Manya Bartick has been a therapist for a long time. She is glamorous. I mean the hair and the nails. She has mentored me mostly in my romantic relationships, although I initially saw her alone where she was incredibly nourishing and kind to the damaged child I yet carry. It is in couples therapy that her value is most clear. We attended, my girlfriend and I, in an attempt to get along better in a relationship which would not ultimately survive, but perhaps that is an unfair ambition, with lifespans being what they are these days. That said, the relationship only lasted a year and was a pain in the arse for most of it. I’m not blaming the woman I was with; I can be a pretty challenging romantic partner with my blend of limitless appetites and needs and my instinct to cut off when wounded. I could’ve been a better friend to this woman but I’d gambled my mental health on her moods, I’d cast her in the role of a deity when she had the limitations of a human. I’d constructed my ideals from the wrong manual, the demented manual of our culture, which instructs us to view our partner as part magical sprite and part Saint John’s Ambulance volunteer. My own strain of idiocy always led me to see women as sky-high, rarefied, unobtainable and unreal. Always astonished when anyone was attracted to me I’d go a bit giddy and fall in love too quickly. My mind would race up the aisle to the altar, I’d be covered in confetti midway through the first date. I wanted to save them and I wanted them to save me; it was all so high stakes – love at the point of a loaded gun. I still feel euphoric to recall any occasion where women have found me attractive, like approval is a transfusion of vital blood. This I suspect is common. Maturation deferred, indefinitely if possible, in favour of juvenile oxytocin.
Whilst the relationship didn’t work out – or at least didn’t endure until one of us died – it was a hugely informative and transformative experience, it exposed a lot of my flaws, my neediness, my co-dependency and the warped manner in which I was unconsciously selecting partners to initiate relationships that could not succeed; simple incompatibility.
Across the coffee table on the low sofas in Pimlico, Manya sits sunken and empathetic. Her primary skill is a deep empathy with women and sympathy for men. Counselling in a relationship still appears to be somewhat taboo, lots of my friends appear averse. Is it because of the presumed sanctity of a marriage? The privacy of a partnership? Are you, like me, a revoltingly uncensored version of yourself in your most intimate partnership? A loose and slovenly blancmange in comparison to the cultivated public persona. This is why counselling is vital for me: I lose my perspective in a relationship. My tendency is to set my partner up as the fulcrum and emissary of all reality, like they are World Secretary, responsible for everything from the whereabouts of my keys, to life after death. Good therapists, who I here submit are different from mentors only in name, have a capacity to feel and intuit the requirements of their client. Whilst therapy can be underwritten by myriad methods and techniques, in practice they are dealing with human beings who are hard to quantify or categorize, especially when it comes to subtle mental patterns and psychic habits. What uniformity is there in depression? There must be such variety according to the peculiarity of the patient. Impossible to take an accurate biopsy of such subjective conditions as lethargy, sadness and despair. So whoever it is on the chair or sofa opposite you needs to be able to feel you in the space between. To deduce what you need from your breathing and your eyes. My faith in Manya’s compassion was sufficient to withstand the expiration of the first relationship that she counselled me through. In fact it enhanced my faith in her abilities. She helped me to see that it was a lost cause, that you can never base a relationship on the hope that the other person will some day change. You are in a relationship with the person as they are today. If they want to change themselves that’s encouraging but you will never change them.
