Love without common ground
In 2001, my home town hosted the Special Olympics. Hearing an advert on the radio for volunteers, my father – possibly frustrated by his student daughter’s tendency to spend summer holidays watching bad TV while ironing as some semblance of meaningful activity – suggested I might like to sign up. It was a good idea, as I had a memorable summer assisting the tennis teams and having fun with the other volunteers. I still have the volunteers t-shirt, and the traditional hat covered in badges that an Austrian tennis player gave me as a thank-you.
During a lull between matches, we got onto the subject of our relationships with our parents – not a surprising topic for young adults. Most of us got on better with one parent than the other. Then one volunteer came out with a controversial statement. If you were closer to one parent, he claimed, it was because you loved them more than the other one. This prompted furious debate, left unresolved when we broke off to return to our duties.
At that point in time, I got on better with my dad than my mum. We had much more in common – shared interests in canoeing, science and planes, and an antipathy to shopping, hairdressers and clothes. Common ground helps a great deal to oil the wheels of a relationship. It’s something I still notice now. If someone likes reading Margaret Atwood, jokes about their hopelessness at sport, or quotes ‘The Life of Brian’, then it’s far easier for me to get a conversation going, and I quickly feel comfortable with them. But although I had less in common with my mum than with my dad, I loved them equally.
In general, our family shared plenty of common ground. Friends of all of us came regularly to the house, so when their names were mentioned over the dinner table, we all knew who we were talking about and were genuinely interested in what was going on with them. For many years we had only one television, so we watched the same programmes, and even after my sister and I acquired our own TVs, we often sat down together for family viewing. As a result, we had plenty of shared jokes and quotes: “He’s her lobster!”, “You are all individuals! – I’m not”, and to this day when we say goodbye, we mime “Goodbye – chook”, accompanied by the appropriate hand gestures. We mimicked my father’s frequently shouted admonition to my sister when she hadn’t tidied away her shoes – “Your BOOTS are spreading!”, and frequently referenced childhood incidents such as my sister’s asking at bathtime to “wash her sandpits” and my hoarse screeching of “Scaffolding!” when I developed an obsession with said structures at the same time as suffering tonsillitis.
That common family ground started to crumble when my sister and I moved away from home. But the first time I truly noticed the change was when I came home for Christmas after the first few months of a year spent living in Germany. I was full of everything I’d seen and done in a completely new country. But I noticed that my family quickly ran out of interest in talking about it. They had never been to the town, they knew nothing about my study, they had not met my fellow students. Under such circumstances, it was difficult to maintain a conversation. Instead, they switched to the subject that was common to them all – the mobile phones they had recently acquired. While they animatedly debated the merits of their handsets and compared their phone plans, it was my turn to find it hard to join in, being quite content with a pay phone for my weekly calls home.
That gap only widened as we all moved to different cities to live – in my case ultimately to a different country. We set off on different tracks, developing different interests and opinions. By the time my father remarried after my mother’s death, we each had a partner who had scarcely experienced our family as it originally was, further influencing us in different directions. As time went on, common ground became increasingly hard to find.
Nowadays, we keep in touch via regular emails and meet up every few months for a weekend. We ask each other how things are going, how is work, how was your holiday? But the lack of common ground keeps these conversations polite and superficial. Instead of looking back on our shared family holiday, we talk about holiday destinations the rest of us do not know, admiring photos of views that are pretty but otherwise mean nothing to us. When mentioning colleagues and friends, they are mostly just names, as we have never met them. When the UK-based family dissects the latest Netflix shows my husband and I have no idea what they are talking about; the same goes if we relate the latest international film we’ve seen. While they compare the virtues and vices of their electric cars, we travel by bike.
Weekends together are special occasions, with an emphasis on making the most of the time together, which boils down to not bringing up anything that might be upsetting or divisive. We meet up together in one group to make the most of the travel, so one to one conversations are scarce, making it hard to properly connect. We regale each other with selected anecdotes about unusual events, while it is often the everyday details of someone’s life that lets you truly know them. Staying away from hot topics means we don’t touch on what is truly important. Serious worries like medical tests or the need to look for a new job aren’t discussed until they have reached a happy conclusion and all necessity for loving help and support is gone.
