12 |
Artists in Love |
Few people are spared relationship problems. For centuries the divorce rate was kept artificially low by cultural injunctions against divorce, cultural norms that painted marriage as the only normal option, a vesting of privilege and control in men, and laws limiting the grounds on which a divorce could be sought. These artificial constraints forced unhappy couples to remain together and kept closeted the relationship problems that were indubitably present.
As individual liberty gained ground, religion lost its iron grip (in some parts of the world), and women secured rights and power, a time came when marriages had to stand on their own four feet if they were to survive. In this country between half and two-thirds of them couldn’t. It turns out that if society doesn’t step in to artificially shore them up, the majority of intimate relationships are likely to fail.
There is nothing surprising about this. It is a myth that it is easy for two people to live together in intimate relationship. It is a myth that someone or something is wrong if two people come together but can’t remain together. Many relationships fail simply because the people involved do not possess sufficient reasons to share a bed, bodily fluids, and their dreams. This is true across cultures, in straight and gay relationships, and in couples consisting of two nonartists, an artist and a nonartist, or two artists. If an intimate relationship is to stand the test of time, the individuals involved must have not just some reasons for staying together but sufficient reasons. This sets the bar uncomfortably high but, in our age of freedom, exactly where it ought to be set.
For an artist, many special factors enter the equation and make her relationship options both more scant and more complicated. Like anyone, she would love her mate to be her friend, lover, partner, sympathetic ear, intimate other, and soul mate. But she also has some other requirements. She needs her mate to provide her with real freedom, the freedom to have her own ideas, to make artistic and human mistakes and messes, and to spend vast quantities of time in solitude.
She also needs her mate to appreciate her life project as an artist, that her commitment to the creative life is not “one of the things she is” but an imperative as real as breathing. Likewise, she needs her mate to put up with her inevitably rich and roiling inner life, which manifests itself as dreams, nightmares, a sudden need for Paris, a sudden desire to throw over painting for sculpture, and so on. To be sure, she may settle for a mate who does not meet these criteria — but if she does she will feel that she is settling.
She is also likely to have special survival needs because of the way our culture is constituted. If she could paint and pay her bills, she would not need a mate with a salary. Because so few artists in any of the disciplines can earn anything like a middle-class income, because typically there are only the extremes of poverty and celebrity, she is likely to be poor and to need to make calculations about how she might survive. One path, not necessarily held consciously but nevertheless held, is to look for someone who, rather than choosing to manifest his creative potential, has gone into accounting.
An artist knows that she is not entering a relationship of that sort with perfectly clean hands. By the same token, she may truly believe that there are enough good reasons in play to counterbalance her calculated decision (if she is aware of the calculation). The gal or fellow in question may be sweet, decent, charmed by the artist’s life, happy to provide, genuinely encouraging, and so on. Still, an artist’s choice to opt for this kind of security may well come back to haunt her.
Conversely, an artist may say to herself, “I will not choose a boring mate just because I could then get to paint” and instead choose her mate based on sympathetic resonances, resonances that will likely be found in the being and body of a similarly impoverished artist. Then the endless dramas and negotiations can’t help but begin: who will work the day job, who has the better prospects and is more entitled to a full shot at an art career, who will sacrifice for the other, who will bite the bullet and go into the world when times are hard (which will be often), and so on.
The upshot of these difficult realities is that many artists find themselves spending long periods of time alone, since their needs are not that easily met by those they encounter. Many end up cycling through brief relationships, since their needs for intimacy collide with the fact that insufficient reasons exist for remaining with this or that partner. Others find themselves in distant relationships whose distance is a function of the basic incompatibility of the partners. Still others wind up in dramatic relationships, in which each partner feels unjustly treated and makes that dissatisfaction known. And a great many sink into depressed relationships, in which both partners feel emotionally and existentially under the weather.
Is an artist more likely to make a good match with an artist or with a nonartist? I think it is fair to say that there is no way to answer this question in the abstract. It depends on the two people involved. Some artist couples are torn apart and ultimately defeated by rivalry and competition. Others aren’t. Some artist/nonartist couples are defeated by the artist’s sense that her mate doesn’t understand her. In other artist/nonartist couples, no such problem exists. So we must let go of the idea that we can choose between one or the other and conclude, “It depends.”
