Trust: a sermon dialogue between Julia and Nathan

Preached at High Plains Church, UU February 2019 ©

Julia:
So, Nathan, we've been asked to preach during a month focused on TRUST. This could go so many directions I can't even begin to summarize! (smile) What's one way you think TRUST has developed or changed between us in the 23 years we've been together?

Nathan:
I think the primary way trust has changed over those years is the complexity of what trust entails.  Early on, trust was about our growing romantic love and friendship.  Could I trust this new feeling?  Where would it go?  Could I trust you enough to really be myself and would you still like and love me once you really knew me? And I don't even mean the initial couple of weeks or months where that early flush of hormones and potential carries a lot of the weight, but the first several years when the charm can wear thin and you start to really see who this person is.  But even then it was still pretty easy--we were in our twenties and our problems seem simple by comparison.  Now, a couple of decades later, we've been through a variety of surgeries, deaths of parents, the purchase and sale of several houses, the agony of infertility, the challenges and fun of parenting, the demands of our careers.  Now, as we settle into the homey joy and homely challenges of middle age, I guess the question of trust has transformed into, well, whether you’ll still like and love me. 

Julia:
I do... quite a lot at times... but it’s not linear. That’s been a big learning for me over the past twenty-some years: that there can be times -- sometimes it’s a couple hours but sometimes it’s uncomfortably long, like months in a row -- where we’re less connected, less fond of each other, less in-sync, but that those times can and will end. At least, so far they have. And that’s a REALLY uncomfortable awareness, I know, the fact that -- despite what people promise at weddings, all innocent and well-intentioned -- no one can PROMISE another person that they will feel just as besotted about them in ten, twenty, thirty years as they do at the beginning. You and I feel like it’s just acknowledging reality to say that. So sticking together when it’s less emotionally rewarding is all about trust. It’s trusting that I made a good-enough choice in the first place... and when I say “good enough,” it’s not minimizing you. I’m using the phrase as it gets used in parenting, when we can’t figure out how to be “good” parents in any given situation so we just aim for “good enough.” If we can get our marriage to be “good enough” -- with excursions into “terrific” and “dreadful” -- we’re probably doing pretty well.

Nathan:

I like the “good enough” bit -- an idea from pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.  He thought it was not only OK, but actually necessary for parents to fail in acceptable ways--not abuse or neglect--but in ways that slowly help a child learn to live with the imperfections and disappointments of this world.  We have to learn, as one writer put it, that “good enough” is not the same as “not enough.”  And here’s that trust--that we’ve made a good enough choice because we never actually know who we’re marrying or even, to some extent, who we’re married to.  I’m thinking here of the wonderful essay by philosopher Alain DeBotton titled, “Why you’ll marry the wrong person.”  To sum up:  we inevitably marry the “wrong” person because we have no idea of the future, are seeking to replicate barely recognized patterns from our childhood, and are blinded by conceptions of romance-based unions that seek to bottle momentary joys.  He winds up praising a certain pessimism in our marriages as an antidote to the destructively optimistic myths that we’ve been sold.  When we stop looking for one person to meet all our needs, an all but impossible demand, we can work on trying to negotiate the inevitable frustrations and challenges with grace, kindness, and forgiveness—and appreciate the good times more. 
So let me ask you a question and one that is more basic.  What does it mean to trust?

Julia:

“Trust” was talked about a lot when I was growing up American Baptist... “trusting God” was a common phrase ... but I haven’t spent much time thinking about trust in the 30 years since I stopped attending my childhood church. With God in the equation, “trust” was about relinquishing troublesome things -- fear, anxiety, even responsibility in some ways. But without God ... strangely enough, I’m thinking trust has to do with relinquishing EGO. There’s a line in the marvelous Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah” -- “Maybe there’s a God above / but all I’ve ever learned from love / is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.” Too often in conversation with you -- my nearest and dearest, literally -- unless I’m really attentive, really feeling safe and open -- too often there’s an aspect of defensiveness. And I think ego is the thing that underlies that, as in “But I DID that already” -- “that’s not what I MEANT” -- “you SAID you were going to...” -- as if we have to prove our worth, our rightness, to each other over and over again. A huge part of trust within marriage, or any close partnership, feels to me like reining in my ego enough to acknowledge that you’re just living your life, experiencing things from your own completely different perspective... you’re almost certainly not TRYING to belittle or annoy me at any given moment. Ego gets in the way of this trust, for some reason. Why does that happen?

