We’ve been chatting about the value of intimacy and what commitment between two partners ought to look like. At the top of that list is the idea that the two partners are “in it together” and that each partner takes the other’s side.
Here’s what refusing to take the other person’s side looks like. Maybe you remember how the movie “Frida” opens? Frida Kahlo is taken from her deathbed and flamboyantly rushed to the opening of her first-ever one-woman show.
The show is a great success and Frida is triumphant. We are then transported back in time to Frida as a little girl and we watch her story unfold, a story that focuses on her relationship with the already world-renowned Diego Rivera.
The filmmakers would like us to believe that Frida and Diego, despite their ups and downs, despite Diego’s incessant affairs and Frida’s occasional ones, so loved and respected one another that their relationship must be judged successful.
Such is the Frida-and-Diego mythology. But the reality, which the movie inadvertently exposes, is that Diego refused to take Frida’s side. Throughout their relationship, Diego tells Frida that she is a great painter. Yet he never secures her a show until the very end of her life.
How can that be? How can Diego tell her to her face that she is a great painter and at the same time make no efforts behind the scenes to secure her a show? His affairs are only one betrayal. They pale in comparison to this greater betrayal.
Was he envious? Was it cruelty? Was it indifference? Whatever its source, Diego did not go to bat for Frida until she was on her deathbed. If Diego Rivera had really respected and loved Frida Kahlo, he would have done much more for her.
Despite his claims to love her work and his claims to love her, his actions announce that he was not really on Frida’s side. Such failures define relationships. The passionate love-making, the zany festivities, all of that is just window-dressing.
If you are on your partner’s side, you help him or her. Isn’t that a simple idea to comprehend and an obvious aspect of commitment? Yet too many couples do not manage this bedrock reciprocity.
To repeat the headline: if two people have decided to be “in it” together in life, they should help one another.
Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]
—