Although at first glance, we should really save ourselves -- not be saved by others -- there's something wrong with looking externally for something that should come ultimately from within -- still, relationships can exert powerful forces for good in our lives. It's painful reading about the Vietnam veterans, for example, who are "unable to touch intimacy," or who still clearly keep intimate relationships at a distance, because they're afraid of the weight of failure, among other things.
There's a nice segment of a poem from T.S. Eliot that speaks to this. Eliot was a famous Modernist poet, from the school that developed around World War I, and while he wasn't sensational about this in his own life -- his first wife, Vivien, to whom the words "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me." are attributed in Eliot's famous poem, The Waste Land, is also a woman he institutionalized; still, he is able to write these comforting words, which perhaps he practiced himself, and perhaps did not. (They could also be about his marriage to his second wife, which was apparently much happier, though shorter-lived. He was married to her at the time he wrote these lines.) In any case, they can still serve to inspire us with their truth:
"If a man has one person, just one in his life,
To whom he is willing to confess everything --
And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,
Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,
But also situations which are simply ridiculous,
When he has played the fool (as who has not?) --
Then he loves that person, and his love will save him."
-- T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman (1958).
Editor's note: For our ongoing series on "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," go here.
