Let’s Exchange the Experience: Relationship Help from Pink and Kate Bush

[Editor’s Note: I’ve been mulling over these two music videos for several months now, and I finally realized that a post about them would be a good fit for Love Among the Ruins. I hope you find this edifying and inspiring.]

Marriage is hard work. The difficulty primarily stems from the frustrating fact that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and according to my five-year-old who was recently studying the solar system, “Those planets are really, really different.” It’s not news to any members of the opposite sex who’ve  made a life-long commitment to occupying roughly the same space that this arrangement can be very grating at times. In my nearly eight years of marriage, I’ve discovered that the only way to avoid the near occasion of planetary collision is to take time and energy to put myself in my husband’s place—check out the view from Mars. This exercise is called empathy; and it is to a loving relationship what the sun is to the spheres.

To prepare me for marriage when I was growing up, my mom always told me, “There’s a thin line between love and hate.” That seemed really odd to me at first. Aren’t love and hate total opposites, necessarily separated by a wide gamut of other emotions? It turns out not.

At this point in my life, plenty of experience and a line from The Lumineers have confirmed that, “The opposite of love is indifference.” When we care a lot, we care a lot, for better or for worse.

Confident in this, I was very moved by a song/music video that I stumbled upon last summer thanks to a post by a now fellow Patheosa: Pink’s “Try”. (Warning: the imagery here is pretty intense. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not a glorification of domestic violence, but rather an artistic expression of emotional turmoil as rendered by contemporary dance.)

This man and woman might as well be the only two people in the universe. Their love is both primordial and astronomical. They show us what it looks like to long for one another, misunderstand one another, to become frustrated and furious with one another. And the lyrics match all of this perfectly:

Where there is a desire there is gonna be a flame;

Where there is a flame someone’s bound to get burned.

But just because it burns doesn’t mean you’re gonna die.

You gotta get up and try, try, try.

But how exactly do we try? What is the content of that perseverance?

I found an answer in another song/music video that was made almost thirty years before this one, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”:

It’s like the mother of Pink’s creation, and the apple has not fallen far from the tree. The dance moves are remarkably similar and are meant to convey the same idea: men and women don’t get one another and that leads to discord. Kate asks, “Is there so much hate for the ones we love?” and she fantasizes about what it would take to solve this ubiquitous problem: “If I only could make a deal with God—get Him to swap our places.” Yes! If only we could trade minds and get a good look inside, then we might know peace and harmony.

There’s no X-ray machine for this, but there is a way to see and be seen, and that is to really look and really share. Effective interpersonal communication can lead to genuine understanding. Developing true empathy is the only way to “exchange the experience,” as Kate says. You can’t love without knowing, and the path towards knowing involves both seeking and finding through a gauntlet of blood, sweat, and tears (and dancing).

I found this to be true in my own relationship. When my husband and I find that we are talking past one another, assuming the worst intentions, or if one of us is balancing the planking body of the other until aloofly dropping it into the multi-colored dirt, we know it’s time for a date night. This kind of date night is for talking with an eye towards transparency. We talk about what we’re feeling—big picture and nitty-gritty. We each practice telling back what we just heard to be sure that we really understand it. Misinterpretations are the worst, and they are easily avoided with the help of honesty and clarity. A few times we’ve even tried role-playing as one another, taking as literally as possible the idea of swapping places. It’s crucial for us that we avoid being petty or nasty. I especially have to remind myself that what may feel like hate in the heat of the moment is actually my love flaring up, demanding to be taken seriously and understood. I strive to not let that flame melt me down, but rather fire me up in another way—refining my heart so that my beloved clearly sees what has been entrusted to him.

All of this takes a lot of effort, which is why Pink feels the need to repeat “try” three times to make sure we really hear her; and it is why Kate Bush is running up that hill instead of down it. Exercising empathy regularly will build up endurance to help you get through the worst of times. That’s how life-long commitment works: it works out.

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Also, let it be known that men and women are actually from Eden.  😉

If you’d like to read more about this topic, check out this post I wrote last year, Empathy as a Key to Romance: Help from the Four Temperaments.