"Now I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it, but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with him and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man."
— Jacqueline Kennedy, after the death of President Kennedy
This poignant quote by Jacqueline Kennedy highlights the tragedy of not having the chance to grow old together. Her words might serve to remind us, as I explore the older couple relationship, that as difficult as it may be to grow old together, it is also an opportunity in life that is not to be missed.
The inevitable result of engaging in a long-term relationship is to eventually suffer the loss of one's partner. That's the deal — unless the couple decides to end it all and jump off the Forth Bridge together.
I am suggesting that if the fear of potential loss is not made conscious or expressed explicitly, then paradoxically, the fear will inform and influence the way we live our lives as we grow old together.
Alison Lyons and Janet Mattinson in their seminal paper, Individuation and Marriage, ask: whether one person can partner another and at the same time develop his wholeness and capacity for individuation? For this paper I would like to define individuation as "becoming one's own self" and more specifically as "remaining one's own self."
As people move into old age, I am suggesting that the tension between the longing for intimacy and the desire to be alone is heightened and that this period is a final opportunity to take on the working through and the struggle to reconcile the opposites — intimacy and autonomy — and, in so doing, hold onto our sense of self. In Jungian terms, to individuate.
Often however that struggle for balance is abandoned and there is a collapse into one position or another. The couple either become merged or grow distant from one another. Some couples remain glued to each other in a malignant dependency; unable to act independently. Alternatively, some couples give up all hope of interdependence and go their separate ways, to live in parallel existences.
I am suggesting that there is an added dimension to our work with the older couple: the shared knowledge, either conscious or unconscious, that the relationship will suffer the loss of one of them, in the scheme of things, sooner rather than later. I have often thought that it is the fear of death that stops us from living; for the instant we claim life and truly know we are alive we must simultaneously know we are going to die.
All our lives we are struggling with the tension between dependence and independence, between intimacy and autonomy, but the dynamic takes on a fresh urgency at the later stages of life. I am suggesting, or perhaps hoping, that something creative can be achieved if we continue to hold and sustain that tension of opposites. If we know, really know what it is like to be a couple and are ultimately able to internalise the creativity that comes from bringing two opposites together; then perhaps we will be able to Let Go and Get On.
© Pauline Hodson