Being and Doing

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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 - 12:16pm.

A friend of mine confessed that she was feeling distraught after her last session with her therapist. She said at the end of the session he suddenly made a sweeping conclusion about her long term relationship and then, before she could respond or even absorb it, the session was done. I’m writing this in pandemic times, so her therapy session, like so many things these days, was happening via zoom. She said he made his prognosis and then “well, time’s up!” and hung up.

She felt mad and confused, and suspected him of having thrown it out there at the end of their call as a way of proving the session was ‘productive.’ As if he needed to nail something down or make some major conclusion at the end of each session. She wasn’t sure she agreed with him, but she couldn’t let go of what he’d said: he’d told her that at the beginning of her relationship, close to ten years ago now, she had “fallen in love with her partner’s way of loving her rather than ‘the man who he is.’ ”

Hmmm.

She said she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and now I can’t either.

Hidden underneath that statement, there are a few different things that intrigue me. First of all, I hear judgement. I said that to my friend to which she protested “No, no, he’s not judgmental.” While I’m glad she doesn’t feel like her therapist is judging her (because, yikes!) I still hear a judgement call: as if there is a ‘right’ way to fall in love.

The other thing that intrigued me is the notion that somehow falling in love with who someone ‘IS’ is better than falling in love with what someone ‘DOES.’ They met when they were in their late 20s. Ten years down the line, they’re approaching 40, they own a house and have two children together. They left the big city where they met and live in a village of 1100 people on the outskirts of a forest. His career has taken off. He’s become a father. Her career has shifted and changed as she has grown, questioned, explored new things. She’s become a mother. Even if she had done the more desirable thing in the eyes of her therapist and, ten years ago, she had fallen in love with ‘the man who he is’...wouldn’t that mean she had fallen in love with ‘the man he was’ rather than ‘the man he is’ today?

I think that’s the crux of it for me: something in the statement “you fell in love with the way he loves you rather than the man who he is” implies that we are static. It also suggests that being is better than doing.

I feel such a strong resistance to that notion! As an actor, I’m particularly sensitive to the differences between ‘being’ and ‘doing.’ For me, acting is absolutely a question of ‘doing.’ I have no idea how to ‘be’ Lady Macbeth, but I can figure out how to do what she does.

I met my husband at age 24 and while there are certainly some things about me at my core that haven’t changed much with time, I definitely don’t feel like 16 years later I am the same woman I was then. The self isn’t static, who I am isn’t static, and if my husband tried to hold me to the person I was when we met by insisting “Don’t change! I fell in love with you are!” well….we wouldn’t have made it very far.

More than that though, I feel like the therapist’s statement sets up a sort of false dichotomy. It opposes two things that aren’t opposed. Isn’t the way we love someone, by its nature, an expression of who are?

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