Relationships: Absolute vs. Relative Love

Great Bill, I like your idea of Fusion, Differentiation and Integral.

What about pure passion at the beginning..before fusing?

I personally felt that I was trying to skip the part of Differentiation and wanted to live my idea of an integral partnership after the Fusion. But your idea made me aware that this is a very important part of the relationship. It is impossible to work on an integral relationship if you don’t pass through Differentiation!

Goooooooooood start…go on…I’m reading ;-)

Namaste,
Diana

I just started Passionate Marriage myself - I managed to get my hands on a copy for review purposes - and so far I've been impressed. I've read Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening, but not this Perfect Love book. Integral relationship is a topic I'm actually looking forward to getting more deeply involved with; I've been together with my partner for nearly two years, but we are still irrevocably nested in that fusion state and I'm trying to be patient about waiting for the differentiation phase.

And I am excited about this, because I firmly believe that relationships provide the arenas (perhaps the only arenas) in which we're able to challenge ourselves to grow into our most essential selves. It's relationships that provide the opportunity to really, really examine all sides of ourselves, and thus the opportunity to accept and embrace and expand beyond. 

 So I love what you wrote.

 It's funny; I've been working on my own particular area of passion (community building and group dynamics), and there's a certain parallel to your articulation of the relationship process. In (Peck's version of) community, groups go through four stages: psuedocommunity, in which a shared pretense of communiy is developed; chaos, in which the inevitable differences of individuals come up and where people wrestle with these; emptiness, in which group members empty themselves of any attachments or prejudices or beliefs that prevent them from being in community together; and finally, true commnuity (which I will not try to explain. ;) ) What struck me was Peck's note that psuedocommunity is an important and necessary stage, because it's what allows group members to feel safe … or at least gives them the reassurance that there is a desire in others to create a safe and loving place for them, even if it is at the cost of denying parts of themselves. I think in the love relationship that fusion plays this same role: it provides that first sense of ultimate security and safety that's necessary before we can feel comfortable exploring our differences and shadows with someone. 

Just an additional angle to consider … 

Yeee-haw!  This is what I came for. 

As I read this, I'm seeing that your 3 stages sounds alot like some of the characteristics of a holon.  Fusion=communion and Differentiation=agency.  I think Integral would be or should be a fully rounded experience of all 4 aspects.  And, so in order for that to be true, for both transcendence and regression to be integrated in, I think that would necessarily mean that a relationship is something besides a hierarchy.  An entity in its own right, and yet also a part of something bigger.  An entity that can and does go backwards ontologically as well as forwards, that meshes with other entities on it's own level, as well as isolates.  And isn't that exactly what relationships are really like?  Really?!

I know I've been steeped in alot of bashing and polemic aimed at regression and isolation, with the hierarchists being big fans of onward and upward only.  But I'm not so sure if that is the card we're dealt. 

AND

There will necessarily be some hierarchy involved.  But where?  How?  And if Integral means transcending AND including, what things at the bottom are we supposed to include?  What elements?  What experiences?  And why?  I am used to using the SD model, so I'm going to have to use that picture in my head, but I'll try and write using more universal terms. 

I guess we begin with survival.  In the case of relationships, it would be the romantic/sexual relationship struggling for survival as it seperates out from it's Parent or Source material - familial relationships (For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to the woman and the two will become one.).  It's a heavy deal to tell your parents that you are going to leave them and start your own family with what, only a month ago, was a potential rival to their bond.  Even if people are at a later stage in life, where they are not necessarily physically dependent on their Parents, there is still a shifting of emotional support from one base to another.  Even when the Parents are long gone, they still haunt with internal judgement messages.

After the r'ship conquers the art of survival , it will spend some time in magical thinking.  There are Higher, mysterious powers at work which determine the success of the relationship, and we try and figure out what those mysterious powers want so we can appease them.  I think alot of relationship counselling is still in this mode.  Naming the Shadow Monsters which energize our mysterious attractions and simply offering detailed instructions in how to feed them (People get “turned off” when a date talks about their former lovers… so don't do it. ).  This is not very evolved.

Then, perhaps, the relationship asserts it's presence into the culture and environment around it.  Creating the legacy of the new family, competing for status in the couples crowd.  “How many children do YOU have?  How many cars, houses, etc.”  Fighting for rank.  Overtly competitive.  That's not too evolved either.

