artistic impulses, to integrate our sexuality, to enhance our self-esteem, to get recognition. All of these are developmental tasks, and we look for whatever assistance we can find to move through one particular developmental stage and into the next.
There are several kinds of developmental tasks. One set is very external and task-oriented. It has to do with what we are trying to accomplish, achieve, or cause to happen at any given moment in our lives; for example, learning to walk, learning to read, leaving home, going to college, starting a business, having a child, building a house.
Another kind of developmental task is a psychological developmental process, where the tasks have to do with our personal psychologies. In this process, the set of tasks has to do with solving some emotional problems, such as taking possession of our sexuality, our anger, our masculinity or femininity, our personal power, our creativity, or self-sufficiency, to name a few.
Since we are human beings, the most natural form of assistance for us is other human beings, and relationships are the most natural form of obtaining the assistance of other human beings. Love is the medium whereby we offer one another this assistance, and, by this definition, a good love is one in which a fairly equal amount of assistance is being given and received by both partners.
This doesn't seem like a very romantic view of love and may even be seen as selfish. But the truth is that the creation of our selves is what is really occurring under the charmed umbrella of our romantic relationships. Rather than being selfish, this is a definition of love that provides an opportunity for real appreciation of the special qualities of both participants. In this sense, it is the fullest view of love.
While relationships very often help us achieve our external developmental tasks—and we often have a very obvious awareness that this is happening (“He helped me finish college,” or, “She helped me start my business”)—what is of more interest, and perhaps of more importance, is that relationships help us accomplish our emotional developmental tasks. They do this because they are by their very nature emotional. We tend to overlook what we accomplish emotionally in relationships because in general we are not aware of the emotional processes in our lives. But the fact is that consciously or unconsciously we all are always in a state of emotional evolution, and nothing spurs our emotional development more than our intimate relationships.
Since external developmental tasks are pretty much self-evident, I am not going to spend much time talking about them here. What I do want to make clear is the nature of our psychological developmental tasks because they affect our personalities so profoundly.
Psychological developmental tasks in relationships fall basically into two categories: (1) making up for specific deficits from childhood and (2) discovering the emotional meanings of our childhood stories.
Most of us don't treat our personal pasts as being in any way important except perhaps as the foggy preface to the lives we're living now. We tend to think of childhood and adulthood as two distinctly different episodes of self, not as a single continuous lifetime with the threads of childhood woven deeply into the fabric of the present. As a result, we tend to give ourselves very simplistic reports about our childhood: “Of course I was happy; my parents did everything they could,” or, “It was awful, but so what—it's over now.”
No matter what we'd like to believe, we do carry our childhoods within us. In fact, they are the blueprints for all that follows, and, for the most part, we live our lives as adults based on emotional patterns we learned as children. Both consciously and unconsciously, with unerring accuracy, we make decisions in our adult lives that are our attempts both to understand and to heal what occurred in our early years. Our relationships, more than anything else, are the vehicles by which we try to understand the meanings of our childhoods. This is difficult for many people to accept, and, in general, we don't like to investigate our childhoods. We think it is a waste of time or we're afraid that if we do examine our childhoods, we will discover our parents’ flaws and end up stranded in a state of judging and criticizing them. Since intuitively we know that no parents can do the job perfectly, we don't know what to make of the failures we may uncover.
While it's true that no set of parents is perfect, our exploration is designed neither to give our parents an A for their work nor to level them with our judgments. Rather, it is an opportunity for us to evaluate their deep and abiding impact on us in order to have a more complete understanding of why we live our lives as we do and choose the partners we do. All information is good information because the more we know about ourselves, the more we become capable of being ourselves in the fullest and most holy sense.
Deficits from Childhood
Now let's take a deeper look at the two love stories at the beginning of this chapter. If we look at John and Deborah, for example, and why they really fell in love, we can see that they came together to heal emotional wounds from childhood.
John grew up in a family where his father, a corporate executive who worked eighty hours a week, was rarely home. Even as a child, John was left to take care of his mother. He took on the role of being her companion. He supported her intellectually by enjoying her achievements and emotionally by comforting her when she was sad. Without knowing it, he took on an adult identity much sooner than was appropriate. Not only did he not have a father who was a model for his development as a man (aside from the model of excessive work), but he also did not have a mother to take care of him. In fact, he had a mother he had to take care of, a mother to whom he became the surrogate husband.
When John arrived at adulthood, he had already had a long apprenticeship as an adult. He had a lot of experience making sure that the woman in his life (his mother) was calm and content. He was a wizard at making sure the lawn was cut, the trash was out, the doors were locked, and, eventually, as he reached adolescence, that the bills were paid and his mother had a dinner date.
There were a few things missing, however. John arrived at adulthood without ever having had the experience of simply being loved: being doted on and indulged, being held, caressed, and treated with special deference. He had missed the basic, unequivocal, unconditional love, affection, and approval that, ideally, parents give to their children.
Deborah, an immigrant, grew up in deprivation. Her father was an alcoholic, and, as a result, her mother had become the breadwinner of the family. Her mother, feeling guilty about her husband's alcoholism and her own continual absence, indulged her children materially, giving them everything they wanted. With gifts she tried to make up for what she was unable to give by being home and present to her children's emotional needs. As a result, Deborah grew up thinking that, materially at least, she'd get whatever she wanted, and so in spite of the severe emotional deprivation of living with an absent mother and an alcoholic father, she was a spoiled child.
When she met John, she was immediately attracted to what she called “his grown-upness.” A traveling furniture salesman, he seemed to know a lot about life and how to function in the outside world, things she had never learned because her mother had been too busy and her father had been too drunk. She had goals, educational goals in particular, that she had been too unfocused to pursue, and when she told John about them, he encouraged her.
He was, of course, a very grown-up person because he'd been taking care of his mother for years. As a result, he was both able to provide stability and consistency at home for Deborah and to teach her a lot about life in the outside world.
With John, Deborah explored and expanded her skills, and he continued to encourage her. He taught her how to apply for student loans, how to write a job resume, how to get financing for a car. He even taught her housekeeping skills, like how to make the bed and do the grocery shopping—all the things her mother had been too busy to teach her. In effect, he became both the mother and the father she had never had.
Because
