Scribbled on one of the many scraps of paper I accumulate is something from a recent church care group meeting in our home. We get together a couple of times a month to discuss ideas sparked by recent sermons. One of our members mentioned that we humans have the tendency in our thinking to be vague about the problem but specific about the solution, and he gave as an example the above phrase, something he’d gotten from a friend at work.
So what’s the SSS? Well, Steamboat Springs is a beautiful little town in western Colorado, known for its skiing in winter and other charming activities in the summer. (I’ve never been there, but just the name evokes pleasure; I hope Jim and I can go there this summer, perhaps for a little anniversary jaunt after we say good-bye to Gideon as he takes off for his internship.) It’s a popular destination for Colorado honeymoons and then later on for family vacations. So, said the guy at work, when people’s marriages are in trouble, they say, “We were so happy in Steamboat Springs. Let’s move there, and then our troubles will be over and we’ll be happy again.” But of course they weren’t happy because of the location; they were happy because . . . they were in love, their marriage was new and they hadn’t gotten into too many conflicts, or they were distracted from their problems by being away from home. As I often say, all pretty obvious. So they move to SS and realize that, unexpectedly, their problems have come right along with them. And they end up getting a divorce. (Apparently, the guy at work, or GAT, knew several couples who had gone through this exact scenario.) They might as well have saved all the hassle of moving and just gotten the divorce to begin with!
Or, more charitably and truthfully, they should have realized that they hadn’t identified the problem. Their unhappiness wasn’t caused by their location; it almost certainly had multiple causes, none of which had anything to do with real estate. I was reminded while writing this of the marriage of Rosamund and Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. He’s an ambitious young doctor, she’s a spoiled-but-beautiful girl who thinks that marrying a doctor will give her the life she dreams of as a socially-prominent matron. But Lydgate falls into disgrace and loses his money (I can’t remember just how), and the two of them are forced to leave their house and rent rooms. Eliot says something about two people who are in harmony having no problem with living in a rooming-house, but that for people out of sympathy a whole house isn’t enough. (I’ve just wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to track down the exact quotation, but I had to give up. Maybe I’ll have MM as a book of the week at some point and therefore have an excuse to re-read the whole thing. It is truly wonderful.) The location simply brings the relationship into focus.
Thus the SSS tells us, Beware of thinking that a simple change outside of yourself will solve your problems, particularly your relationship problems. Life doesn’t work like that. As the cliche says, you bring yourself along everywhere you go.