Nathan:
I think that reflects my initial question.  Am I actually lovable as I am--can I just be myself and is that ok?  It’s the fear of rejection that I think drives a lot of those ego-driven tensions.  And, coming back to DeBotton, if we can accept that we aren’t the “right” person, then maybe we ourselves can let go of struggling to be someone else.  The inadvertent offenses while still needing to be apologized for and addressed become less caustic because they are unintended.  The brilliant couples’ therapist, Esther Perel, observes that marriage, indeed all long-term relationships:  romantic, platonic, parental—entails being recruited for a role in a play we didn’t audition for.  We are playing a part in the other person’s internal drama.  If we can acknowledge this and work to let it go, perhaps we can settle into a sense of trust that allows us just to be ourselves.  I am not your image of me, but I am fundamentally always on your side--even when I’m annoyed or annoying, hurt or hurting, scared or scary--I am always going to choose your side.  Not because you’re my “soulmate,” but because I fundamentally like and love who you are —and I feel committed to you and our marriage.  In a somewhat meta-moment, I am writing this at 2:30 in the morning in early January, awake partially because I had too much caffeine and partly, mostly, because you said something that hurt my feelings last night in a argument that we’ve had repeatedly over twenty years.  And I feel hurt and defensive and pissed off ... and yet I know these feelings will pass.  It’s scary though—and here the small ego, full of fear, arises again. There is always that worry that I will at some point exhaust your good graces, that the burden of being with me will outweigh the benefits.  You’d think after all these years, that we could simply trust in ourselves and our relationship, but I still find it hard.  I desperately want security—and I’m hearing this in your reflections as well.  It’s funny because we come from such different backgrounds.  You grew up in a very stable, loving home and I was raised in an deeply unstable house where love couldn’t be trusted and was always conditional and, more often than not, weaponized.  And yet both of us struggle with these simple issues:  can I trust you to love me as I am?

And so what do we do?  Perhaps this is where we come back to the Buddhism that appeals to us both.  Buddhism encourages us not to ask for permanency, but to just rest in this moment and have compassion.  Right now, we are together.  Can I truly promise anything about the future?  That sounds realistic, but it doesn’t feel comforting at all.  Back to Perel, I know you weren’t going out for the role I often ask you to play, and I don’t want to constantly be auditioning for the role of your husband.  I can’t tell if we’re displaying the deep dysfunction of our marriage or bravely stating human truths involved in most marriages.  I’m thinking of a line from As You Like It:  “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy. This wide and universal theater presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play.”

Julia: Those theatre metaphors are powerful, aren’t they? I’m writing this a few days later in January and, though we are back to peace in the household, I know as surely as I’m standing here that we will have that argument again. We will play that scene over and over, tired as we are of it. My appreciation of the Buddhist approach comes from the fact that, when I acknowledge my feelings rather than denying them, I’m telling MYSELF the truth. And when I’m telling myself the truth, I’m in a much better position to tell you the truth. And when that happens, uncomfortable as it can be, there’s the potential for us to step outside of the drama, go off-script, and create a shared reality. Awareness, mindfulness, helps me trust myself.

So, yes. We can’t, in good conscience, make promises about the future. But if look at where we’ve been so far in 23 years, it seems pretty likely that we’ll go on choosing each other. After all, everyone ELSE we might be with would be the wrong person to be married too, also.

Nathan:
But that’s a central problem within marriage and back to the trust issue again, of course.  How do we trust in what we DO have when what we MIGHT have is so seductive?  As Don Henley sang, “What are those voices outside love's open door, Make us throw off our contentment, And beg for something more?” I think we’re both increasingly feeling the often damaging artificiality of the modern construct of marriage.  Marriage for most of human history was a business contract and a way of addressing inheritance:  who was going to be a hard worker and who was going to get the goats or the castle after I die.  It wasn’t until the age of Jane Austen that ideas of romantic love as a central element in marriage began to take hold.  Then around the 1960s the stakes got upped again when marriage started being seen as a path to self-actualization — our spouse is supposed to help us become our highest, truest self. So we’ve gone from a sense that marriage was for creating children, sharing work, and passing on wealth to finding a single person to be my lifelong soul-mate, house-mate, co-parent, lover, best friend, business partner, secretary (to be fair about the mental load most women carry in relationships) and, of course, completely self-actualized herself through my own perfections and wisdom.  It sounds funny and excessive, but I’ve done a lot of weddings, and I always listen to the painfully exhaustive promises couples make in their vows.  You will fulfill all my needs, physical, spiritual, intellectual, sexual, and so on.  I see the tremendous pressure this puts on relationships in some of the folks I counsel---and that pressure leads to questions about what’s out there that might be better since the poor benighted fool I’m married to isn’t fulfilling it all.  Some marriages absolutely need to end, but many die because of unrealistic expectations for what is an incredibly fraught project to begin with.

