aleks peterson | author

“Hell is other people,” the expression goes. The protagonist of Jean Paul Sartre’s famous play, No Exit, shouts this in agony as he realizes his afterlife situation—trapped in a room with two other people, hand-selected selected to torture each other for eternity. Sometimes this is what my house feels like on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes this is my Monday morning conference call at work. Sometimes this is me, convulsing in the grocery store self-checkout line while some dodo bird feeds 27 crumpled dollar bills into the machine. 

As fallen beings in a fallen world, we tend to get on each other’s nerves. We tend to take more than we give. We gossip and slander. We betray. We neglect friendships. We mutter curses beneath our breath, full of resentment and pride. And that’s only the wading pool of human enmity. At its darkest depths you find an entire criminal subterfuge willing to inflict tangible harm on others—to steal and attack and even kill—simply because they want what they want. Just this week I read a story of a man in Genoa whose neighbor shot him with a bow and arrow as he was walking home from celebrating the birth of his son at a nearby pub, simply because he was making too much noise. The man died hours later from a severed liver, leaving his newborn son fatherless. How can a being with a soul be capable of such senseless violence against another, I wonder? What other species needs a special force of armed public servants dedicated to making sure their kind doesn’t destroy itself? Humanity is infected with a kind of rot, a blight, known best as Evil. We are not all controlled by it, not completely. But it is in all of us and adds considerable challenge to the goal of getting along. 

And yet, we haven’t given up. Across every tribe and tongue, our desire to form attachments with others has proven inextinguishable. We are wired for deep and meaningful connection. Each of us has a person, or a few people, whose souls seem bound to our own. They may not be perfect, but they belong to us, and we to them. They call to us like lighthouses through the fog, restoring our faith in humanity and in ourselves. These are the people we want to spend time with. The ones who cheer us up. The few for whom we would sacrifice. Frodo had Samwise. Thelma had Louise. Cleopatra had Mark Antony. This is how we were made—to not be alone. Few members of the animal kingdom can even survive alone, much less an animal with the divine gifts of language and reason and emotion. “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor,” Ecclesiastes says. “If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.” Even at the dawn of creation, before the advent of sin, God declared it was “not good for man to be alone.” 

Relationships are not only good; they’re essential to our existence and survival, and they’re as close as we’ll come in this life to understanding the love that God the father has for his children, the love that Christ the bridegroom has for his church. But like any good thing, human relationships can be corrupted. They can be idolized. They can be elevated to a level that is beyond reasonable. Hollywood and mainstream music and the Hallmark racket that owns Valentine’s Day tell us there is no necessary limit to the extremity of passion, no distinction between love, infatuation, and obsession. They teach us to call another person our “better half,” and to say things like, he completes me. I’d be lost without her. To describe someone as the best thing that’s ever happened to us. They teach us other broken people can somehow make us better. In truth, only God can complete us. Only God can find us. God’s son is the greatest thing that’s happened to humanity and to our hearts, and only he can transform us into better people. And if you don’t believe in God, well, that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you’ll have an easier time saving yourself through another damaged, hurting, unpredictable human being. 

We certainly try, though. Not only that, but we often become so entangled in a relationship that we lose sight of our own identity, and we begin to reconstruct it using the other person. We fall in love and let the lover instead of love itself be our anchor. We live in a house with someone, and that someone becomes the house we live in. We bear children and spend so much time nurturing, correcting, providing, that we forget to care for our own inner child. It is easy to do. You may not realize how easy, and how at risk you are for this type of crisis, so let me ask this: if the most important person in your life were to vanish tomorrow and never return, would you still know who you are and why you are? 

When you elevate one particular relationship to the level that it erases your own sense of being, you walk a tightrope between destruction and oblivion. The late priest and theologian Henri Nouwen explained this once in a letter to his nephew (Letters to Marc About Jesus, 1988): 

Our ability to satisfy one another’s deepest longing is so limited that time and time again we are in danger of disappointing one another. Despite all of this, at times our longing can be so intense that it blinds us to our mutual limitations and we are led into the temptation of extorting love, even when reason tells us that we can’t give one another any total, unlimited, unconditional love. It is then that love becomes violent. It is then that kisses become bites, caresses become blows, forgiving looks become suspicious glances, lending a sympathetic ear becomes eavesdropping, and heartfelt surrender becomes violation. The borderline between love and force is frequently transgressed, and in our anxiety-ridden times it doesn’t take very much to let our desire for love lead us to violent behavior.

And what is violence? Sometimes it can be physical. But more often it is simply the opposite of peace, as chaos is the opposite of order. It is insecurity and resentment. Disappointment. Betrayal. It is the inflection point of a relationship gone bad, when our connection to another person ceases to bring us joy and instead begins to destroy us. Something inherently good is hijacked by the insidious force of ultimate evil, and everyone involved pays the price. 

This can happen for a number of reasons, but the most common is simply misuse. Misuse of another person, misuse of yourself, and misuse of the relationship. If you use the family sedan to tow a yacht across the country, you won’t make it an hour before the vehicle suffers major mechanical failure and endangers all of its occupants. In that situation, no one wins—not the boat, not the car, not the driver. A four-cylinder sedan isn’t built to tow a yacht. It’s built to carry a few people and some groceries, maybe a small Christmas tree strapped to the roof if you’re lucky. When you place your identity in another person, no matter how lovely that person, you are using a relationship for something beyond its intended purpose, and you invite dysfunction into the lives of both involved. You invite violence.