Vulnerability and the Royal Wedding

or: the price of our freedom is loss of security

Brené Brown got me thinking about vulnerability. (Warning: that video clip I linked to is about 20 minutes' long. Well worth the time though.) And then came the Royal Wedding, and surprisingly it came with not just lace and finery and fairytale coach and horses, but some food for thought too.

One of the things that moved me in Will and Kate's wedding was something in the sermon, about how marriage can provide a space in which people can grow, and be transformed into who they are meant to be - or in other words, grow and fulfil their potential. This is true, of course, only when a marriage is functioning the way it ought to function, and the bishop did talk about the importance of giving each other space and not trying to control the other person - which sadly does happen, and it's not just men trying to dominate - my own gender has its own manipulative methods. There's a sad old joke about marriage that goes: what are the three words on a bride's mind on her wedding day? aisle, altar, hymn. Say it out loud and see what you get. My own husband knows he's safe because there wasn't an altar at our wedding :) but seriously - I know my role as his wife is not to try and change him but to love him as he is, and that is exactly the key to what the bishop was talking about. Marriage, when it's functioning the way it's supposed to, means each of you is in a place of safety, knowing you are loved as you are, and it's in that safety of being accepted as you are that you can grow and be transformed.

Brené Brown talks about the need to make ourselves vulnerable in order to receive the love we need, and I'm wondering: is this problem she has identified perhaps a newish problem, as a result of changes in western society over perhaps the last five decades or so? Let me try and unpack this thought.

Marriage as a place of safety, where you know you are loved as you are and therefore you feel safe enough to explore things and to find out more about who you really are, you feel secure enough to take some risks and discover to your amazement that, yes, you can actually do XYZ... this kind of marriage is more rare in the west today, because at some stage we rebelled against "the institution of marriage" and claimed the freedom to do whatever we like, we looked in disdain at the old-fashioned ways of previous generations and said: what's the point of staying in a marriage when you don't love each other any more - putting the cart before the horse, not realising that love in a marriage is not primarily about having romantic feelings but about choosing and promising to show love to the other person even when you don't feel like it, so that they will have that safe place in which they can be themselves... and also so that the children will grow up in a safe place.

So today we have people getting married but not really knowing that they're in a safe place, not knowing if/when the other person will get fed up with them for some reason, or have a mid-life crisis, or meet someone else and fall in love and then, according to the values du jour, they will naturally get up and go because, according to the values du jour, there is no point staying in a marriage when the feeling is gone.

It seems to me that at least part of the reason there is so much of this feeling of unworthiness that Brené Brown talks about, part of the reason why so many people are scared to be openly themselves in front of others, is because we in the west have rebelled against the very things that were giving us a sense of security, safety, belonging - in something very much resembling a teenage tantrum, we threw away our security blankets, yelling that we're all growed-up and don't need this stuff any more, and now we're scared and lonely and we can't get our security blankets back because... well... how? Once we've made it perfectly ok and acceptable for someone to walk out on a marriage at any given moment for any reason whatsoever, how can we now make it not ok again? We demanded that freedom, but of course the flip side of Mrs Smith being free to walk out on a marriage is that she has to live with the knowledge that at any point in time Mr Smith might walk out on her, so the price of that freedom is the loss of security.

And children are growing up with the knowledge that this is what life is like - even if their own parents stay together, they'll know some kids whose parents have split up, and this is bound to make them grow up more anxious - if I see this stuff happening in other families, how can I know that my world won't turn upside down tomorrow?

So of course people are feeling vulnerable and scared. We have - out of our desire for greater freedom, and a contempt for old-fashioned values without taking the time to explore their merits - removed something that was providing us with a sense of security and belonging, and turned our world into a much scarier and lonelier place.

When marriage functions the way it should, it can be a safe place in which two people can grow and fulfil their potential; a safe place for them to bring up children; and a safe place out of which they can reach out to other people, to those who are lonely. If you're in a place of safety, you can do that, you can be more generous, you can show more kindness, you can think of others because you're not worrying about your own situation.

Safety, stability, commitment - these things may sound boring, but we need them so much! and we have to be willing to give them if we want to receive them.