Committed Interaction

If you could name an area of your life in which you expend the most energy and learn the most, what would it be? If you're not sure, ask yourself which area of your life gives you the most joy and pain? For many people, the response is relationships. Many students graduate from the Lifespring Basic Training with a renewed sense of the importance of relationships in their lives. Graduates leave the Training with fresh perspectives on their interactions with and their commitment to their mates, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their co-workers.

What do graduates do with that fresh perspective? What in their lives is informed by their experience of a renewed commitment to fuller, richer relationships? These are not new questions for those of us who have described our experiences of the Lifespring trainings to others.

I wanted to hear what graduates had to say about their primary relationships after the Training. But even relationships that are working relationships can be difficult to talk about. And when a relationship isn't working--when there is usually something concrete to discuss--it is all the more difficult. In fact, we often don't discover or face the truth about a relationship until we are in a crisis or breakdown about it. So, in talking to graduates, I framed my questions in the context of breakdown.

Consider the experience of crisis or breakdown in your relationships. What happens for you when an unpredictable event or situation occurs which stops the forward motion of the relationship? Do you avoid your partner, confront him or her, or maintain 'normal' conditions despite the upset? What conditions determine breakdown in your relationships? Lack of communication, lack of agreement on certain issues, or even absence? It takes two to make a relationship, but only one to make an illusion. A breakdown is no small event--no minor squabble or disagreement--but rather a fundamental point of disjuncture between two people's experience in their relationship.

While I was researching this article, I had dinner with a married grad who asked, "Why is it that people get married?" She and her husband of ten months were having what she called "a stormy week," and she was exhausted from the constant emotional roller-coaster. She wondered aloud, "Why does this society believe we should live with someone else all the time?" Listening to her, I heard her core question as a much more personal one. Amid her breakdown with her husband, she was asking herself, "What am I committed to in this marriage? Why am I spending my life with this man?" These moments of complete and fundamental honesty with ourselves can be some of the most significant in terms of our commitment.

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