The Trouble About Love & Commitment - Part II

Part I is a description of what in me interferred with love. In Part II, I discuss a book on the subject, and a song which has, in its structure, the answer to the trouble about love and commitment.


What Is the Real Meaning of “Fear of Commitment”?

A recent book, He’s Scared, She’s Scared by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, is a instance of what people find in bookstores all over America when desperately looking for answers to why there is so much trouble about love—but don’t get those answers. Because of copywrite law, I will describe and paraphrase what is in this book. The authors, who describe themselves as “writers, not therapists” created the term "commitmentphobia" to describe the fear of caring deeply and steadily for another person. As they categorize commitment conflicts as either active or passive, the authors claim that recognizing these conflicts in yourself can enable you to change and make better choices, but they don’t give any scientific logic. Their description of attaining a permanent relationship is not even an attractive goal, described as compromise where no one wins.

This book is essentially useless because while describing in detail the many fears people can have about love--such as growing bored with a person, or losing one’s individuality--they do not know: 1) what love really is, and 2) that the deepest cause of all the fears they describe begins with how we see the world, which another person is part of and represents to us.

For instance, the authors quote Theresa, age 28. Her experience is included because of how a man goes from the pedestal of “Mr. Right” in her eyes, to the lows of “What did I ever see in him?” Theresa relates that she really thought David was the man for her, but when living together she found him impossible, and like living with her father.

Many questions could be asked about their purpose with each other, and if Theresa were to have Aesthetic Realism consultations, she might be asked: “How is the world seen in your home?--as something to know and respect, or to scorn and escape from?”, and “Do you think knowing another human being is an exciting, adventurous, deep experience?” As men and women study the Aesthetic Realism explanation of love, it makes for a freshness and fullness every day that is the farthest thing from the boring, “ordinary life” women fear, as I once did.

Toward the end of He’s Scared, She’s Scared, there are pages of advice about what to do about your conflicts—such as buying something new for your kitchen or hanging a work of art on a wall. Take it from me: I had plants, pictures on the walls, and kept appointments, but it never encouraged lasting care for a man because if you don’t see and criticize your desire to feel nothing in this world is good enough to “have” you, it has to cripple your ability to “live your life to the fullest,” and to love another person.

Today, it is my great joy to know and love my husband, Jeffrey Williams. He is a junior high school teacher of health and physical education, and I respect him for the way he wants to bring out his students’ desire to learn. And he has written important articles about how the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method has the answer to the failure in education. I love Jeffrey for being a good friend and critic of me, which often includes delightful humor, and for what I am learning about his life as an African-American that has me hate racism even more.

Early in our knowing each other, I was affected by the lively way he spoke about his experiences, such as traveling in the U.S., Canada, and Europe as a hockey player. However, though I had changed a lot, I sometimes wanted him to concentrate on me, and felt agitated when he was talking about something else. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked why I thought I was not at ease. I said I wasn’t sure, and she asked:

"Do you think you want to see Jeffrey Williams as a person in this world, as himself, with meaning and wanting to get meaning from other things; or do you want to make him [an adjunct to yourself?]"

Hearing this, I thought of how I had already been devising ways of managing him and having him do things for me. And I was learning about what in me interfered with love, as Miss Reiss asked: “Do you think a woman would like to run a man?” “Yes,” I said, and she continued –

"Love has been for people a time when they run the world. How much [a woman] wants to run the world, and how much [she wants to] like the world has to be looked at."

I am in the midst of the most romantic and practical education-—learning both what interferes with love, and about the real pleasure of trying to know another person, and through him the wide, various world. And as Jeffrey and have been married for over four years, it is priceless to have the means of never feeling bored or trapped. We know that through studying the rock-solid principles of Aesthetic Realism we can be happier and more in love with every year!

A Song Has the Answer to the Trouble in Love

I learned that the answers to the biggest and most intimate questions of our lives is in art. “All beauty,” Eli Siegel stated in this landmark principle, “is the making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

A song which I think has beauty is one that was very popular during World War II: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” written by Irving Kahal & Sammy Fain. This song puts together opposites central in love: intimacy and distance, specificity and width—the meaning of one unique loved person, and the meaning of the world in its diversity. The word “seeing” in the title itself is important. It has a lovely melody and the big, moving thing about it is that we hear someone showing love for another, not through concentrating and being exclusively, but through seeing that person in relation to other things. You feel the person singing this wants to like the world, even though far away from love.

The melody, which begins each verse, falls and rises in a way that is both poignant and hopeful. “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.” This woman doesn’t say, as I once felt, “Everything is gray since you’re not here,” or “It breaks my heart to be reminded of where WE were alone together,” or “Who cares about all those places—if you’re not there!” She says she care more for these places, sees more meaning in them, through knowing him:

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces all day through.
In that small café, the park across the way,
The children’s carousel, the chestnut tree, the Wishing Well.

As the melody rises and falls, we also hear that other people are included—-in a café, and the park; and we feel this woman is not using a man to feel she’s in her own miserable den of sadness, or that the world revolves around her, but that knowing him has her care more for the diversity of reality—through the circular whirl of a carousel, the verticality of a tree, and the depth of a wishing well.

Then, the last verse has even greater width, as notes rise higher, and we feel distance is at one with intimacy as she says that the qualities she cares for in a man she’ll also find in a summer’s day, in the morning sun, and in the moon. In the final phrases there is a repeated “oo” sound, which has wonder in it, on the words new, moon, and you. And that last “you” goes higher still, as if she wants her care for that man she is close to be related to the distant moon—in one world that they were both born to like.

I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay –
I’ll always think of you that way.
I’ll find you in the morning sun,
And when the night is new,
I’ll be looking at the moon
[And] I’ll be seeing you.

I've been "having a blast" through learning what it means to use a man to care more for all people, and encourage that in him. It is the means for any person to have what Eli Siegel described as “the true grandeur, the true intensity of love."