Relationships Are Like Pianos
Jane Thickstun
February 13, 2005
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland

 

 Reading

The reading is by Unitarian Universalist minister, Gary Kowalski.  It’s called “Valentines”, and is from his meditation manual called Green Mountain Spring.

            I have a piano in my house that I rarely play.  When I practice, which is usually twenty minutes a week, I feel a mixture of frustration and enjoyment.  Although I tell myself that I’d like to play better, I don’t give music an important place in my life.  Sometimes I wish I didn’t even own a piano. Whenever I have fantasies about living in a rustic cabin in the woods, the piano feels like an anchor and impediment to my freedom.  But a piano is a nice piece of furniture.  Owning it gives me a sense of settledness and solidity.

            Many of us have relationships that are like pianos.  They become part of the furniture of our existence.  We may have purchased our pianos or begun our relationships with a sense of high ambition and excitement.  We dreamed of making beautiful music together.  Now we’ve settled into a routine of plodding mediocrity.

            Becoming a better lover is like becoming a better piano player.  It’s partly in the fingers and partly in the soul, but there is one principle common to both – to give it a place of priority in our lives.  Twenty minutes a week is not enough time to become a Horowitz or Scott Joplin, nor is it enough time to build intimacy, trust, and camaraderie with another person.  Whether you aim to make it to Carnegie Hall or to have a good relationship, the rule is the same.  You need more than passion.  The art of loving, like mastering the keyboard, takes practice, practice, practice.

 

Sermon

 

            How many of you have a piano?  How often do you play it?  How many have a relationship that’s like a piano?  Have you ever taken for granted some important person in your life, figuring they would always be there, while you went off and directed your attention to other aspects of your life?  

            In the reading, Kowalski is speaking specifically of romantic relationships, but we can treat any relationship like a piano.   We can settle into “a routine of plodding mediocrity” with just about anybody: parents, children, siblings, roommates.  It doesn’t matter whether we live with them or not, though it’s probably easier for a piano to be neglected under your own roof.  That’s because we like playing other people’s pianos!   At least I assume it’s the same as with guitars – I’ve noticed that if my guitar is sitting out and I have people over, if there is a gentleman under 35, he is usually attracted to my guitar.  And no matter how well tuned I think I have it, he will invariably pick it up and spend a good 15 minutes tuning it!

            Which brings up a good point: like pianos, relationships need to be tuned.  When the notes start to sound off-key, you don’t throw away the piano.  Often people wait too long, until it starts sounding really bad, but usually, if they care for it at all, they eventually call in the piano tuner to tune it.  With pianos, we recognize that we lack the skills or tools or the objective ear to tune them properly.  We are often slow to admit that we may lack those same things to tune our relationships.  But if your relationship hasn’t been tuned in a while, it can be worth paying someone to help you tune it.  There are professional relationship tuners, also called counselors or therapists, who are trained to listen for the notes that are off, and to help you hear objectively and suggest the necessary adjustments.

            We can also tune our relationships by communicating well.  It’s important to be able to express our needs, though without expecting them to be met.  If we don’t voice it, we stand no chance of it being met, but we can also overburden a relationship if we voice our needs as expectations.   Communicating well in relationship includes clearing up potential misunderstandings.  Because we are not as much alike as we sometimes like to think we are, misunderstandings happen all the time in all of our relationships.  If you think there’s even a small chance you might be misunderstanding someone, it pays to check it out, especially if it is something that feels negative towards you.  So often, what’s going on with the other person has nothing to do with us, but we can imagine all kinds of horrible things if we don’t check it out.

            Another way to tune our relationships is by forgiving.  This is needed when we check out those things we’re imagining, and we find out they’re true.  Or when the other person, acting from their fears, hurts us in some way.  Of course it’s so much easier to forgive if the other can recognize how they’ve hurt us and express regret.  Apologies are the tuning forks of relationships; the instruments perhaps most useful to us in our ongoing tuning of relationships.  Some are better at it than others.  It is a skill worth having – if you are adept at using this tool, you may not have to call in the professional tuner.

            I’ll give you an example of a circumstance where this tool may be needed to repair a relationship.  It’s a little story I got recently on email, called “Having Mom Over for Dinner.”

            Brian Hester invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian’s mother couldn’t help but keep noticing how beautiful Brian’s roommate, Stephanie, was. Mrs. Hester had long been suspicious of a relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious. Over the course of the evening, while watching the two react, Mrs. Hester started to wonder if there was more between Brian and Stephanie than met the eye.               Reading his mom’s thoughts, Brian volunteered, “I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just roommates.”

                About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, “Ever since your mother came to dinner, I’ve been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don’t suppose she took it, do you?”

                Brian said, “Well, I doubt it, but I’ll send her an e-mail just to be sure.” So he sat and wrote:  Dear Mother: I’m not saying that you “did” take the gravy ladle from the house. I’m not saying that you “did not” take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.   Love, Brian

                Several days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:  Dear Son:  I’m not saying that you “do” sleep with Stephanie. And I’m not saying that you “do not” sleep with Stephanie. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.  Love, Mom

            Just like pianos, our relationships need nurturing and caring.  “Practice, practice, practice!” as Kowalski says.  We need to spend time with our loved ones.  There is no substitute.  I’m sure you’ve all heard how people have been asked at the end of their lives what they might have done differently, and invariably the answer is that they wish they had not worried so much about work, but had spent more time with their loved ones. 

