Kelly Flanagan - True Companions: A Book for Everyone about the Relationships That See Us Through

I F YOUVE EVER GOTTEN THE BOTTOM of your shoes sticky walking on the caramel-popcorn-and-cotton-candy-strewn grounds of a carnival, youve seen or played a Whack-a-Mole game. The object is to get as high a score as possible by whacking as many moles as you can while theyre popping up out of five holes in a huge wooden box. At first, their plastic heads rise up out of the holes slowly enough that you can whack that mallet like Thor with his hammer. But as the pace speeds up, the moles pop up and down faster and faster until youre in such a frenzy that the mallet is about to fly out of your grip.

As a kid, I learned to manage my feelings by whacking them as soon as they began to show up. If I was fast enough, I could make them disappear before I felt themor worse, before I incurred the consequences of expressing them. Growing up, I learned that with enough whacks I could make sure that some of them would just stay down there (it never hurt to add a little substance-induced oblivion just to make sure), thank you very much.

That worked until it worked against me. I thought I was doing finewell into sobriety; married to my college sweetheart; living in an idyllic yellow house in New Canaan, Connecticut; discovering my sweet spot in a growing ministry vocation; burying my father and, along with him (so I thought), the pesky demons that had colored my relationship with him so darkly. Whaddya know, those moles decided it was safe enough to pop back up again. This time I couldnt whack themI didnt even have a mallet readyand lickety-split went from zero to frenzy. What is happening to me? I asked my therapist. His answer gave me the vocation Ive been on ever since: Youre waking up.

You dont have to read far into this lyrical book that Kelly Flanagan has sung into stunning form to realize that hes been schooled by his own version of Whack-a-Mole. Theres nothing like flinging yourself irrevocably into a lifelong relationship with another human being to guarantee it will stir up the moles youd managed to keep underground so long you forgot they were there. (His stories about his kids show that becoming a parent is another sure-fire invitation to raise the moles from your dead zones.)

What Kelly does for all of us in this deep dive into being-in-relation is help us unearth those deeply buried conditions weve been loading onto what we think weve been asking for or offering as unconditional love. Then, therapist that he is, Dr. Flanagan invites us to put down the mallet and befriend our loneliness, shame, and abandonment. Those are the fears fueling our worst selves, whose job it is to keep us on autopilot. Kelly charts a path of waking up so we can show up as our best selves in our most important relationships.

Friends keep one another company. True companions keep each other tetheredto the ground of reality, to the ground of our being. Are you in a season of discovering that what used to work for (both of) you is now working against (both of) you? Been there, done that. Its why Im so glad to commend True Companions to youit comes with some really great strings attached.

I REALIZE NOW HOW VERY BRAVE and a little foolish it all really was.

On an otherwise ordinary afternoon in the autumn of 2001, I waited for her to walk down the aisle and join me at the altar. Twelve hours earlier, Id awoken in the muted hours before dawn to transport a special bottle of champagne from my hotel to the office of our limo company. I had been mostly alone on the vacant highways. Id done this by myself because it never occurred to me to ask for help. In those days, I was used to traveling through life alone.

Alone was all Id ever known.

Then the doors opened and there she was, moving toward me. Time has taken from memory most of what followed, but I can still clearly remember how happy she looked walking down that aisle. Somehow I knew her happiness wasnt about her big day having finally arrived. Shes not a center-of-attention kind of person, and shes not a waiting-for-prince-charming kind of woman. Rather, I knew her happiness was simply about marrying me. On the surface, I acted like this made perfect sense. I liked to pretendeven to myself sometimesthat I was quite a catch. However, underneath the bravado I was still confused about why a woman like her would tether herself to a guy like me.

Then, she was there. Next to me. With me. And in the moments that followed, I pledged the remainder of my life to her. Wedding vows are a little startling, if you are paying any kind of attention at all. I promised Id stick by her through all sorts of catastrophepoverty, illness, her death, or mine. Just a few weeks earlier, the Twin Towers had been reduced to a tragic pile of steel and stone. The rubble was still smoldering as my bride and I promised to stick by each other through buildings falling and bodies failing. To promise that kind of no-matter-whatness when you are twenty-some years old and living in a world on fire, you have to be a little foolish or a lot courageous. I think there was a bit of both in our vows that day. Yet, my wedding-day promise was not nearly the bravest thing Id ever said to her.