And I think escaping the incredible pressure this puts on a couple requires a further nuance on the trust we’ve been talking about.  I have to trust that I don’t have to be everything, indeed I can’t be.  And the trust in our friendship, our partnership, and, yes, our love, is what allows us to encourage each other to have adventures separately.  That we can and should meet needs outside ourselves.   I am grateful that you have an intimate group of friends with whom you can share the challenges of your life.  I am proud of you for heading off by yourself to Fiji to track down what you needed to learn twenty years after living there the first time.  I wander off into the woods for solo adventures and other trips.  Both of us go walk-about, push boundaries, challenge ourselves, and then come home gratefully to our life partner.

Julia: And if we can both allow the other to wander off the beaten track, to explore a bit, that can take some pressure off our relationship. We don’t have to be everything. We can just be ourselves, imperfect but wonderful, and trust that that is enough, that we are enough. These broader nets of people and experiences take so much pressure off our relationship; I’m no longer asking you to meet every need. And it’s important to note that these issues don’t, of course, only apply to marriages or long term partnerships.  They apply to friends, family, parents, kids. We ALL need communities, villages, adventures, to make these intense relationships thrive.

Nathan: Yes, and, as I’m seeing after my latest, very intense round of therapy, they also apply to myself.  I, as you know, struggle with trust. There was practically none of it in my family of origin. I saw nothing of healthy relationships to another or oneself.  This has created in me, I’m starting to see, a real struggle to trust myself.  And without those early models, it becomes very hard to know what is trustworthy within me—and, then, what is trustworthy in others.  Trust is what allows for healthy boundaries in relationships.  I could go on, but learning to trust oneself is the precursor to being able to love both self and other.  And here, the more I can embrace imperfection, the better off I am.  Perfection is neither necessary nor possible.  Trust that acknowledges imperfection holds space for the ebb and flow of a living, growing relationship with myself and with you.

So the last question is to you.  Where do you want our trust to take us?

Julia:
The most honest answer is, “I don’t know.” It feels like we’re trying to invent something... like we can’t just traipse along in the groove of our grandparents’ or parents’ marriages, or any other partnership in history... as if the times we’re living in, the deep gender equality we idealize (whether or not we attain it), the changing conception of what marriage can and should be leave us in a confusingly wide-open space, without a map. I could be over-thinking... doubtless I AM over-thinking; I always do. But what do I want, really want?

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” Philosopher Maria Popova, commenting on Rich’s words, says, “Among the dualities that lend love both its electricity and its exasperation — the interplay of thrill and terror, desire and disappointment, longing and anticipatory loss — is also the fact that our pathway to this mutually refining truth must pass through a necessary fiction: We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.” End quote.

When we don’t RECOGNIZE that fantasy for what it is -- pure hopeful invention on each of our parts -- we invite disappointment over and over: we keep waiting for the other person to figure out the script, to be who we want and expect. But they’re acting out a different drama, from their own script.

I want a partnership that allows meaningful freedoms to both of us -- that allows us to explore areas of interest on our own at times -- but I also crave the safety and serenity that our life together, for the most part, provides. That sense of home as refuge, as the place where our unit of two -- or three -- is together against the craziness. So perhaps the best I can say is that I want us to be able to trust in the “beautiful imperfect”... to internalize a sense that even when things don't feel perfect that it’s okay, that the imperfect is good enough -- is, in fact, as good as it gets.

Where do YOU want our trust to take us?

Nathan:
No, no, we’re not going to end this with the man having the last word.  Let’s both offer a final sentence summary of what we’re thinking about trust in long term relationships.  And YOU get the final word.

Ok, here’s mine: Our relationship is an opportunity to let go of past models of marriage as business proposition or all-inclusive path to self-realization, and I trust in us to accept this beautiful imperfect in ways that create love, security, and connection for us both and for Ben. 

Julia: I’ll just expand your sentence to include ALL relationships. Being a true friend, a colleague, a child of aging parents -- being in relationship in any way gives us a chance to let go of fantasies of how it might be done perfectly and just DO it, beautifully and imperfectly, because relationships are worth the work.