            It can be difficult, however.  Not just because work places so many demands on us, and we have a real desire to succeed and make a difference, but because our relationships themselves can be difficult, and it’s often easier to bury ourselves in work and other things than to confront the problems in our relationships.   It’s easy to justify working, and we may not even see that we are avoiding confronting problems in our relationships.  We may settle for “good enough,” thinking this is as good as it can be, not knowing how to make it better.  We may not trust ourselves anymore to produce the music we wish to hear by interacting with that piano, or that person. 

            Romantic relationships are certainly among the most difficult of relationships.

            One way to explain the dynamics of romantic relationships that makes a lot of sense to me is the Imago theory of Harville Hendrix.  He wrote the book, Getting the Love You Want, that you may have heard of.  The book is well-known for a reason– it’s well-written and fascinating.  It talks about the attraction couples start out with, and the romantic phase when everything seems perfect, or close enough, and it seems like this other person will meet all of our needs.  Then Hendrix describes the Power Struggle, when this perfect person becomes a demon out to get us.  Many relationships don’t survive this phase.  Or they manage to achieve a truce, a way they can live with the difficulties without really working through them.

            Hendrix was curious why it is that we are attracted only to certain people, but those attractions can be very strong.  Based on his therapy work with many couples, he came to the realization that we are attracted to people who have the predominant character traits of the people who raised us.  Our subconscious looks for someone who has both the positive and negative traits of our parents or early caregivers, because it believes that this is the person who can heal the wounds of our childhood.  We all have some emotional and psychological damage from childhood, since no parent is able to perfectly meet all the complex needs of chilren. When we fall in love, it is like we are meeting someone who says to our subconscious, “Hi, I’m like your parents only I’m going to meet all your needs and never hurt you.”

            Then often as the relationship becomes committed, the hurts start.  Then it’s like the person says to our subconscious, “Hi, I’m so much like your parents, I’m going to hurt you in all the ways they did.  I’m going to push all your buttons, I’ll dig in where you’re most sensitive.”  Or maybe it’s just that we get more distant.  Hendrix suggests that the attraction we feel when we fall in love is as much or more for the negative traits as for the positive traits of our parents.  He asks why do the negative traits have such an appeal?  He says, “If people chose mates on a logical basis, they would look for partners who compensated for their parents’ inadequacies, rather than duplicated them.  If your parents wounded you by being unreliable, for example, the sensible course of action would be to marry a dependable person, someone who would help you overcome your fear of abandonment.  If your parents wounded you by being overprotective, the practical solution would be to look for someone who allowed you plenty of psychic space so that you could overcome your fear of absorption.  The part of your brain that directed your search for a mate, however, was not your logical, orderly new brain; it was your time-locked, myopic old brain.  And what your old brain was trying to do was re-create the conditions of your upbringing, in order to correct them.  Having received enough nurturing to survive, but not enough to feel satisfied, it was attempting to return to the scene of your original frustration so that you could resolve your unfinished business.” (p. 35)

            Or phrased another way, “we hunger for love from our original caretakers or from people who are so similar to them that on an unconscious level we have them merged.”  But the question arose for Hendrix, ‘How can our partners heal us if they have some of the negative traits as our caretakers?  Aren’t they the least likely candidates to soothe our emotional injuries?”  If the daughter of a distant, self-absorbed father unconsciously selects a workaholic for a husband, how can her marriage satisy her need for closeness and intimacy?  If the son of a depressed, sexually repressed mother chooses to marry a depressed, frigid wife, how can he recapture his sensuality and joy?  If a girl whose father died when she was young moves in with a man who refuses to marry her, how can she feel loved and secure? (p. 161)

            “An answer began to take shape in my mind,”Hendrix says.  “It was the only logical conclusion.  If people were going to be healed, I conjectured, their partners would have to change.  The workaholic husband would have to willingly redirect some of his energy back to his wife.  The depressed, frigid wife would have to recover her energy and sensuality.  The reluctant lover would have to lower his barriers to intimacy.  Then and only then would they be able to give their partners the consistent nurturing they had been looking for all their lives.”

            He continues, “It was at this point that I began to see the unconscious selection process in a new light: while it was often true that what one partner needed the most was what the other partner was least able to give, it also happened to be the precise area where that partner needed to grow!”  In our efforts to heal our partners, we can recover an essential part of ourselves that we have lost or repressed.  “The unconscious selection process has brought together two people who can either hurt each other or heal each other, depending upon their willingness to grow and change.” (p. 162)

            Partnering with another person in a committed relationship provides a great opportunity to grow, both personally and spiritually.  Actually, any relationship can provide that opportunity. It can be a spiritual practice, if it is practiced with intention, just like piano playing can be a spiritual practice if practiced with intention.  It takes commitment, patience, and a willingness to let go of the need to control, to have it our way.  It takes a good dose of faith, to believe in our inherent worth and dignity no matter how much it seems like the other may be questioning it.  If they tell you you’re good-for-nothing pond scum, you have to detach yourself and remember that you have a divine light shining within you.  It takes a good dose of faith to believe in the inherent worth and dignity of the other when they are behaving in ways that make them seem like pond scum.  It takes a healthy sense of self-worth to be able to look at ourselves through the other’s eyes and admit that maybe some things about us need to change.  It takes a firm belief in our own value and the value of others to be able to withstand the ebb and flow of affection and affirmation that is normal in relationship.

            Let us play the pianos in our lives often and well.  Let us make beautiful music that will send its waves throughout the world.  Let us stand firm in our faith in the inherent worth and dignity of all, and practice the spiritual discipline that our relationships offer us.  Let us keep our pianos well-tuned, and let us practice, practice, practice.

            Amen.