Dr. John Young                                                                                                          2/4/07

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Relationship Preservation

            Perhaps I made a mistake by entitling this sermon Relationship Preservation. I do not think that people can or should try to pickle their intimacies. It does not usually work if people get jealous and try to keep their spouse safe by isolating them or getting possessive. People rot when they are closely controlled, and intimacy is stifled by domination, jealousy or possessiveness. That usually demonstrates more about the character weaknesses and lack of self-confidence on the part of the dominator/possessor than it demonstrates anything worthy about love. Authoritarian relationships do not nurture love, and they do not and should not work in a liberated, democratic, and free world. Unitarian Universalists believe that such excuses for intimacy are anti-religious and sacrilegious in a sacred world embraced by natural Creation.

            The strong foundation of any enduring marriage relationship is friendship. Ideally, you become friends before you become lovers, just as you become an adult before you enter into a marital relationship. Biology and nature are not always our natural allies in this regard. Biologically, males are attracted to females as soon as they can produce children, and an article I read this week produced persuasive evidence that women can smell a man with significantly different genetic characteristics, and statistically are more likely to have sex with that male even if they are already married to someone else. So, to build intimacies that endure and that live up to our personal and social goals, we all need, significantly, to overcome nature and our own biological drives in order to love as most of us want to love. People are not naturally monogamous. Every modern person has plenty of opportunities to stray, and the biological drives and cultural reinforcements to try; so, fidelity is a learned art and remains a life-long discipline.

            An enduring friendship requires mutual: affection, respect, reciprocity, and commitment in adversity, regularity, continuity, and at least some continuing intimacy. Contemporary life does not make enduring friendships easy. Many of us move around, our ideals and priorities change, and relatively few friends make it through all those transformations. Computers and telephones make it easier to stay in touch. However, these verbal contacts, if they are to become or remain real, people need to continue to see and literally to touch each other. I have talked a better game about friendship than I have lived. My young adult children are doing a better job of nurturing friendships than I have done so far in my life. They work harder at it, not only through daily or weekly e-mails and cell phone calls but also by flying all over the country to be there when their friends need them for celebrations or emergencies. It is a high priority for my son and daughter, and I suspect it will pay off with a good many enduring intimate friendships. My children are an inspiration to me in their friendships.

            I have high hopes for congregations in terms of their capacity to nurture intimate connections. Many of my closest friends have been my fellow congregants and my colleagues in the other organizations and institutions in which I participated. But, as we all have experienced, our roles, our relative success, and our enduring participation make significant differences in how those friendships flourish. Some ministers resolutely do not make friends with their congregants, in order to maintain their desired professional standing and separateness. If some one leaves a congregation and another friend remains active, or one leaves the job and the other stays at the place of work where they met, their relationship is often in jeopardy too.

            So, let’s talk instead about sustaining relationships. It being our marriage reconfirmation Sunday service, let’s focus on enduring romantic relationships. When they work well, they are probably the best relationship that people experience, with the possible exception of raising children and nurturing grandchildren, which are bonus blessings for some of those enduring romantic relationships. You sustain an intimate relationship by: 1. getting your own act together and continuing to grow and evolve as an individual, 2. remaining as attentive a spouse as your ever were as a suitor, 3. realizing that nurturing your relationship is often the way to nourish your own happiness, and 4. surmounting your ego, pride, and hubris, a life-long battle, in order to become your sacred self and to sustain the relationship that you both deserve, and, at your best, desire.

            Now, here are my amplifications of these four necessary ways to sustain an intimate relationship.

How do we get our acts together? Don’t idolize yourself, or get too enamored by your own best qualities. When you are too full of yourself, you make an irresistible target for your intimates. Whatever you think your primary virtues are, give them a rest at least once a day in your most intimate relationships. Give the other person chances to breathe. When you are feeling particularly strong, ask your spouse or intimate to help you to understand what you are overdoing or not getting around to that needs attention, and then pay attention, and then do something real about what they have said. They love you; they want the best for you. They are and will be the best advocates for your effective growth and evolution. In the current AARP magazine, 71% of adults say that “finding true love is life’s top achievement.”

            As I said in the reconfirmation ceremony, court your long-term love. Taking your beloved for granted is a recipe for failure and unhappiness. Nobody likes it. Take time everyday, certainly every week, whether you have time or not! Your marriage is the best investment you have ever made, or it should be; so, if you are not spending real time on it everyday, you are a terrible investor or have your priorities mixed up. I don’t mean sitting in front of a television together, or being home, but unavailable emotionally or physically. I mean being truly present, listening and paying attention, and responding in ways that make sense or feel supportive to the other person. If you are not courting the person you love you are not doing your job in life. Sally Field, the actress, said in the current issues of This Week magazine: I’ve been divorced twice, had lovers, and at 60 years old, I’ve never known true love. Like many women, I was really never taught about what to look for in a man. It all comes from what relationship yo had with your father, and I never had a good relationship with either my father or my stepfather. One was terribly passive and needed care, and one was terribly aggressive, and dominating. Whatever a soul mate is, I’ve never had that. You have to be taught how to be loved. Some things I’ve never been good at. That’s probably one.”

            In a marriage, there are the two people, and there is the relationship, and the relationship does and needs to have a life of its own. It is there to feed you and the other person, but you are also there to nourish, cherish, celebrate, support, and nurture the relationship. The sum of the relationship is larger than the two individuals. That is why every one in your intimate circle mourns if your relationship fails. You are literally not what you were to them. The world is less for every loving mature relationship that fails. Sometimes a much larger circle is lessened by the loss of your relationship. Some of the world’s light goes out; some of the hope that the world has disappears.

            So often by the time a counselor or clergy is sitting with a struggling couple, they have gotten stuck in their egos. They are cornered by their pride and hubris, and they are so imprisoned by themselves that they cannot see how much they love each other, how much they will lose by destroying their relationship, how much what they care about is embodied in their intimate other and in their relationship. This is a tragedy.

 Another hope I have for each congregation I serve, and each member of those congregations, is that they will use the congregation to strengthen their relationships. Carlos and Barbara stand ready to offer marriage enrichment periodically in a uniquely UU fashion. This congregation is packed with people who have loved, some whose loves endure, and some whose loves have failed, and a good many of us with both experiences. We could learn so much from each other about sustaining relationships. These relationships are central to our lives and our faiths, and, too often, we are afraid to trust each other, and so we do not ask, share, befriend, or join together to help one another find solutions to the struggles in our marriages. There is no one in this room that has not loved, and there is no one in this room that has always done so without pain or error. If we truly want to be a loving community, we must find a myriad of ways to help one another to nurture our intimate relationships.

 I am delighted that a group of us are helping UUCJ to become a Green Sanctuary congregation. We need to green ourselves and the world. But even more important is the greening of our intimate relationships. We must help our loves to become and remain sustainable. Thoreau said that “wilderness was the preservation of the world.” I say that relationship sustainability is the preservation of the human future.