Meeting the Shadow – Relationships & Marriage

An excerpt from the book Meeting the Shadow.  The text is by Michael Ventura.

“Which is the major difference between the expectations of a marriage and a relationship.  My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other’s selected inner archetypes.  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshiper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am your client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the garish of the patterns.  Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw

These hold up well enough while the archetypal pairings behave.  But when the little boy inside him is looking for the mommy inside her and finds instead on this particular night a sharp-toothed analyst dissecting his guts.  When the little girl inside her is looking for the daddy inside him, and fids instead a pagan worshiper who wants a goddess to lay with, which induces her to become a little girl playacting a goddess to please the daddy who’s really a lecherous worshipper and…little girls can’t come.  Or if a woman is attracted to a macho-man who is secretly looking to be mothered: when a man’s sexual self is in the service of an interior little boy it’s not surprising that he can’t get it up or comes to quick.  Or they’re really not there at all, they’re masturbating, really, men in their little-boy psyches for whom the real woman is just a stand-in; while the woman who happens to be in the same bed, an extension of teir masturbation, is wondering why even though the moves are pretty good she doesn’t really feel slept with.  And why he turns away so quickly when it’s done.

On the other hand, teachers fuck pupils with excitement, analysts fuck clients with abandon, and people seeing each other, in bed, as gods and goddesses light up the sky – bu the psyche is a multiple and a shifting entity, and none of these compatible parirings hold stable for long.  The archetypal mismatches soon begin, and then it’s a disaster of confrontations that can take years not even to sort out (it would be worth years to get it all sorter out) but simply to exhaust itself and fail.  And then the cycle starts all over again with someone else.

My experience of a marriage is that all these same modes are present, but instinctively or consciously it becomes a case of two people running down each other’s inner archetypes, tackling them, seducing them, cajoling them, waiting them out making them talk, ‘fessing up to them, running from them, raping them, falling in love with some, hating others, getting to know some, making friends with some, hanging some in the closet on each other’s hooks — hooks on which hang fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, other loves, idols, fantasies, maybe even past lives, and true mythological consciousnesses that sometimes come to life within one with such force that we feel a thread that goes back thousands of years, even to other realms of being.

All of this is what we “marry” in the other, a process that goes on while we manage to earn a living, go to the movies, watch television, go to the doctor, walk on the Palisades, drive to Texas, follow the election, try to stop drinking, eat too much Haagen-Dazs.”