Her strength and candor also came in handy when both of them confronted problems with their parents. In her characteristically straight-forward manner, Jessie reported that both of their “parents have screwed up their own relationship so you don’t need them to help to fuck up your life; you can do that on your own!” In their commitment to each other and their willingness to discuss the undiscussable with one another, Dick and Jessie present a unified front to their parents (and his children by a previous marriage). For both of them, their partner is more important than the maintenance of any other relationships. “This is us,” Jessie told her mother: “take it or leave it. We’re in love. This is who we are and we’re not going to change.”
While Jessie seems to offer strengths and candor, Dick tends to “calm things down” in the relationship. He explains that “we work on supporting each other’s weaknesses. The strengths are easy.” These wonderful words of wisdom would seem to be appropriate for most couples and certainly help to open the doors for candor and discussions of those things that are usually not discussable, namely, our weaknesses.
Benita and Darrell had an on-again, off-again relationship for nine years. They talked frequently during their interview about the initial ambivalence they both felt toward making a commitment to one another. Betina reports that the marker event in their relationship after all of these years related directly to their willingness to disclose important feelings to each other:
. . . we would go out a couple of times and then he would disappear and that was that.. . The most notable thing about the relationship is that we would separate and come back together again and separate and come back together again and that happened several times after college [as well as when they first met while attending the same college.] . We could talk about going to a movie, but we weren’t able to talk about our feelings for a number of years and the only point at which our relationship became serious was after we were able to talk about our feelings, and so I don’t think it’s worth anything to talk about all those years we were sort of in and out of relationship because those were years in which he was important to me, in some ways, but certainly there were other people who were important. There were actually two other men that I was interested in marrying. But when it really started to jell was when we could talk to each other and that was when we developed the kind of relationship neither of us had had with anyone else. . . . We (pause) started saying things that we felt were unspeakable and that made a lot of difference and it was pretty terrifying, but it sure as hell made a big difference.