Then, I guess, there would be finding a place in the social environment where you fit in and can be on equal footing with other couples.  “What Church/synagogue/party circuit/health club do YOU belong to?  What creed will you be raising your children under?”  Blah, blah.  There's lots of this type of counselling too - find out what your “interests” are and make sure they coincide.  Still, primitive and partial.

And what next?  The not-necessarily-competitive individual influence.  What do we bring to the table?  How can we carry our own weight in society?  Instead of what kinds of vacations are your family taking, it's what kinds of volunteer work is your family doing?  Maybe the job isn't so much about how much money is made, but now is about what kind of impact is it having on the larger community.  The circle of care would be expanding.  Now we're gettin' somewhere.

But then, what?  Any notion of competition or recognition might just drop out here.  The circle of care is agressively pushed all the way out so that any and all notions of rank are dispensed with.  Memberships with clubs and organizations become unimportant, material possesions drop off the radar and energy is spent learning to connect with and include other couples who might have been excluded in all that hierarchical jostling.  Sounds pretty good.

However.  As we all probably know, this particular stage isn't as inclusive as it tends to think it is.  It still cannot include couples who buy into and retain ranking value systems.  Just last night I was telling my friend how nauseated I get by people who chase after wealth and possesions, and how uncomfortable I am around couples who “think they're better than the rest of us”.  Yeah.  That's real evolved.  And totally driven by my own Shadowed insecurity and sense of marital failure!

Time to move on to the next thing and learn how to include what's best of all of those and leave the rest.  Include what improves life at all levels, and exclude what isolates and creates friction between the levels.  Somehow rank will be included, but also excluded.  Is that because we now see that both are required in order to provide people with a way of moving in some sort of progressive direction, where removing rank would not only be hypocritical but also uncompassionate to those who want to improve their lives and relationships?  What else will it mean? 

How does this sound?  It seems to me that this is what r'ships are actually like and not some idealized, forward-only-no-reverse idealized caricature.

[Added after hitting the button]

I just realized that I described the evolution of the relationship in mainly the bottom half of the 4 quadrants - if I can use that terminology.  But that does happen to be the half that relationships basically occupy. 

If a r'ship can be a singularity of it's own, then we might need to look at the developmental levels of the self and apply them to a r'ship - mainly Upper Left.  Prehension, irritability, sensation, perception, impulse, emotion, symbols, concepts, conop, formop, vision-logic.  This would also coincide with actual experience.  R'ships usually begin very impulsively, go towards expanding ability to direct intention claiming ever more and more of the self as it's own to direct, then finally to some thing like Absolute Intention or complete autonomy. 

And I don't know if the Upper Right applies, but it'd be fun to see.  Do couples go through physical transformation purely because they are together?  A woman certainly does.  But do they actually change together? 

I know, for one thing, that Shadow plays a part in entities that are comprised of more than one person.  Organizations have Shadow.  So, too, do smaller scale r'ships.  Integral will surely mean overcoming the urge to dissociate from primitive impulses so that they can be included in the true transcendence.  This will tie in the regression and isolation powers of a holon quite nicely.

I think there may be some things that happen to the human body because of their long-term relationship to another.  Certainly we are born to be compatible with the opposite sex.  And with the sexual politics aside (if that's even possible at this stage…  doubtful), there are things which do actually happen to us physically which prepare us for coupling and are a direct result of coupling.  And as we age and our bodies “wind down”, are they not expressing the completion of coupling?  No longer directing energy towards reproduction or mate attraction.  The female body may show the most extreme effects of this progression, but I think the male body experiences change in it's own way.  The decrease in sex drive happens to them too over the full span of their lives and they seem to instinctively direct more physical energy into acquiring possesions and protecting what they've acquired  than into survival and mate attraction.  Together we display the full human experience of our purpose.  Biology suggests that this may indeed be the sole purpose of 'the couple”.  But we know that biology is not destiny, right? 

What else does our body seem to be designed to do?  Refine physical survival to the point where it can focus on other things?  Does the couple have an advantage in those other things that the individual does not?  Is this the buliding of society, creating art and exploring the experience of being in general?  How does that non-physical event show up on the physical radar screen - for couples?  Is this also where the biological survival experience is transcended and we break away from it completly to reach large frontiers of r'ship?  Polyamory?  Homosexuality?  Bestiality?  I've heard Ken wax weird on that subject before…