My wife and I leapt into therapy with ridiculous haste. Our second date was marriage guidance. We’d dated a decade before and had a beautiful time but were not ready for commitment. I in particular was like an unmanned lawnmower chewing through a jungle of possibility. When we found each other again there was a real ‘cut to the chase’ mentality, like an arranged marriage that we arranged ourselves. ‘Do you want children? Where do you want to live?’ A blunt acceptance that there is no point in doing this for popcorn and blowjobs. We’d both come out of relationships that were of the demented romance variety and were ready for something different. Manya’s recruitment was swift, she provided objectivity and compassion and advocated for patience. She was able to point out where we were defaulting to fear-based attitudes, where we were being incommunicative. Importantly, she encouraged us to assess our unspoken intentions. Sometimes we don’t rationally address what we want or what we believe, we carry unconscious templates from inherited sources as diverse and as daft as family and films. ‘What do you think a relationship should be like?’ ‘What do you see your role as in this relationship?’ ‘What are your responsibilities?’ ‘What are your expectations?’ These questions didn’t consciously occur to me in previous relationships, they certainly weren’t explicitly addressed. But they always come up. If a month into living with someone you find yourself disgusted by their standard of tidiness it is because these questions were not addressed. If a year into your marriage you are completely bored with your sex life it is the same thing. In the marital ceremony, all the ‘richer or poorer’, ‘sickness and health’ stuff is supposed to assert the final nature of your new bond that contains these vacillitating extremes. But the language seems phatic, it might as well be the lyrics to ‘Agadoo’. ‘Do you promise to push pineapple, shake a tree?’ Perhaps the inability of the secularized church to tackle the reality of human relationships is one of the reasons for its ongoing decline.
When we attended a mandatory course in order to use a quaint village church as the set for our wedding the vicar seemed embarrassed by the idea of God. Our rituals have been divorced from the deeper meaning to which they were solely intended to refer. Why do we cry at weddings? What is being evoked? The veils and the marches, the rings and the maids, what do they refer to? Certainly death as well as rebirth is evoked in this ceremony. Are you willing to let go of the man you used to be? Of the plan you used to have?
Where in your life are you encouraged to seriously consider these questions? Are you not astonished that the space for human reflection has been colonized by consumerism and commerce? People are too ‘fucking’ busy to think about those questions and so relieved are we to have a moment of respite from the pointless drudgery of jobs we just browse Facebook or flick on a screen. I knew my previous formula for selecting mates was not working and was poorly resourced, I was looking for goddesses and projects, not companions and partners. I had odd ideas of what my role would be, more saviour than provider. I felt I could preserve my wayward youthful persona by prioritizing my identity as a performer above all else. All of us have strategies, but the strategies are limited; when you reach the limit you will likely need a mentor to guide you over the threshold. When I realized I wanted to be a husband and a father I knew that I would need some pretty hefty software updates. I did not have a family model to emulate. My mother’s family of origin was ruptured by a divorce and the toxic shame still shudders through the survivors like a private Chernobyl. My dad’s father died when he was seven, he skidded into fatherhood, mapless.
Mine was a quiet and lonely childhood, in here where I still reside. Whilst I politically and ideologically believe in tribe, family and the collective, I have been raised an individualist; the recipe: doting mother, absent father, no siblings, highly alert, low self-esteem – an off-the-shelf cake mix for narcissists, dictators, kooks and crooks. Drowning in the impossible and the possible, for both are in the infinite, I clung to any floating thing – class clown, show-off, truant, performer, addict – always looking for the light within, without. If you survive your childhood with your spirit intact, if you get through the various disappointing institutions unextinguished at some point, if you’re lucky, you may have an encounter with an awakened soul, a kindred spirit. God, it might be a book, or a song on the radio, but for your sake I hope it’s a living, breathing mentor, someone who can see your light and has kept their own light burning. As if pulled into a side street in a riot they take you to one side and say ‘you have it too’, and ‘this is the way out’.
One of Manya’s strengths in my particular case is that she has now witnessed me as an individual, as a participant in a failing relationship and now as a member of a healthy one. She knows me. She is in recovery herself and knows how addicts think, presumably through scars accrued on her own ordinary odyssey, and knows how they avoid, negate, destroy and explode. She witnesses and translates as my wife and I try to communicate, marshalling my anxious tendency to control and hers to avoid, and directs us to common ground.
Hers is a warm and powerful emotional intelligence, founded on maternal compassion. My rhetorical skills and linguistic gymnastics are easily enveloped and discarded by the potency of her kindness and understanding. As a mentor for the man that must be a father and a husband to daughters and a wife, her strength and intuition are potent. All these people to whom I have turned in making this family are in their own way mad, people with pasts littered with mistakes. I can only guess that they, like me, when invited to fill the role of guide, access an aspect of themselves not only unsullied by failure but elevated by it.