Togetherness.

When I think of the word togetherness, one image jumps to mind: the image of a man and woman in their fifties who lived around the corner from my house when I was growing up.  I don’t remember much about the man, but his wife intrigued me. She always wore her dark hair in braids which she pinned around her head like an Alpine maiden.  She dressed simply and never adorned herself with make-up or jewelry.

The old neighborhood couple mostly kept to themselves and didn’t seem to have any family or friends, but I never saw them alone. Wherever I saw one of them, the other was always close by.  When their car passed us on the street, we could see the woman sitting right next to her husband in the middle of the front seat as if there were an imaginary third passenger sitting next to the door.  (Fifty years ago cars had bench seats in the front and back. It was common to see teenaged girls sitting in the middle of the front seat when riding with their steady boyfriends, but older women always sat by the door.)  At first, it seemed sweet and kind of romantic that she chose to sit right next to her husband as they drove, but after a while, something about it seemed off-kilter–it began to look clingy and desperate.  I wondered if she felt stifled or if he felt trapped.

Togetherness.  What is it anyway?  Can too much of it become a problem in a relationship? To begin I needed a definition, so the first place I looked was in my treasured two-volume Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary, copyright 1937. I found the word together easily enough, but togetherness wasn’t even listed as an entry word!  Togetherness, it seems, had not even been invented yet!

On-line dictionaries gave neutral definitions such as “affectionate closeness,” and “warm fellowship” and mentioned “a feeling of being intimate and belonging together.”  Within that context, it hardly seemed like a potentially divisive issue. I continued to search for essays and articles mentioning togetherness.

I found something interesting by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite writers.  I feel a kinship with Rilke because, like my grandparents, he is of Bohemian-Austrian descent and was born about the same time as they were. His writings are tender and wise and painfully lovely.  In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke defined togetherness as “a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement, which robs either one part or both of his fullest freedom and development.” When I read that quote, it hit me right between the eyes.  I wondered what he meant by “reciprocal agreement.”  There was no reciprocal agreement in my own young marriage.

My husband and I began our lives together flying blind.  The issue of togetherness never came about through an agreement; it had never been discussed or agreed upon.  It simply emerged and solidified on its own because of our unspoken, unacknowledged neediness.   It took us many years of trial and error to examine our relationship and learn to balance togetherness and individuality.  By breaking free of our old, constricting habits of relating to one another, we finally gained an understanding of one another’s needs and weaknesses.  It was only then that we were able to forge a truly loving relationship.

Getting there was gut-wrenching and grueling.   We were only twenty-one years old when we got married.  We were scarcely twenty-two when we became parents.  My husband needed someone who he could count on to be faithful and never leave.  I needed someone who would shelter me from the outside world.  We tried to squeeze ourselves into the traditional marital arrangement of our parents–breadwinner-caregiver.  It was all we knew.  The result was that each of us became broken approximations of our true selves.  He felt duty-bound to be a good provider, but was daunted by the immensity of the task. Financial struggles meant personal failure to him. He worked two jobs and had no time for himself. He became resentful.

I hid from the world by throwing myself into the role of homemaker and selfless wife and mother.  I was puzzled by the anger that simmered deep down inside me, and then I felt guilty for feeling angry.  Wasn’t this what I wanted?  What was wrong with me?  Why did I feel like I was shrinking with each passing day?  I felt like I was in danger of disappearing altogether.  Depression and joylessness set in.  I needed help. We needed help.

There were times when our relationship felt hopeless, but neither one of us was willing to quit.  We were both stubborn and proud and loved one another with startling ferocity. That alone made it impossible for either of us to walk away from the other.  Counseling helped.  So did self-reflection and growing up.  We had struggled mightily and finally got it right.

I understand the old neighborhood couple now, especially in the context of Rilke’s quote, read in its entirety:

“Togetherness between two people is an impossibility and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement, which robs either one part or both of his fullest freedom and development.  Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them, which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.” (Letters to A Young Poet)

Like the old neighborhood couple, my husband and I had finally achieved our own “wonderful living side by side.”  And I think maybe it’s possible that in those last years if we had owned a car with a bench seat up front, I, too, would have slid over to the middle and sat right next to him wherever we went.