The Trouble About Love and Commitment - Part I

I know many people will be glad to learn what is in this month's installment about why there so much trouble about Love:

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Women have wanted to love passionately, fully, and have hoped to have the kind of wide emotion expressed in the lines of this famous sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.

But most women see ever having such a grand, enduring emotion as a one-in-a-million chance. Many things are blamed for the trouble about love: from not finding the “right man,” to feeling that the demands of work or family leave no time for a love relationship. But we can also feel: “There’s something wrong with how I see love and men, but I don’t know what it is.” At last women can learn what in us interferes with love, and change!

Eli Siegel explained that how we see the world as a whole affects everything we do, including how we see love. “Love,” he wrote, “is a means of liking the world through a person.” And, I learned, the thing that interferes with love--as in every area of our lives—is our desire for contempt. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, titled “What Opposes Love?” Mr. Siegel wrote:

"As Aesthetic Realism sees it, the only reason love is confusing is that it is a continuation of the confusing battle between a narrow like of ourselves and imaginative justice to the world…The answer, then, to the question: What opposes love? Is, The narrow self opposes love, with it great continual treasure, contempt."

What a relief it was to learn that the biggest cause of trouble in love was in me, after all the pain I felt and had given. As I learned what it means to give “imaginative justice” to people, and to criticize my contempt, I grew happier and, also, was able to care truly for a man, my husband Jeffrey Williams.

Here I tell of what I learned, and how my life continues to change; about a recent book on “commitmentphobia”—a modern term that has both sadness and humor; and a well-known song of the 1940’s which comments on the question of this seminar.

I. A Major Interference to Love Begins Early

Growing up, I was in that confusing battle Mr. Siegel describes between a narrow like of myself, and wanting to be just to things. From an early age, I remember the thrill of trying to draw accurately the roundness of a tree trunk, and I loved singing in the elementary school chorus—working with my classmates to join our voices rightly in harmony.

But being just to what wasn’t me didn’t seem to satisfy, and having contempt was a much quicker way to feel important. One way of narrowly liking ourselves is to feel we are too good for this messy world, and are superior to other people. Eli Siegel describes this in a young woman in his book Self and World:

"There is, for example, Miss Tessie Wilson who is displeased by her environment. She sees it as dull, and though she behaves like a good daughter, she feels that her mother and father are boring, that her relatives are boring, that the town in which she lives is boring, and that life, as she sees it ordinarily, is a pretty small thing.”

I also felt life was “a pretty small thing.” I remember wondering how I ever got into such a dull family, and bemoaned the fact that my parents were not in show business, because then I could have gotten the training and “breaks” for my singing talents. Feeling morbidly magnificent, like some sparkling jewel tossed in a dustbin, I spent lonely hours brooding on a desolate hillside in Yonkers, NY.

The one person I felt was good enough for me most of the time was my brother Kevin. He was an approving playmate, and we saw each other as so superior and witty—-making fun of everyone around us. But as we made less of the world together, we also had contempt for each other. Years later, Kevin and I became true friends when he encouraged me to study Aesthetic Realism. It means so much to me that we changed from laughing at the world, to encouraging each other to be fair to the world--to have honest emotions about people and things, near and far. And I respect Kevin for the important seminars on Aesthetic Realism he has given, the articles he has written on music, and for his work as a singer in The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company!

II. Not Wanting To Know a Man Makes For Trouble in Love

Like many women, I thought that the purpose of love was to make me feel appreciated, adored, and able to get away from a cold, confusing world. When I was 19, I met John Templeton, and was very affected by his liveliness, good looks, and his adventurous desire to go new places like outdoor festivals, or take a spontaneous ride to Chinatown for an egg roll. I conceitedly saw myself as being everything a man could want, but after several years, John repeatedly put off our getting engaged. I was quietly furious and hurt, but I was not interested in knowing if his hesitations had to do with what he may have missed in me.

Years later, I was to learn from Aesthetic Realism that a man represents the world to a woman--the world she was born to know and like. Even as I was attracted by John’s energetic interest in things, I preferred getting him away from people, so we could be alone together. I was making a bad choice, which Eli Siegel describes in “What Opposes Love”:

“Love is with a possibility of seeing the world differently because something different from ourselves is seen as needed and lovely; or it is an extension of our imperialistic approval of ourselves in such a way that we have a carnal satellite.”

John and I eventually broke up, but I hadn't learned anything about what in me had made for the trouble. As years passed, I grew more bitter, and remember thinking with anger and despair when another relationship failed: “What does it take to get a guy to want to sick around, anyway?!” At the same time, I was also afraid to get married! I worried about our growing bored, and the thought of myself as an “ordinary housewife”, with small children pulling at my apron, struck terror in my heart!!

Then, by a phenomenal stroke of luck, I heard of Aesthetic Realism. In my first consultation, when I told about not having any luck in finding the “right man,” my consultants kindly asked: “Do you think some of the reason you feel bad, and don’t know why, is because there’s not enough love in you for other things? I answered “Yes” without hesitation, and they continued:

"According to Aesthetic Realism, love is the same as good will: the hope that another person or thing is stronger and more beautiful, as the means of ourselves being stronger. This is what women don’t know…. You are far more interested in how a man sees you that in how he sees the world. It is the first mistake a woman makes, but you don’t know how it makes you suffer."

In Aesthetic Realism consultations, I studied how to see my life in relation to the art and culture of the world. I worked on assignments that encouraged my desire to see other people fairly—like writing a short biography of my mother, and studying the opposites in characters like the very selfish Rosamond Vincy in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, and also the very admirable Jane Eyre in the novel by Charlotte Bronte.

In one consultation, when I complained of feeling unappreciated by a man, my consultants encouraged me to see that while men, too, can make mistakes I would benefit from thinking about what a man could object to in me—and asked if I wanted to think about this question, put humorously: “Are There Any True Reasons Why A Man Wouldn’t Want to Walk Down the Aisle With Me?” I had wonderful time thinking about this, and saw that I had had an energetic determination not to be pleased by things, or to think deeply about what a man feels. It was something important for my life to see I actually had a hope to be disappointed, and I felt like celebrating because I was able to scientifically criticize my contempt and change!

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Coming in Part II: Discussion of a book about the fear of commitment, and concludes with a song--"I'll Be Seeing You"--which has the answer to this question.