What We Can Learn About Real, Lasting Love From The Velveteen Rabbit

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

I remember being a happy child, living in a happy family. My father was a writer and I remember being on a television program called the Squeaky Mulligan Show about a talking cat (puppet). I was thrilled to be on T.V. at the age of four and loved that my father was becoming a famous T.V. writer. My mother was a stay-at-home Mom and I remember her making my favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day.

But following the success of the show, my father was out of work and became increasingly depressed. He couldn’t find a job and felt he had failed as a breadwinner for his family. When I was five years old, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. Though he survived physically, our lives were never the same. He was sent to a mental hospital and my mother had to work to support us. I didn’t see him again for many years.

I was a shy boy and spent a lot of time alone. My main friend and companion was a stuffed doll, I called “Baby Bunting.” My mother sang this nursery rhyme, I think to cheer us both up. I so missed my father, but at least I had my Baby Bunting.

Bye, baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
Gone to get a rabbit skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in.

For kids the line between “real” and “fantasy” is a thin one. For me my Baby Bunting was real. I had long conversations back and forth. I could always be honest and feel like I was always heard and understood. When I spoke as Baby Bunting I always had kind words and supportive suggestions. Baby Bunting was always there for me and I could trust that if I ever was scared or in trouble Baby Bunting would be there for me.

It never occurred to me that I was learning important relationship skills. Since I didn’t have a lot of direct experience of a loving marriage after my father left, I thought a good marriage was what I saw on T.V. and in the movies. Watching Father Knows Best, I learned that the ideal family had a mother, father, and two children, a boy and a girl. There were rarely any serious fights, father always had a job, and always offered sage advice whenever his children needed help.

At the movies I learned that relationships were all about finding that special Prince Charming or the magical Cinderella. I loved going to romantic movies of the 1950s, usually with great accompanying love songs like Three Coins in the Fountain of Love is a Many Splendored Thing. From these I learned that the romance was the key to happiness and once you found your soul mate on some enchanted evening, you were home free.

I have been married now to Carlin for the last thirty-five years (the third marriage for both of us). We’ve had to deal with our share of losses including the death of parents and our own illnesses, both mental and physical. I realize there is more wisdom about real, lasting love that I learned from my childhood cuddle baby than I learned from my mother and father or from T.V. and movie love stories.

The Wisdom of Margery Williams and The Velveteen Rabbit

My cuddle baby always reminds me of the rabbit. Many of us know the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s the tale of a small boy whose Christmas present is a toy rabbit. The boy quickly discards the toy after playing with it for a few hours in the bustle of Christmas and relatives. In the nursery the rabbit is looked down on by the fancier wind-up toys, but a Skin Horse tells him they will eventually break, but that the rabbit has the potential to become real.

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. There is a wonderful dialogue between the Skin Horse and the Velveteen Rabbit that can tell us a lot about what it means to have real, lasting love:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I never knew the story, behind the story until I learned more about Margery Williams. Ms. Williams was an English-American author, who was born on July 22, 1881 and died on September 4, 1944. Her father was a well-respect barrister and her mother was a renowned classical scholar.  Her father encouraged her creativity and Margery and her sister seemed to have had a wonderful childhood until their father died suddenly when Margery was seven years old. Like the loss of my own father, her loss influenced her creativity and the deep connections between love and loss.

So here are some things I’ve learned about real, lasting love from my Baby Bunting and the Velveteen Rabbit:

1. Real, lasting love is about being there during times of upset and fear.
2. Real, lasting love requires honesty and listening deeply without judgment.
3. Real, lasting love is about the bond that we can trust now, and forever.
4. Real, lasting love is more about the magical energy that connects us than about you or me.
5. Real, lasting love is fun and playful.
6. Real, lasting love is thoughtful and serious.
7. Real, lasting love gets better through time, even as our parts wear out, and we show the wear and tear of life’s many, painful losses.

What’s been your experience with real, lasting love?

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Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live well throughout their lives. Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s new book, Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.