Wombatgram #20 - Relationship Arcs

Naturally, we're all different. Equally, we're all human too. So patterns will emerge despite our best efforts to be different.





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Bottoms Up, Individualists.

Why is Breaking Up Hard to Do? Wrestling With the Break-Up Monster.

Breaking up is hard to do. Only sociopaths and terminal masochists fail to find some kind of emotional turmoil when they want out. Detaching from another person is one of those life downsides we can only suffer through.

Sometimes it's a relief. When the inner voice whispers that the best option is termination, the pain of the act is tempered with guilty triumph. Afterwards, that is. Once the words are out there, the air is cleaner. One regains peripheral vision. Still and all, pinches of regret and dashes of sadness will adhere. We're meant to be with people, after all, and de-gluing feels like a step back.

Part of the reason break-ups are uncomfortable is that most of us aren't good at it. Facing someone with a parting can generate a vortex of emotion for which we're ill practiced and poorly prepared. Airline pilots spend time in simulators dealing with the kinds of horrid failures and tricky scenarios that are hardly ever seen in real life. But if the worst does occur, they have the confidence to deal.

Leaving a relationship isn't like that. We never know how the other person will react. We might even not know how we'll react. It takes time to build trust and confidence with another person; tearing all that hard work down can be utterly dispiriting. And yet it must be done. To avoid personal Titanic sinkings, we have to protect ourselves from bad relationships, slow down the ship, and head to warmer waters. Sometimes drifting for a while is the right course. Better that than having Hollywood remake your life as a tragedy.

So how can we get better at break-ups? One way might be to do it more often. I'm more and more amazed at how people cling to relationships that any outside observer can see don't work. We - humans - seem to think that the other person will magically stop the damaging/annoying/frustrating whatever that leads us to dissatisfaction. We hang in there on a hope and a whisper...a strategy that never works.

Western legal justice begins with the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. When we're talking about criminality and jail time I guess that makes sense. But should the same premise pertain when the worst that can happen is that we are without a regular Friday night date?




Bottoms Up, Heartbreakers.

Siege

A marriage or LTR might be done, over, cooked and stinking up the joint, but no-one is allowed to say so until one or other of the participants says it first.

This public defense of the widely held private opinion is the same mentality that those under siege take. Stalingrad in World War II springs to mind, or Boston in 1775/6.

Gradually the food runs short, so less and less to eat becomes acceptable. (Marriage equivalent: progressively less communication.)

Gradually the fuel runs short, so colder days and nights are taken for granted. (Marriage equivalent: sex becomes less frequent, more perfunctory.)

Gradually the participants daydream about better times, willing the reality to be different. (Marriage equivalent: resorting to drink or drugs or anonymous sex outside the relationship.)

To outside observers this is as obvious as Mick Jagger's lips. We know what's happening in the lives of those close to us nearly as soon as they do, and acknowledge it (out of their hearing) much sooner.

No-one outside a relationship can ever know all the ins-and-outs, but dispassionate onlookers have the advantage of perspective. Nature apparently sets us up to defend indefensible positions - or nearly indefensible, because although the Americans won the siege of Boston, the Germans failed to take Stalingrad. But do you really want to go through that kind of epic horror?[link]





Revolutionary War spy pic from here [link]

Honour and Offer

Slightly bummed tonight because yet again I'm left with another communications mystery around women.

You remember that I had a date set-up created for me by some friends.[link]

The date went well as far as I could tell:

-> she was attractive and very nicely dressed in boots and knock-off (short) Pucci dress.

-> I made no obvious faux pas on initial introduction, always a hairy area.

-> she appeared to not find me completely physically repulsive.

-> the conversation was natural and unforced.

-> the introducing couple were great and made life easy.

-> spinach salad thankfully didn't end in dreaded spinach in the tooth-gap.

-> I made her laugh, three times.

-> we hugged good-bye.

Let's say that my grade was a gentleman's C.

I called the next day to say how delightful meeting her was.

I called two days after, spoke to her, she was busy, and agreed to call back two days after that.

I called then, and the call went straight (I mean, straight) to voicemail.

I called three days after that, ditto.

I called a week later, ditto.

The furrowed forehead I have is because of the minute or so we had together after our matchmakers made their gracious exit. It seemed abundantly clear to me that she would be up for a date sometime later, and that she liked me. We even had TWO good-by hugs and pecks.

Despite my studied disinterest in an outcome, it's still mystifying.







Pic from Czech [link]

I could do so much better.

A list of words describing relationships will include The Good:

+ loving, honest, devoted, a partnership

The Bad:

+ abusive, mismatched, infidelitous

And The Ugly.

+ she settled.

Any union including violence is abhorrent, and if contempt moves into the spare bedroom it's pretty much over. But settling has a quality all its own.

If we settle, we're in worse shape than one innocuous word implies. Settling tells the world that we could have done better. We ended up with the 1995 Honda Civic when we should be driving a showroom-new Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder - according to the voice in our head at least.

More than that, settling means that at one point we thought the Civic was the Lambo. The fact that we now see how blinkered we were is evidence of self-criticism verging on self-flagellation That leads to self-doubt about any further choices we make relationshipwise. That is not a winning formula.

And then there's the corrosive effect of looking at what we have right in front of us, and imagining what might have been. To me, that's the very worst element of thinking that we've settled because it combines the two deadly mindfuckers: regret for the past, and (irrational) imagining of the future. Between them, those two will suck all the life from us, stopping, as they do, the only thing we have.

Right now.






Photo of Humphrey and Lauren from here [link]

With thanks to Belle for the inspiration.