Autonomy, Intimacy, and Relationship

Kathy and I have spent the past two pleasantly cool days doing gardening.  Now, in your mind’s eye you might imagine a sweet gray-haired couple side by side in their yard, bending and moving and pulling and tossing in a dance of companionship.  Sorry to disillusion you.  She works on hers, and I work on mine, and each of us comes around from time to time to help the other, to observe and comment or encourage.  And we stop to have lunch together, and stop each other in the afternoon in order to retain enough energy to prepare dinner.  During these days of working like this, I have reflected repeatedly on our dance of autonomy and intimacy, and its difference

from that opening image of more collaborative gardening. 

Autonomy!  God, I had not thought of that word for years, and yet now it was in the forefront of my thoughts, this second day of gardening, almost constantly.  I remembered Dr. Pikunas, my Adolescent Psychology professor, his strong Lithuanian accent forcing me to really concentrate on every word, helping me to notice in him a kindness, a yearning for us to learn.  Autonomy, he taught, was an adolescent’s urge to lead his or her own life, beyond even the love of parents, to replace that nurturing with independent effort for the sake of self-determination.   

I wondered, as I was aware of Kathy working without me because I chose to work alone, if it’s a “guy thing”, my natural desire to retain a certain autonomy, to prefer to work on my patch of yard, hoping to do it my way.  I was aware, too, with great waves of emotion that swayed me like the gusts of wind swayed these huge trees, of how much I treasured Kathy there on the other side of the house, even as I continued to enjoy working here.  I was glad for my occasional need to go back there for this or that, to load the wheelbarrow with material, or to take a bucket of rakings to the compost pile.  It warmed my heart and gladdened my eyes to see her, her green camping shovel in one hand, her head turning from side to side as she surveyed the ground for a new home for that clump of something green in her other hand.  I might say something to her, to satisfy her desire for my communication, or I might choose to just tacitly enjoy her as one might wonder at a bird at a feeder, just the other side of the window, close enough to touch but wild enough to be revered as other.

At lunch on our porch the second day I shared with Kathy that I had been, for the past day and a half, reflecting on this dance of autonomy and intimacy of our days gardening.  And I shared with her what I had come to decide about us, and found leading me to wonder at our daughters and their husbands.  I told her that I think we trade some autonomy for intimacy, and that in doing so we lose something, some part of our freedom.  I told her when I wondered why we would voluntarily accept this diminishment, I knew right away.  It was in trade for loneliness.  Our souls or psyches or spirits move us to choose autonomy limited by love over unlimited autonomy burdened by loneliness.

Perhaps this is a guy thing.  Maybe women reading this will just shake their heads and wonder how men can be such dopes.  Perhaps it’s not a gender issue at all, that some of us just want to be alone sometimes, but are grateful that the other is there for us to join for lunch or dinner or for an occasional walk-by, with its welcome affirmation or almost-tolerable challenge of our way of doing things in our part of the yard. 

Autonomy is only a prize while one is attempting to wrest it from relationship.  An image occurs to me, a memory.  Two little boys are pulling on each other, perhaps for a toy that each wants for himself.  Each tries to pull the toy away from the other, and while they are pulling, they both remain on their feet.  When one wrestles the toy out of the other’s hands, both fall down.  Balance is in the wrestling, the pulling.  And yet if it is wrestled away, we are left on the ground, holding onto an empty, lifeless thing, a Holy Grail that turns out to be just an empty cup.    I told Kathy, there at lunch together on our porch overlooking her prairie/wildflower garden, that I wonder if my sons-in-law are goofballs like me, and if my daughters suffer the same ache and frustration that Kathy does with me.  I wonder if we will learn from each other, young and old, male and female, the appropriate balance of autonomy and intimacy. 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.