Nevertheless, when two artists are in intimate relationship certain difficulties frequently arise. For example, Jennifer, a painter, and Mark, a musician, came in to see me for couples’ counseling (in the days before I began creativity coaching). Each felt blocked and daunted and blamed the other for not providing enough financial and emotional support. They were running through their savings and were fighting about who should go to work. Mark argued that the university administrative job Jennifer could easily land would hardly tax her. Jennifer countered that Mark’s computer skills make him much more marketable and that he would bring in considerably more money. So they fought.
They fought continually. They argued about who should do the shopping, who should do the cooking, who should do the cleaning. They argued about everything with a time cost. When they came to see me, their main grievance was that neither of them was willing to make time to fix the broken window in their apartment. Jennifer wasn’t painting (which he rather liked to rub in), so she should do it. Mark wasn’t composing (which she rather liked to rub in), so he should do it. The matter of who should repair the broken window, standing in for their many elephant-sized underlying issues, looked about to do them in.
At about the same time I counseled two married actors. Both were reasonably successful in San Francisco theater, which meant that they both had to work day jobs to supplement their meager acting incomes. They framed their current problem as “loyalty issues.” Jeremy felt that Alicia did not respect him as an actor. His proof was that whenever a role came up for a leading man, an actor/singer, or required a dialect, she would remind him of his hawk nose, his propensity to sing flat, and the difficulties he once experienced trying to play an Irishman. She, in turn, complained that he never came to see her perform, got on her about her weight, and dismissed the idea of moving to Los Angeles or New York.
Like Jennifer and Mark, Jeremy and Alicia lived in a state of constant tension that was in part caused by the demands of the art life they had chosen, in part by the constant bruising of their egos at the hands of the world and of each other, and in part by their feelings of envy, competitiveness, and rivalry. Had one half of either of these two couples become successful, you could lay odds that the couple’s problems would only worsen; individual success was not going to be the answer. And had one of them made the decision to “sacrifice everything” for the other and, with gritted teeth and clenched jaw, worked full-time to support the other’s art career, you could lay equal odds that the relationship would ultimately founder on that frustrated partner’s misery.
Ronda’s situation was different. She hadn’t married an artist, she’d married a former artist (or, more accurately, a failed artist). Harry had once been quite a good amateur musician. But he had put his guitar away and opened a shoe repair shop in San Francisco. Ronda worked in the shop with Harry, dealing with customers and keeping the books. Their situation struck her as absurd and humiliating, but it did allow her to afford a painting studio and to get to the studio several days a week.
Ronda’s main complaint was that Harry was always sabotaging her. He would fall over himself to seem helpful, pledging to pick her up from the airport when she got back from New York or run her slides over to the post office so they’d get to a certain juried show on time. Then he would fail to show up at the airport or to get her slides to the post office. His excuses were always perfect. He hadn’t shown at the airport because he’d had a headache, which had caused him to take some medicine, which had made him drowsy, so he’d fallen into such a heavy, drug-induced sleep that even the alarm, which he’d remembered to set, hadn’t awakened him. As to the slides, well, their cat had gotten sick, so he’d had to rush it to the vet, and in his anxiety he’d picked up the wrong package.
Harry’s passive-aggressive behavior was no doubt connected to his failure as an artist; possibly the worst choice an artist can make in a life partner is a failed artist who refuses to acknowledge his or her anger and disappointment. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that an artist is inclined to mate with someone who has at least a little artistic sensibility, existential intelligence, and understanding of the artist’s world. Complications instantly arise because that person will be hungry, driven, and complicated in his own right.
Meredith, a young painter, nicely captures something of this dynamic:
I’m afraid of commitment because I know myself and know that I have a powerful need for change. Luckily my current partner, who lives across the globe, feels exactly the same way. He is an artist who very much needs and loves his own space and independence. He, too, wants to know who he is and what his life would be like without a partner’s influence. We love being together when we’re together, and I feel lucky to have someone who is so like me and who understands my needs.
