Turkey Date

Posted by fxckfeelings on November 15, 2010

Working hard at school usually gets you a well deserved A (and, if you’re a certain advice-giving psychiatrist, a Harvard degree). Working hard at relationships, however, never guarantees success; it doesn’t necessarily get you what you deserve, whether it’s a good mate or a better relationship with a parent. Your efforts and motivations may be pure, but too much that you don’t control is always there to get in the way. Don’t take it as a failure then if you’re lonely and have mixed feelings about going home for Thanksgiving. The biggest success, for many of us, isn’t a frequently-mentioned set of Harvard degrees, but preventing sorrow from making us do something stupid.
–Dr. Lastname

I’m a 47-year-old woman who has never been married. My goal is to find out if circumstances have simply kept me from meeting a suitable partner, or if there’s something I’m doing or something about me that has kept me from finding/recognizing someone who might have been the right choice. I’m attractive, extremely bright, I have a great sense of humor, and am warm and open. I have wonderful friends of both sexes. The downside is I’ve had some serious health issues, including one chronic illness that has directly and indirectly undercut my most important career and personal goals and, to some extent, my sense of myself as the kind of person I wanted to be (accomplished and desirable). I’m under a kind of chronic stress and I don’t feel I’m living my life fully. To restate my goal, how do I figure out what, if anything, has kept me from having a successful relationship?

Don’t disrespect yourself by assuming that being single means you’ve done something wrong. If your problem finding a partner were anything obvious, like a stupid compulsion to dump good guys or an aversion to bathing, you probably would’ve figured it out at some point in the past 47 years.

Also, don’t disrespect yourself by giving illness and bad luck the power to define your self-worth. Yes, it’s nice to be healthy, rich and thin and it feels like success. Real success, however, is knowing you did your best when things turned out badly and left you hurting; it comes from pride in the effort, not pride in the outcome.

That’s why you respect friends who deal well with bad luck even more than you respect those friends who worked hard and did well. Dealing with bad luck, rather than getting good results from hard work, is the heaviest of heavy lifting and the biggest kind of accomplishment. The lucky hard workers may get results, but the cursed, diminutive college football player Rudy gets an eponymous biopic.

So feeling like accomplishment and desirability are necessary to being who you want to be and living the “full life” you want to live is dangerous, because it links your self-esteem to your fate, rather than to what you do with it. The same goes for your luck in partnering.

It sounds like you have a gift for friendship and have done a great deal with it, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll find a good partner, because matching with a good partner is beyond everyone’s control. Perhaps partnering wouldn’t be beyond your control if the world was fair, and guys were as good at marriage as women are, and people of good character were easy to find, and “Arrested Development” was never cancelled.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the world we live in. In our world, not only are good matches hard to find, but bad matches are amazingly easy to find and can wreak terrible damage for years to come (see: the next case).

You’ve got good relationships and you’ve had the strength to tolerate loneliness without straying into bad partnerships. Don’t mistake your sadness, loneliness, and illness as failure. Instead, be proud that you haven’t let them compromise your principles and be aware that, regardless of your feelings, you’re living a full and successful life, given what you’ve got, even if you don’t have what a lot of other women do.

STATEMENT:
“It hurts not to have a partner and kids to love, but I will not let sadness or illness make me doubt myself or devalue who I am and what I’ve accomplished. I may not feel successful, but I am, and as a successful person I will keep looking for a partner without compromising my principles or the network of close relationships that I’ve built.”

My father always went out of his way to spend time with me and my brother after he divorced our mother, but he also had a terrible talent for finding subsequent wives who really didn’t like kids, (he didn’t have any more), so our times together weren’t much fun, to say the least. Now I’m 21 and he wants us to be close (he’s on wife #4), but I can’t stop resenting him for all the lousy times we had and the fact that he would never own up to the problem. My goal is to have a better relationship.

No one screened your father for his skills other than your mother, and she long ago admitted that mistakes were made, so she left. Alas, you weren’t so lucky.

As a kid, you might have felt that he preferred his wives to you because he didn’t seem to mind that they didn’t like you. The greater likelihood, however, is that he was clueless about their feelings for you or the way they made you feel, because that’s the way he is.

He might not be a bad guy, but he is a crappy father, and it’s one of the many things he seems oblivious to. If he is truly clueless, you can never expect him to see or take responsibility for his parenting problems.

Don’t share your disappointment with his parenting; you’ll just make him defensive and he’ll tell you all he’s done for you. If trying to talk about it will cause more problems, your only choice is to let it be.

On the other hand, he’s probably got some redeeming qualities, so add them up, subtract the step-mom factor, and decide how often you should get together.

When you do spend time with him, you may often feel frustrated by his cluelessness and it may awaken old, painful feelings. That’s unavoidable, so don’t take your anger and hurt as evidence of a failed relationship or as a problem that needs solving.

Bear your discomfort proudly as proof of the effort you’re putting into being the good son of a guy who tried hard to be a good father, but found it easier to be a husband (many times over) of non-nurturing women.

STATEMENT:
“There are times when I don’t like my dad or my memories of his parenting, but that’s unavoidable. I see him as often as I think is right, without reacting too much to his expectations. I’m proud of the fact that I do.”