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.

Being fully present in the moment

One of my favourite Times columnists, Michael Gove, wrote yesterday expressing his longing for "pure immersion in the moment". He said he'd love to read our thoughts about the best way of being "fully present", but when I went onto the Times website I found that they give us a maximum of 300 characters to comment! Yes, you read right - 300 characters, not 300 words. How on earth can I squeeze all that I have to say about this subject into 300 characters without resorting to TxtSpk?

I'm not going to try and compete with his suggestion of surfing, as risk-taking just isn't the way I get my buzz, though I can see how a feeling of danger can bring about a total focus on what's going on for you at that moment, I'm sure that facing a huge wave and concentrating on survival would mean you don't suddenly find yourself thinking about the shopping list or the person you were supposed to be phoning or the report for the boss. But there are other ways of getting that pure focus. (Actually, I was surprised to find a man asking about this - my impression has been that men are much better than us at focusing on whatever they're doing and forgetting about everything else, whilst women tend to juggle lots more different activities and are not so good at shutting out the world and its distractions, which is probably the way we're programmed so that we could be good mothers. Babies wouldn't survive very well if their mothers were too good at focusing on what they're doing to the exclusion of everything else.)

But the question was about ways of being fully present in the moment, which is, as he says, quite rare these days as people tend to rush around so much - the developments of technology, instead of those optimistic fantasies of a life of leisure which I remember reading about in sci-fi when I was young, have brought us more pressure, higher expectations, and much less peace and quiet. To be able to focus on the moment these days you need to switch off a huge number of gadgets! One of the things that I find crucial to my sanity is the ability to switch things off. Even now as I write, I've got the email closed and have signed out of Messenger - useful as they are, these things are likely to distract me from my writing.

Yes, writing has to be near the top of my list - being creative is something you can fully immerse yourself in, so much so that I've been known at times to forget about supper because I was so immersed in a story. And I expect people who are creative in other ways - painting or sculpture or whatever - probably experience the same thing, total immersion in what you are creating.

Praying can sometimes do that for me - not always, because often I am very distracted, but now and again there are these special moments when I am totally and wonderfully aware of God's presence, and nothing else matters, there's just me and him and total bliss. Even better than making love - which of course is another opportunity for totally immersing yourself in the moment and forgetting about the boring and mundane elements of life.

And then there are those little moments that are on offer but so often we don't feel we have the time to really enjoy, like watching a rainbow or a butterfly, or pausing to cuddle a cat. Children are so much better at this - somehow we lose it as we grow up and allow ourselves to become more and more burdened with To Do lists. But the choice is still there - seeing the neighbour's cat in our back garden when I go out with the rubbish, I could tell myself I've got a zillion things to do, or I could stop for a minute and really enjoy stroking the cat. I find if I allow myself that moment of pure delight, I then have much more energy to tackle my To Do list afterwards.