I’ve noticed, though, that we never seem to be creative at the same time. He seems to be less inspired to do his work when he is with me. I feel like he is losing out on more when he is with me, no matter how much I encourage and support him.
Still, I have this recurring daydream where we create heaps of artwork together and help each other to promote our work. I just wonder if that’s a realistic scenario for us. I know my boyfriend loves to feel independent, as do I, but I would love one day to feel more like part of a team rather than on my own with everything.
Different challenges arise in artist/nonartist relationships. The artist, who may not bring in much money, is likely to feel dependent on the nonartist, disempowered because of that financial dependence, and guilty about her inability (and perhaps unwillingness) to contribute to the communal pool. She may have a hard time being taken seriously by the nonartist because, for example, her work requires that she stare into space and her mate, seeing her staring, presumes that she isn’t busy. And she may consider her partner dull and his values too materialistic and conventional. Here is how one writer, Marilyn, described her experience of dating nonartists:
I met John through business. He’d been attracted to me for years; he used to say that I was the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. Now that we’re involved, he no longer says that I’m fascinating. For the time and effort I put into my writing I have little to show, which he cannot help but see. I have a tendency to assign my own negative self-talk to him, and then I resent it when he doesn’t say or do anything to reassure me that he doesn’t feel that way.
I resent his lumpish inability to intuit when I need that just-perfect two-word touch that I can deliver when he needs it. I feel that I bring all the emotional intensity to our relationship. It seems like he just shows up and feeds at the trough. He doesn’t have any big life questions he’s studying. He’s not attempting to raise his consciousness; he thinks he’s okay just the way he is. That’s the basic issue. Artists are striving for something; nonartists buy things.
Sarah, a painter, presents a contrasting view:
It seems to me that relationships often work well when the partners have very different personalities — each ends up carrying the load in the areas of her or his strengths. I have always had relationships with women who have artistic sensibilities but have not chosen to pursue art to any degree. The pluses for me have been that my partners have always appreciated and admired my work, and that’s a real ego boost and often a stimulus to keep going.
I have gotten some excellent and helpful criticism from my current partner, too, and I am very open to that. I imagine that some artists would find that a distinct minus, but it works for me because my partner is not my competitor or my rival. If the non-artist partner is confident of her own gifts, skills, and talents, and if the artist appreciates and values them, things can be worked out. Always, communication is the key to making it work.
Every artist’s intimate relationship, whether with another artist or with a nonartist, is a unique coming together of two distinct people. The relationship will succeed not because one of them is or isn’t a self-identified artist but because the two of them are friends, mature enough to relate, genuinely on each other’s side, and sympathetic and lively. It doesn’t matter if your mate paints, and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t paint; it only matters that the two of you have good reasons for sharing a bed and a life.
The prevailing cultural myth about relationships, a myth only about a thousand years old but ubiquitous and rarely challenged, is that each of us should meet someone to settle down with permanently and monogamously. Together we are to raise a family and live in a prescribed way, ideally on a piece of land and in a house we own, earning a living through the sanctioned work that we do, maintaining ties with and being supported by family and a religious institution, and retaining a modest-sized individuality but in most matters obeying and conforming for the sake of social harmony.
This prevailing myth has it that the family is the basic unit of social currency and that permanent dyadic relationships are not only the best and most natural life arrangements but the only ones that are not suspect. Even feminism, our skyrocketing divorce rate, and other countermyth realities like single-parent families and intentionally childless couples have done little to deconstruct the myth of marriage and family that has settled in since the troubadours began touting romantic love in the eleventh century.
Artists, however, male and female alike, have always balked a little (or a lot) at this mythology. Concerned about their individual destinies, wanting to chart a course for themselves based on insistent internal demands and the felt need to make meaning, wanting to speak and be heard, feeling different from (and alienated from) those around them, and knowing that truth telling, solitude, and nonconformity possess real value, they have put a priority on actualizing their potential and plotting a personal course rather than on playing out a predetermined role in the social game. For these reasons artists have typically made less-than-stellar marriage and family material (with, of course, many exceptions); and they have suffered for this and made others suffer in turn.
