Standards and Poor

Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2012

The heart may be a lonely hunter, but it’s also picky and easily irritated, particularly when hungry. If you enter the hunt without knowing what you really need, you risk being too impatient, too easily rejected, or both. In any case, try to remember all the important things you and a partner need from a relationship, aside from emotional fulfillment, so you can preserve the not-always-loving relationships that are still worth saving, and let go of the ones that won’t work. You might not get everything you desire, but you won’t return from the hunt empty-hearted.
–Dr. Lastname

I have a friend who is in town visiting from far away (she recently moved). She is not a great communicator, and at the last minute decided not to stay with my family but to instead stay with a friend I don’t get along with, citing some pretty lame reasons. I am often hurt by the communication style of this visiting friend. I also have a trip planned to stay with her in a month, and I can’t decide if I should A, suck it up, not take her decision too seriously, and continue my plan to stay with her, B, have more self-respect and tell her she’s hurt me (a conversation we’ve had before; it hasn’t done a lot of good), or C, redirect my trip and avoid her since I don’t want to invest more energy in this person. It would take a lot of energy to redirect my trip, but it’s been over a year of me being really sad, her engaging in formalities like birthday cards but not actually spending time with me or returning emails or phone calls. I feel I am over reacting but I also feel that if this is the reaction I have to her, isn’t everyone better off if I just separate? Most of all I want to engage in action that I will still be able to endorse 20 years from now. What to do?

Looking back twenty years from now, you probably won’t care about how often your friend ignored your texts or chose to pal around with your enemies. What will matter more is whether she was the best friend she could be, and whether that was worth it.

In all friendships, there’s a balance between your painful feelings and the times you find your friendship meaningful and rewarding. It’s up to you to decide whether you value the good side enough to ignore the shortcomings.

You’re wise enough to know that you can’t eliminate the painful side of this relationship; despite your best efforts at hashing it out, your friend isn’t going to change her communication style, inattention, or other friendships. So, if this relationship is going to be worthwhile, you know it will not be because you solve these problems, but because the benefits outweigh them.

Ask yourself then what you want a friendship for, aside from feelings of closeness. Factor in shared interests, acceptance, and reliability when you really need it. If someone is willing to put you up as her guest, that’s pretty positive. If you think you’re likely to have a good time with her, including the days when one of you isn’t all that interested in doing what the other one has planned, then you’ve got a friend who more than makes up for her bitchy other friends and bad birthday cards.

After all, some people are lousy at returning calls and remembering birthdays because that’s the way they are, not because they don’t care. If they do it to everyone, then they’re not doing it to hurt you or anyone else.

Don’t ignore your hurt feelings, but don’t let them make your decision for you. Your goal isn’t to improve your friendship or stop feelings of being ignored or rejected, it’s to get better at figuring out whether a friendship is worth the pain.

From what you say, this friendship may well be a keeper, but a measured assessment and a fair set of expectations, not twenty years of hindsight, will work best to make that clear.

STATEMENT:
“Caring for my friend often seems to cause more pain than pleasure, but I believe that she cares and really wishes to spend time together, and there’s a good chance we’ll enjoy that time, regardless of what’s happened in the past. I’ll try to find good things we can do together and ignore the past and, hopefully, I’ll find more reason to believe I’ve got a friend who’s worth keeping.”

I’ve done everything I can to clean up my act and show my wife I love her, but it’s not working. I understand why she left me, but I’ve stopped drinking, I go to meetings, and I always tell her the truth about where I’ve been. I work hard, and it’s not my fault that the contracting business is slow, I underbid my jobs, and I’m often broke. She doesn’t seem angry at me anymore, and she tells me she appreciates how hard I’m trying, but that it’s not enough because she wants more security than I can ever give her. I don’t know what else I can do, which makes me wonder whether the clean-up was worth it. My goal is to get my family back.

One of the hardest things about recovering from drug addiction or other kinds of “bad boy” behavior is finding out that it doesn’t get you any kind of immediate reward; often you get quite the opposite, which is a sad (yet not-totally-unpredictable) surprise.

Here you’ve finally done what your wife (and maybe parents and friends) were always begging you to do, and instead of getting you a sweet kiss, sobriety has made you all the more sensitive and vulnerable to a kiss-off. It doesn’t give you a warm, fuzzy feeling about recovery. It’s hard not to say “fuck ‘em” and go back to your bad old ways, losing whatever trust you’ve started to regain.

Trouble is, you’re thinking about your marriage in terms of how it feels, instead of how it adds up. Your wife isn’t leaving because she’s mad at you (and will therefore change her mind if you can make her smile), she’s leaving because she doesn’t see how you’re ever likely to do your share of bread-winning, even if you stay sober forever. You’ve said it yourself—you tend to lose money, even when you’re working hard.

From your perspective, you deserve credit for trying. Ask yourself, however, if you’d invest in a guy who tries hard but tends to fuck up anyway. You might like him, but you wouldn’t want to start a business with him, let alone a family.

So don’t get sober to make your wife happy or win her back; not only don’t you control her response, your desire for her approval tells her that you don’t understand the bigger problem, which is that, even sober, you don’t have your shit together.

Instead, use your sobriety to start thinking about what’s getting in the way of your making a living, and what you can do about it. That’s a potentially painful, long-term project that would make any drug-user think of a hundred ways to avoid bad feelings by doing feel-good things. On the other hand, for a guy with the strength to take it on, that’s the project that can give you back your self-respect and show your wife, or your new girlfriend, that you have a lot more to offer than you used to. Not just remorse and sweet company, but strength and good survival skills.

Keep up the sobriety and prepare to build on it, but don’t expect any good feelings for awhile. Promise yourself, however, that if you do what feels right, rather than what feels good, that you will become a person that you and your partner can respect.

STATEMENT:
“I feel bitterly disappointed that my wife doesn’t appreciated the huge effort I’ve made to show her I love her by making the ultimate sacrifice and giving up drinking, but I can’t really expect this or any partnership to work until I get better at managing the way I make a living and remembering my priorities. Regardless of how she responds, I’m proud of getting sober because it makes that possible.”