Snappy Endings
Posted by fxckfeelings on January 31, 2013
Unless you’re living in a Nora Ephron movie, breaking up is a painful ordeal, often for the dumper as much as the dumpee; while initiating the break doesn’t have same level of shock and betrayal as being broken, there’s often tons of guilt and paralysis, and everybody ends up spending lots of money on fatty foods, impulse electronics, and shrink bills. While there’s no painless way to break someone’s heart, wallowing in guilt never makes things better, so instead of trying to change feelings that won’t change or punishing yourself for having them, learn from your experience and do what’s necessary. You can’t control your heart but you can make the best of what it does to you and, sadly sometimes, to the people who love you, even if you can’t love them back. It’s what Nora would want.
–Dr. Lastname
Just over a year into my relationship with my current boyfriend, and a week after we had moved in together, I met a man at a month long intensive personal growth course. I was clear with him that I was in a relationship (as he was clearly interested and single), but the feelings developed over the month, especially with the work we were doing together in the class. It was very hard to say goodbye. It’s been exactly a year since that time and I have not for one day stopped thinking about him and the friendship/closeness/attraction that was there. I’m still with my boyfriend and have had doubts about him ever since. I know it’s really affected our relationship. I’m a person who’s always working on myself and trying to be better, growing and changing, where he is not so much. I’m trying to get him to be more open with his feelings, but I feel like I’ll be trying my whole life. I can’t help but wonder if I’m with the right person and have to stop myself every single day from contacting the other man. I don’t know if I’m just a crazy person with fantasies about a better relationship, or if I need to take a risk and move on (even though I’m terrified) – if not for the other man but for someone who is more sensitive to my need to share deep feelings regularly. I should also mention that my boyfriend wants to have kids and we need to make a decision as soon as possible as right now I am just stalling. This dilemma has me up at night and I think about it constantly. I wish I could just trust my gut feelings but I am so confused.
If you feel a prospective husband must be someone who’s also into self-improvement and feeling-sharing, then you’re right to worry. On the other hand, after some additional experience with feeling-sharing self-improvers, odds are you’ll realize your standards are a little wrong.
You don’t have to spend as much time around the feelings-ful and improvement-driven as I have to realize they make up a high risk group of people who are exciting to get to know and talk to—much more so than most people, including your partner—but then become changeable and unreliable in the long run.
That’s because self-improvement and feeling-sharing are feel-good activities in themselves that often distract people from deeper values and the necessity of acceptance. They make for an exciting month of discovery, but probably not for a strong, lifetime marriage.
Of course, people can be stable and still want to improve themselves, but finding a good guy in this group may not be easy, particularly if you focus on the qualities that make a guy interesting to talk to, rather than his track record and life management skills. (Perhaps you checked these out in the guy you met at the personal growth course—but you didn’t mention them, so I worry).
Since you haven’t mentioned any of your relationship history here, it’s possible you’d benefit from talking to a shrink and reviewing prior relationships to see if there are any lessons you haven’t yet recognized. Many people begin with relationships that are exciting but unstable, then learn from their breakups to change priorities. Maybe you need to remember your old heartbreaks to save yourself from future ones.
In any case, don’t blame yourself or your boyfriend; you’ve both tried hard to make your relationship work but remain deeply uncertain about the kind of attributes you require for a partner. Unless something changes your mind, you don’t want to burden him or yourself with a relationship that can’t meet your expectations and is bound to disappoint, because you both deserve something better. Then again, he might be better in the long-run than the guy who seems exciting right now.
So go ahead and try out a feeling-sharing self-improver, just as long as you also check out his basic reliability before the talk and improvement become too fascinating. Remember, the real test of self-improvement is learning to make decisions that improve your chance for a lasting partnership.
STATEMENT:
“I feel mean and stupid to feel so uncertain about the nice guy who wants to marry me, but I won’t allow myself to marry anyone until I’m sure I can accept them and not require them to change. I will hold to that standard even if I have to give up a guy I care about and a chance to get married that may not come again.”
When I was in high school I fell in love with the guy who was always in trouble and got knocked up my sophomore year. He reacted by getting drunk and smashing up a semi-stolen car (long story), which made it that much easier to end the pregnancy and follow my parents’ wishes by going off to a boarding school far away. I made new friends, got into a good college, and that’s where I met the guy who is now my husband. We’ve been married for about five years and have a condo and jobs we like, so we’ve started talking about kids, but as much as I want to love him and am not the person I was, I have to admit that I really don’t love him, he really doesn’t get me in a lot of ways, and the idea of spending my life with him is depressing, which makes me feel terribly guilty because he loves me dearly and he’s a good guy. After feeling this way for a while, I heard from my old boyfriend on Facebook, who’s now a policeman (no surprise, right?) and basically became the man I always wanted. I know it sounds absurd, but even if I don’t go back to him, I don’t think I can stay married. My goal is to figure out what I want to do without ruining my life.
You probably know that the most frequent advice this blog offers to people in love is to remember to look for your loved one’s track record of reliability and common values (see above), without which love tends to turn ugly; the stronger the love, the uglier things get if your lover lacks the character and values to be a good partner. On the other hand, you offer a nice reminder that good interpersonal chemistry is also essential. Living with a nice, solid reliable person in the absence of that loving chemistry is its own kind of hell.
Just because love is important and you vow to share it with the person you marry doesn’t mean, however, that you control your feelings. If you told your husband you loved him when you didn’t, maybe you were expecting to learn to love him later. If it was a lie, you were probably lying to yourself as well as to him. In any case, lying about love is a sin you can’t atone for by staying married to him if, by doing so, you have to pretend to love him for the rest of your life.
It’s a terrible burden to put on yourself and, in all likelihood, he’ll eventually sense the truth and his loss will be that much worse. In addition, divorcing him now gives both of you an opportunity to find a better relationship and you don’t have any kids who will be hurt. It’s for you, of course, to determine the right thing to do in this moral dilemma where all paths are both right and wrong.
I hope what you will do, however, is add up the good and bad and compare them to one another rather than act on unthinking guilt or other strong feelings. Otherwise, guilt may paralyze you until you can provoke him to reject you or act badly in a way that will justify your leaving him. That’s the kind of conflict that fills a therapist’s appointment calendar.
Don’t feel obliged to validate your love by running back to your old boyfriend and proving to yourself that you can really love someone; remember, even though he now has a solid job as a policeman, you don’t yet know whether he has become a relationship-stable guy you can count on, so don’t take risks in order to punish yourself. If you’re leaving your husband because you want a good marriage, then respect your values and make sure your first love has what it takes.
Give yourself credit for five years of marriage-making effort, but also give yourself the right to do what you think is best, whether or not that involves a new life with your old flame.
STATEMENT:
“I hate myself for how much I hate to live with my nice, loving husband and for how much I miss the kind of love I once had, but I know the issue of my mistakes and/or sins is not as important as figuring out how to take advantage of what I’ve learned about life to make good decisions about my current and future relationships.”