Since artists tend to see through the pretty picture of romantic love and perfect relating as drawn by their culture and since they know that a great many relationships are long-lasting only because both partners have lowered their expectations or lost the wherewithal to leave, they need to come up with their own reasons for relating. Given that an artist’s goal is not to make a good marriage and settle down but rather to be an artist, given that she may well hold the idea of marriage-and-family as compromising, and given that she sees herself as a loner navigating an unknown personal journey — given, in short, that she starts out with many potent reasons for not valuing relating — it is only if and when potent reasons to relate present themselves that relating begins to make sense.
What, in fact, is required of two people, when one or both of them is an artist, if the relationship is to succeed? Such a relationship needs to be built on the following twenty building blocks:
1. Care of each other’s solitude. It must be all right and more than all right for each partner to spend significant time pursuing his or her own activities and inner life.
2. Maintenance of emotional security. Each partner is not only aware of the other’s feelings but takes them into account and actively works to help his or her partner feel good.
3. Maintenance of meaning. Partners understand that meaning crises will arise and that, to be met, they may sometimes necessitate profound changes, such as in career, in art discipline, in subject matter, in geographic location, and so on.
4. Maintenance of passion. Partners will not let themselves become too busy for love, too tired for love, or too disinterested in love, unless they want to participate in an ice-cold relationship.
5. Creation of at least occasional happiness. Partners will actually ask questions of each other like, “What would make us happy?” and “What would make you happy?” and make requests, saying, “This would make me happy.”
6. A gentle demanding of discipline from oneself and one’s partner. Each partner will strive to work in a productive, undramatic, regular way, with few creative tantrums and few excuses about not being inspired or in the mood.
7. A gentle exchanging of truths. When something must be said, it will get said carefully, thoughtfully, and compassionately — and also clearly and directly.
8. Acceptance of the limits of human beings and the facts of existence. Each partner will expect a lot from himself and his partner while at the same time recognizing and accepting that floods, failures of nerve, and pratfalls do happen.
9. A minimizing of one’s own unwanted qualities. Each partner will bravely look in the mirror, take a fearless personal inventory, and identify and then change those aspects of personality that harm the relationship.
10. Support of each other’s careers. Each person in the partnership is likely to have a career and hence will have career demands that need to be respected and negotiated.
11. Maintenance of friendship. Nothing is more crucial to the viability of an intimate relationship than that the partners be friends — and friendly.
12. A monitoring of moods in oneself and one’s partner. Both partners will sometimes feel blue, and depression will likely prove an uninvited but persistent houseguest, one that must be regularly acknowledged and just as regularly banished.
13. An acceptance of difficulties. Both partners will understand that difficulties arise and that action must be taken to deal with them.
14. Shared principles and values. Both partners strive to build on their shared principles and deal calmly, intelligently, and compassionately with their differences.
15. Management of one’s own journey. Each partner has the job of taking responsibility for his or her life, for setting goals, for making choices and taking action, and for proceeding as a responsible adult.
16. Careful communicating. Both partners will want to speak carefully and clearly about the large and small relationship matters that endlessly arise.
17. A bringing of artfulness to the partnership. A creative person can bless her relationship by bringing the same qualities to it that she brings to her art, qualities as diverse as whimsy, imagination, resilience, and meticulousness.
18. Maintenance of a present orientation. Each partner lets go of past grievances, even in the face of repeat offenses, not to engage in wishful thinking or denial but to deal with issues in their specific and current reality.
19. Fair treatment. Fairness in everything — the honoring of agreements, the equitable distribution of resources, the respect shown in word and deed — is the glue that holds together a healthy relationship.
20. The creation of a supportive relationship. Even if two people find it easy to relate, even if both are “low maintenance,” they will still have to invest real time in and attention to what they have created together, an edifice that is certain to need the occasional repainting and new roof.
This is not to say that an artist can’t live alone and thrive. Of course he can. Rather, it is to say that when an artist does decide to be in an intimate relationship, there will be work for each partner to do if they are to build a relationship that serves them. Imagine training to compete as an ice skating pair. Each partner has individual work to do in order to become fit, to learn moves, and so on. But the pair must also function beautifully together. Each artist has his own work to do to make him fit for relationships; but ultimately it takes two serious partners to make a partnership work.
