The Faithful One: 34 Years Means Nothing

There is a man I think about sometimes when a client sits across from me and says, *I just want someone who stays.*

Fr Raymond Bonnici served as police chaplain for thirty-four years. He did not stay because the conditions were perfect. He stayed because staying was the thing he had decided to do. He showed up in the rooms where people were broken — the holding cells, the corridors after a shooting, the quiet aftermath of violence — and he offered what he could, which was presence. Consistent, unremarkable, faithful presence. The police praised him warmly when he retired. They meant it. You can tell the difference.

I find myself thinking about what that kind of constancy costs. Not the chaplain's — his is a vocation, a different architecture entirely. I mean the constancy we ask of each other in ordinary love. The staying that isn't dramatic. The showing up that nobody praises because it's Tuesday and you just did it again.

In the clinic, I see two types of people who struggle with this. The first has confused intensity with love for so long that steadiness feels like indifference. They have been fed a diet of highs and ruptures and reunion, and when a calm, consistent man sits across from them at dinner, they feel nothing — and they call it incompatibility. It isn't. It's withdrawal. Their nervous system has been calibrated to chaos and it mistakes peace for emptiness.

The second type — and this one is harder to reach — has decided that faithfulness is a form of settling. They want to be chosen passionately, repeatedly, dramatically. They want to earn the staying every single morning. And so they build relationships that require it: with people who are ambivalent, unavailable, interesting in the way that burning things are interesting.

Both types will tell you they want a reliable partner. Both will sabotage one the moment they find him.

What strikes me about thirty-four years of anything — marriage, vocation, craft — is that it cannot be sustained by feeling. Feeling comes and goes. Thirty-four years is constructed from decisions made on the days when the feeling wasn't there. The days when leaving would have been easier, more comfortable, perhaps even justified. And you stayed anyway. Not because you were weak or afraid or without options. Because you had decided what kind of person you were going to be.

This is what we don't teach people about love. We teach them to find the right person. We don't teach them to become the person who is capable of staying.

A client — a woman in her early forties, sharp and self-aware — told me recently that she had left every relationship the moment she stopped feeling certain. The moment doubt arrived, she took it as a sign. She had left seven relationships this way. She was exhausted. What she hadn't understood was that doubt is not a verdict. Doubt is Tuesday. It arrives in every long relationship, in every serious vocation, in every life built on a choice rather than a feeling. The question is not whether you feel it. The question is what you do when you do.

Fr Bonnici almost certainly had his Tuesdays. Thirty-four years of them. He showed up anyway.

I am not arguing for staying in relationships that harm you — I have left three, and I would leave them again. But there is a difference between leaving because something is genuinely wrong and leaving because something is merely hard. We have become very good at telling ourselves the two are the same thing.

The uncomfortable truth is this: most people don't leave bad relationships. They leave ordinary ones — because ordinary is the one thing they were never taught to love.

*Elena Vella is a licensed relationship and family therapist and Love, Life & Relationships Editor at News Beast.*