Marriage As Being With Another

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When we are born, we find ourselves in this world. Most people think that way - I was not there, then, bam, I was born and began to exist in this world. One on one with the world, in interaction with the objective world, other people.

However, if you think about it, this is not entirely true. We appear in this world in duality, initially there are two of me. The baby in the womb is not even a separate organism, let alone everything else.

We do not know how the baby is aware of himself before birth and whether he is aware at all, however, the observations of psychologists who observe the first days and even hours of the baby's life after birth, unambiguously indicate that it takes time for the baby to become aware of himself as a separate being in general. …

The formation of personality occurs even later. In the first period of his life, a child exists in being with another, specifically with his mother. Only later, going through different stages of his development, different stages of separation from his mother, does a person become an independent person.

We will not now consider the various pathological forms of this development, when separation from the mother did not take place, we only note that such a failure can lead to serious disorders of both the neurotic and psychotic spectrum.

In adulthood, normally, we build a paired relationship with another person - the one who will become our spouse. And this is also an experience of being with another, different, different from the experience of being with a mother, into which, nevertheless, we bring the experience of previous relationships, and not just relationships, but precisely being together with another person.

We are now deliberately brackets, abstracting ourselves from other family members, for ease of understanding, talking only about paired relationships: mother-baby, husband-wife.

Heidegger writes about "being-s" (Mitwelt), a special mode of being, namely about being with the other. Unlike being with the world, in which an individual person is only one of the others, if we single out him, then for a while, we do not think of our being exactly as being with this person. In paired relationships, we move into a different mode of being - being with another.

Being with another is very different for different people and in different periods of relationships - from almost complete merging during the period of falling in love and the first months of life together (not for all couples, of course) to some stages of separation, pre-divorce states when the feeling that the newfound compatibility is still there, but is about to disintegrate. As well as smooth, calm relations of partnership, mutual support.

Understanding this, precisely that paired relationships are a special mode of being, different from others - being with oneself and being with the world, can be very therapeutic. In a pair relationship, attunement takes place with each other, this is a special way of interaction, a special way of my presence in this world, where I am not one on one with the world, and not one on one with myself, but where I am one on one with another, his personality and his being. And this being with each other is joint, as if one common being for two.

It is difficult, incomprehensible. The other's world is mysterious to us and cannot be understood. Only some cautious touching the understanding of the other is possible, and from this it is necessary to somehow build a joint life, being together. And being-together-with the world. This is about the openness of the couple to the world, namely not each of the members of the couple separately, but their mutual compatibility.

Each person already has the experience of this togetherness, being together. This refers, of course, to the experience of a dyadic relationship with the mother in childhood and early childhood. The task of the growing up period is to get out of paired relationships, to become an independent person, to realize oneself as oneself, being with oneself, as well as one's being with the world as a whole. And then, having become an adult, not only physiologically, but also psychologically, to build new dyadic relationships with a new person - a spouse or spouse.

Sounds great, but as you can probably guess, not everything goes so smoothly. Complete separation from the mother usually does not occur, and there are often problems with psychological maturation. Dealing with this, with your adult paired relationships, unconsciously building up in the same way as the dyadic relationship with the mother, to see the difference in these relationships and start building them in a new way, in an adult way, can be done as a result of personal and family therapy.

The existential approach in psychotherapy offers such an adult view of one's paired relationship - as being-with-another. This is a special state, a special way of being, as mentioned above. Finding an adult oneself in a relationship, finding harmony in one's paired relationships lies precisely in this way of being and looking at this joint being in this way (optics).

What do you think about this? What are these optics? Do you have an experience of such an experience of being with your “half” as an experience of being-with-another?