What does a relationship erected on these building blocks look like? Following are two reports, the first from Nancy, a painter:
I have been a “starving” artist for forty years and have been supported by my advertising-writer husband. Nine months ago he was laid off, and we are now both “starving creatives.” We are scrambling to figure out who will be paying the bills, and how. For the last two and half years I have been doing portraits and as a result have gotten a lot of publicity. My portrait business is increasing, but I am nowhere near being able to support anyone.
It is hard to actively pursue something really artistic and still meet the demands for food. It is a constant balancing act between what we need to survive and what we need to grow and be happy. I can’t imagine my life without art; and my husband and I made many sacrifices in order for me to be at home to raise our family and to still have the time to pursue art. It takes a lot of work, but it is well worth it and I am sure that we will figure out this time in our lives as well.
Diane, also a painter, explained her situation:
Most of us know that we want to live the lifestyle of an artist, but finding the right person to share that way of life can be a problem. Speaking for myself, I met and married a fellow artist twenty-five years ago. What has worked for us is our focus on the creative process and the respect we both have for one another. We have balanced our life by working full-time nonart jobs, painting, selling, traveling yearly to Spain, and sharing the same studio space.
Times have been rough recently. John lost his job of twenty-five years and was out of work for two years. There were times he did not want to paint because his days were spent looking for work, and he had to deal with interviews, rejections, and anxiety. After his unemployment benefits ran out, I was the sole source of income keeping us afloat. Through it all we continued to support one another with faith, the realization that nothing stays the same in life, and the belief that things do work out. We are each other’s best friends and lovers, and that’s the way it’s been for twenty-five years. Our focus has always been on our art and on making sure that nothing comes between what we have together.
That’s the secret: that nothing is allowed to come between the two of you. Many things will try: your moods, his moods, money problems, differences of opinion, failures of nerve, small betrayals, bad habits. Real partners can weather these trials because they have made the decision to go it together.
This “being in it together” is different from love, different from respect, different from empathy, different from caring, different from compassion, different from commitment. It is a distinct quality, that of honoring an agreement to take the other person’s side. You side with that one person above all others. The lovemaking, the conversations, the like-mindedness, the mutual love of art are frosting on a cake that will go stale unless each partner puts the other ahead of the rest of humanity.
You don’t go out with your buddies if your wife needs you. You don’t go out shopping if your husband needs you. You don’t go back to the studio if your wife asks you to hold her hand. You don’t visit your sister for the weekend if your husband needs cheering up. Each day you reckon what, if anything, your partner needs. Maybe it is the freedom to create. Maybe it is a bit of truth telling. Maybe it is dinner out. In turn, you tell him what you need, secure in the knowledge that he will listen and do his best to respond.
Are you willing to be your partner’s real partner? Are you willing to be loyal and faithful? When you hear of an opportunity for your wife to show her art, do you make careful note of it and report it to her at dinner? When your friends take a few sarcastic potshots at your husband’s latest enthusiasm, do you refuse to laugh along? Do you think of her first? Do you think of him first? If you don’t, you haven’t obeyed a good relationship’s first commandment.
There is only one marriage vow: you are now the most important person in my life. When that changes, when the person you sleep with is not the most important person in your life, when he matters but not really that much more than the fellow with whom you share studio space, an intimate partnership has become just two individuals sharing a bathroom. No legal document can create such a partnership; no amount of love can guarantee such a partnership. It happens in a simple but altogether rare way: when two people shake hands and agree to become loyal partisans.
The ultimate goal for an artist and his or her partner is the creation by two ever-evolving people of a bastion of safety and sanity in a dangerous world, the creation of a close-knit unit in which each partner protects, supports, and enlivens the other, in which each respects the other’s efforts and has his or her efforts respected in turn. This fine relating eludes most artists — indeed, most human beings — but it remains the prize on which we want to keep our eye.
Spend some time thinking about each of the twenty building blocks described above, and begin to understand what each one means and what each one requires, both of you and of your partner.