I've been thinking about the questions I'm afraid to ask.
We had our first meeting as a men’s group in January 1991: fifteen guys agreeing to meet early every other Monday morning to talk about work, women, and God. We’ve never run out of things to share!
A few years into our venture my wife and I separated, and I wound up living alone for seven years before we got back together permanently. During that span of seven years, I was invited to lunch twice by one guy in the group and once to dinner by another guy. Three meals in seven years, from a group of people I had thought were my friends.
At first, I ignored the hurt I felt at being left alone, but over the years the hurt turned to frustration and eventually to anger. Didn’t they care? Didn’t I matter? I wound up with this persistent question: What’s wrong with them?
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I never said anything; I just stewed in my hurt and anger. In the ensuing years each of them, and all of them as a group, showed up big time. After we were back together in our marriage, our younger son died tragically and there they were: encircling us in their embrace, checking in for months until they knew we were stable again. When I had prostate cancer surgery in 2012 and both knees replaced eighteen months later, every one of them showed up with food and wine and kindness and patience as I recovered. Clearly there was nothing wrong with them.
So I walked back in my memory to the season of our separation and asked the question I’d never asked, the question I was afraid to ask: What’s wrong with me? What is it about me that persuaded guys I love - and who demonstrably love me - that I didn’t need them?
What I came across was obvious: I don’t want to need anyone’s help, especially in those moments when I’m most vulnerable. I want to project an image of self-sufficiency, that I can take care of myself without relying on others. I had enough flimsy evidence to support this fantasy about my strength: oldest of five children, captain of my high-school basketball team, married to the head cheerleader, president of my graduate school class, pastor of a large church in my early thirties. I was a leader and wanted to control my own life and to convey to others that
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.“Invictus,” William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
My friends bought the notion that I could make it alone through even the toughest times because that’s what I need to believe about myself and wanted them to believe about me - even more than I wanted their care and concern.
My friend Jay wrestles with these same conflicts, though from the opposite direction. From early childhood, he took responsibility for his parents and two siblings, scanning for their every need and doing whatever it took to fix it for them. He was far too young to figure out exactly what to do, so he failed time and again; they were never okay enough for him to relax his vigorous care giving.
He lives now with the burden of taking care of three generations of his family; he succeeds more than he used to, but when he fails, he still burdens himself with the gnawing in his gut. And he wonders what’s wrong with him. I was afraid to ask What’s wrong with me; Jay avoids like typhoid the question What’s wrong with them.
For Jay, such a question threatens the notion of selfless love taught in his family and their Baptist and Presbyterian Sunday schools. To point out the failings of others feels like abandoning the unconditional love Jesus exemplified, love that shaped Jay’s character and is still the bedrock of his beliefs. Though he’s a tough-minded, very bright person, when climbing on the seesaw of his relationship with any Beloved, he pushes himself toward the ground – it must be something I’ve done – to lift them up. Like stones in a backpack, he weighs himself down to support the fantasy he has about them. Where I idealized myself, Jay sustains an idealized picture of all those whom he loves.
Why do I have so few, if any, close friends? Why do I fail in relationships with lovers? Why am I always in conflict with any authority figure: bosses, teachers, public leaders? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them?
Why don't we ask these questions? For myself, what kept me for so long from exploring these questions was fear: if they really knew who I was they wouldn’t love me. If they knew I needed them they would see me as weak, which was and is something that terrifies me. Who could possibly respect, let alone love, a weak man?
I’ve never explored this with Jay, but my guess is that he too is afraid of losing the love of those he cares for. If he started to require them to bear responsibility for their share of what wasn’t working, how long or how solid would those relationships prove to be? Is the risk of losing a dynamic - even a problematic one - worth asking the dangerous question?
For most of us who live with fears like these, we’re not making it up out of thin air. We had (and maybe still have) formative and deeply important experiences of conditional love in our closest core relationships, love that demanded we be a very specific kind of person in order to continue being loved.
I was the oldest of five, and there were many times when Mom was so busy with the younger kids that she trusted me - in fact, required me - to make it mostly on my own. She needed real help to deal with a dysfunctional husband and four younger kids, and she turned to me for that when I was still a boy. It was clear to me that my mother needed me to be strong, needed me to be a fully functional adult when I was still a child. It was an impossible task that I tried my hardest at. Who could respect, let alone love, someone weak? Probably not her, my younger self believed.
If you’re the youngest, you may feel lost in the crowd. Decade ago, my siblings and I discovered the childhood photos my parents kept. With each child, the number of photos declined until we realized that in those shoe boxes full of prints, we could find only one photo of my youngest sister by herself. Where I was expected to be strong, my sister was lost in the crowd.
If an adult complains about something like this from childhood, too often the response is Grow up! Get over it! You’re not a baby any longer! But when something is branded on a little person’s soul it’s very difficult to forget about it, to erase it like some dusty old chalk on a blackboard (remember chalk and blackboards?). And when it comes from the one person who is your entire universe, that message is etched in deep and can be almost impossible to change.
Seven decades later, I still fear being weak and therefore unlovable. So it's no wonder that I went out of my way during a tough time in my life to project an image of strength and self-sufficiency - and it's no wonder that my friends believed me. It's a role I'd been playing my whole life.
One sad consequence of avoiding the dangerous questions is that is keeps us from the kind of intimacy each of us craves. I can't allow anybody to really know me: if they knew the whole story, they wouldn't love me. It can feel safer to be alone - I spent seven years having dinner by myself, but at least everyone believed I had my shit together.
I’m better than I used to be with other people. Having finally asked time and again What’s wrong with me?, I’m comfortable enough to share bits and pieces of my discoveries with a few Beloveds. It’s like I’m testing them: I’ll tell them a new piece about me and, if they handle this without judging me and giving up their love for me, maybe I’ll try to share even more.
When it was published in 1991, I read David Schnarch’s book Constructing the Sexual Crucible. It was a follow-up to the sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and the extensive work of Masters and Johnson about sex in adult relationships. I remember the book mostly for one insight. With frightening candor, the sexual revolution suggested that intimacy would be enhanced if we made love to one another with our eyes open, looking directly into one another. Schnarch took it a step further: the ultimate intimacy is loving one another with our I’s open, not just our eyes but our souls. For all these years, the notion of this kind of transparency lingers as my desire in all my relationships: to be so transparent that we know one another and love one another through and through.
But I’m still very cautious. I’m seldom certain that any person is a safe place to explore these fears. Most of the time I feel – and perhaps you feel this way too – like I need to hold onto these stories because I need to hide my full self to survive in these relationships. Most often, I conclude that asking the dangerous questions about fear and love is too great a risk to my sense of self-worth and my personal safety, even with the people I’m closest to.