Even when we lived together, we weren’t really into discussing our inner struggles. But we were mostly aware of what was going on without the need to say it out loud. We saw when someone was ill, when they were studying or working hard, we could recognise if they were happy or stressed. No probing was required, no momentous group announcements had to be made. We just knew, and knowing meant we could silently offer support, giving a hug, taking over a chore. Now that we live apart, that closeness doesn’t come effortlessly anymore, and we lack the skills to know how to create it.
Going back to the theory of the tennis volunteer at the Special Olympics, this signifies that we no longer love each other. But this is absolutely, emphatically not the case. I deeply love my family, and I know they love me. However, without common ground, it is very hard to communicate this love. How can you show your interest in someone when you don’t know enough about them to ask the right questions, or to truly understand their answers? How can you demonstrate your sympathy or offer comfort or advice when you don’t know what problems they are facing? Even giving gifts, the shallow commercial proxy for love, becomes hard when you don’t know how their tastes have developed or what they have bought themselves in the last few months. Increasingly, we are thrown back on nostalgia and reminiscences, to the days when we did have so much in common. This gives a snug warm feeling, but does it mean that the love is also in the past?
At the same time, my husband, my children and I build more common ground every day. We are developing our own family history, our own shared jokes and quotes. We puff at Picnic delivery vans, shout ‘plong’ when we spot fire hydrants, quote the musical we went to see at Christmas. At breakfast, we talk about the day ahead, at dinner we look back on the highs and lows. We hear when one of us coughs at night and ask the next morning how they feel, notice the silence when one of us is stressed with work or school and give them a cuddle, mark minor important dates like the end of term. With so much in common, the love is very easy to feel.
But what will happen when my daughters leave home? I now better understand the fear of empty nesters. Once we lose that common ground of living under the same roof, how do we make sure they still feel our love? And how do my husband and I support our love once the giant chunk of common ground that is our children is gone?
It’s no wonder I can love you the way that I do
‘I know you by heart’ – Bette Midler
I can finish any sentence you start
Our ideal picture of love – reinforced by books and films – is that it goes hand in hand with deep knowledge of the other person. If that knowledge is absent, it follows that the love is also absent. Common ground doesn’t automatically lead to love, of course. There are plenty of people I have much in common with who I don’t love. But common ground provides the nutrients for the seeds of love to grow and blossom. Without it the love is still there, but it is bottled up with little means of expression. Not being able to talk about what really matters to someone, not being able to help them feel better, not being able to make their face light up when you give them a gift that is just what they wanted – in short, loving someone but being unable to express it – is very frustrating. This, in turn, can lead to resentment. It can feel like the other person is being deliberately awkward by failing to share your interests, like they are judging your way of life and sneering at your tastes and choices. Instead of a natural development, the movement away from the values and interests of the shared past can feel like a rejection of the family – like betrayal.
The obvious answer is to build more common ground. But how? Different tastes make it hard to share hobbies. Living at a distance makes spending more time together very difficult. Plus if that additional time is still in the form of a polite gathering, then it won’t help anyway. Meeting up one on one, as my sister and I occasionally do, is much more effective but is too expensive to do often, and risks shutting out the others. Ideally, we would get more value out of our weekends together by using the time for open and frank conversation. But how to break through the polite veneer that has grown up over the years? And how to persuade the others that ‘spoiling the weekend’ with the occasional flood of tears or stormy argument is worth it if, in the process, we can get closer to each other?
Or is it simply natural that, as we’ve gone our different ways, we have become less close? Do I worry about it because my family is closer to each other than to me? Do I see that as a sign that they love me less? Perhaps I need to remind myself that I never believed the tennis volunteer’s thesis, because I knew I loved my parents equally even if I was closer to my dad than my mum. Do I need to stop trying to prod my family towards more closeness and just concentrate on showing them my love? The most basic methods always remain open to me – a hug, a kiss, or simply saying ‘I love you’. Or am I then wasting the opportunity to get closer to them? It is so hard to know, and we only have one lifetime together in which to get it right.
