Halloween happens, ghosts and goblins float along the streets. We laugh and play scared.
Close relationship goblins, however, are often not so funny. They come in all sorts of costumes. They hurt us and make us want to hide from the risk of trying again.
What haunts you from relationships past or present?
Here’s a few notable ghosts that can scare us away from relationships:
~~ Abandonment: our partner or friend not being there for us emotionally, or literally walking away or dying
~~ Betrayal: infidelity or unmet expectations
~~ Vulnerability: nakedness in the bedroom or exposing ourselves for who we really are
~~ Ridicule: silent or aloud.
With these hauntings, who needs an intimate relationship, we might ask?
But then there’s the spookiness of not undertaking (ahem) a close relationship:
~~ Not having help with life’s challenges and comfort when they happen
~~ Not experiencing that feeling of elation that resounds in our souls when we think of how much we’re loved
~~ Not having someone who walks with us in the Garden of the Gods and joins in our joy when we exclaim, “Look at THAT!”
~~ Not being taken care of as we grow older, both in a friendship way and literally
~~ Not having someone who sees us as special and who we see as our special someone.
To conquer these specters, why not have an intimate relationship?
If we’re afraid to have intimate relationships and we’re afraid not to have intimate relationships, what can we do? Maybe learning to live with ambivalence—a word coined by Sigmund Freud meaning “mutually conflicting feelings about a person or thing”—is the answer.
As Sir Anthony Hopkins, who curdled our blood as Hannibal Lecter, says: “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.”
The problem isn’t that life’s full of ambivalence. The problem is we can’t stand to know that. A simple yes or no will do, thank you!
Author Robert Fulghum, in his hilarious, heartfelt book, Maybe (Maybe Not), writes about this inevitable way of life: “We live…in the bipolar world of wet and dry, love and hate, peace and war, hard and soft, light and dark, yes and no.”
Embracing ambivalence is admitting that most things, including our ghosts, are a paler shade of gray:
1. Recall how many times you find yourself having mixed feelings about something or someone. Acknowledge that black and white only works in old Westerns and refers to hats.
2. Living with ambivalence does not mean we’re indecisive. It may make it harder to find the answer, but we weigh the contradictions in any given situation and come up with our best solution.
3. Look on the bright side: ambivalence is a “both-and” rather than “either-or.” That way we can experience what master of horror Vincent Price suggests: “It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared.”
4. Know that insisting on the “right way” (as if there’s only one) creates anxiety when even one contradiction of the “right way” emerges. If our partner represents the contradiction, conflict can emerge from the ethers.
Maybe the best definition of what we have to live with in this life is what a good friend of mine once told me: “The definition of ambivalence is buying your kid a drum set for Christmas.”
Happy Trick or Treat inside your closest connections!