any partnering potential, and to find a community we can nurture. Then, as we live our lives with the interesting people around us, we might meet someone who we can join together with us in one of those committed partnerships. We'd be ready for it. But, we might not ever become a couple. And we're healthy if all else in our life tells us that that's more than okay. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks, 2003), was named one of the "Best Gay Books of 2003" and a Finalist for the 2004 Independent Publisher Book Award. His Scared Straight (HumanityWorks!, 2001) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Independent Publisher Book Awards. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org .
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Have you noticed that in our society, relationships fall apart right and left? It doesn't matter whether they're gay or straight.
© 1997-2008 BEI
The sexual orientation of individuals pictured in and writers for
Gay Today should not be assumed.
