Love Savings

Posted by fxckfeelings on May 13, 2013

While it’s said that you only hurt the ones you love, it would be more honest to say that you only hurt the ones who love you. What’s worse, that hurt usually comes from pushing them away when they’re trying too hard to help. Trying to redeem or heal someone, or yourself, through caring and communication usually does less rescuing and more repulsing. After all, if one or both people can’t consistently manage their own responsibilities, honest talk and helpfulness does little but make excuses and turn love into prolonged anguish. Develop a reasonable set of standards about what a person should do to take care of him/herself, before you offer or ask for help. Otherwise, you’ll earn all too well how true the “help until it hurts” saying is.
–Dr. Lastname

My friend and I have feelings for each other, which are no secret to either of us—we had kissed and had even gotten close to having sex but when it came down to being completely honest about our feelings we couldn’t do it. I knew this was unhealthy but I was scared because not only are we both guys but we both had a lot of issues when it came to love. He would say things like, “I don’t know what I want,” and “Don’t fall in love with me.” It was confusing because before that he would be asking me to “make love to him” and had even said, “I love you” twice. I know that part of it was fear of being with another guy. Then, two months ago, I got into a car accident because I was drunk. He was there but, luckily, no one was hurt. Now he says he’s forgiven me, but he has also picked up a girlfriend, which was a shock to me and it hurt. In the beginning we had great chemistry but then we lost that when we stopped being honest with each other. I believe it happened when feelings started getting intense. I want for us to stop hurting each other and start being honest. I’m not sure how to do this and it is breaking my heart. I wouldn’t mind being his friend if he would just stop playing games or whatever this is with me. Is he just confused or being cruel? I can’t make up my mind.

Hollywood wisdom is that women don’t like Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but given how far-fetched your average romantic comedy is, that’s simply untrue. A movie about two people with great chemistry overcoming impossible circumstances by having a heart-to-heart and ending up happily ever after is built on a reality so false, it makes The Hobbit look plausible.

While that good, honest talk solves all romantic problems in TV/movie fantasyland, frustration like what you’re experiencing in real life is more often due to the other things that you’ve mentioned troubling you and your friend: confusion, fear, and uncertainty about who each of you wants to be with and who you want to be.

Talking about such feelings often makes things worse by stirring up feelings of love, intimacy and loneliness while doing nothing to reduce the probable heartbreak. That’s why love makes for great soap opera but is actually pretty dangerous unless the person you’re interested in is steady, reliable, and knows who he is. Romantic fantasy is only fun as a spectator’s sport.

Steadiness means your boyfriend doesn’t run away when he feels too vulnerable for any reason—caring too much, getting irritated, or wondering what he’s going to miss out on by spending all his time with you. You can tell steady people by their track record in previous relationship, and your friend has warned you he isn’t steady and then shown it by getting a girlfriend after telling you he loves you. It’s not personal—that’s just the way he is, by his own admission—so don’t expect to solve your intimacy problems with a “good, honest talk” when he honestly told you he can’t hack it, period.

Of course, you’re less likely to find a steady person until you’re a steady person yourself, which means no drinking, and certainly no drinking and driving. You’re remorseful about the drunk car accident, but being sorry isn’t the issue. Ask yourself whether you’re able to control your drinking, which means stopping before doing anything you’ll be sorry for later. Even if your out-of-control binges are very, very rare, if they’re dangerous and likely to happen again sooner or later, then you don’t have the control you need and deserve.

Get help with your own problems first, even if you feel like your friend is the source of those problems, because you need to find a way to cope with any issue, romantic or otherwise, that doesn’t involve alcohol. Don’t get sober to please your boyfriend, or you’ll get un-sober when you can’t please him. Get sober because you don’t want to hurt anyone, especially behind the wheel, and be able to make better decisions.

So stop trying to talk with your not-boyfriend about intimacy and start talking to yourself about what you’ve learned, namely, that you need to get sober and find someone who can return your love without becoming confused about his priorities or who he is.

If you get your mind right, you can get out of your romantic Middle Earth and find something real.

STATEMENT:
“I feel I’ve come so close to tasting love with this not-quite boyfriend that I can’t stop thinking about him, but I know how unsteady he is and how he brings out my own wildness, and that’s not good for either one of us. I need to build a better life for myself, stop drinking, and look for love from someone steady, once I know I’m steady myself.”

I’m going nuts about my boyfriend’s unwillingness to see a doctor about what I’m pretty sure is a seizure disorder. He’s very touchy about anyone trying to control him—meet his father and you’d know why—so he hates doctors. He tells me he’s been having weird dizzy spells and then wakes up on the ground, not remembering what happened, which I know is a seizure, but he didn’t try to get any help. Finally, two days ago, he agreed to see a doctor “just for me,” but I detected a tone that said he was starting to see me as someone who was out to control him, and I have no confidence he will tell his doctor the whole story, even though I’ve told him it’s a life and death issue. I’m afraid my boyfriend will stop trusting me if I talk to his doctor, and that he’ll ignore a dangerous illness if I don’t. My goal, of course, is to figure out a way to get him help without destroying our relationship.

When you find yourself taking more responsibility for your boyfriend’s health than your boyfriend does, you’ve got to ask yourself whether your relationship is ever going to work the way it should, or what, if anything, your boyfriend will accept responsibility for. After all, one thing you want a partner for is to share the load, particularly if you have kids, so it’s a bad sign if the person you’re with adds to that load by refusing to care for himself and then, even worse, blocking your efforts to get him help. It’s natural, when you love someone, to focus on getting him help, but the bigger question to ask yourself is whether anyone who doesn’t take care of his own health problems will be reliable to take care of you, your possible future family, or anything else.

So before figuring out how to get him help without his complaining to you that you’re trying to take over his life, ask him about his own values regarding self-care. Ignoring any discussion of his feelings, ask him whether he believes he has a responsibility to himself and/or those who depend on him to keep himself from getting disabled, assuming that medical treatment could make the difference. If he tells you he hates doctors or doesn’t really care, ask him whether his sense of responsibility is or isn’t more important than those feelings.

Warn him about the vicious circle that will occur in your relationship if he doesn’t tell his doctor about his seizures. If you feel obliged to tell his doctor, against his wishes, because of the risk of irreversible damage, beware the damage it will do to the two of you. Whether or not he then accepts treatment, he will resent your defying his wishes and, in addition to having to deal with his anger, you will worry about having to assume responsibility for his health in the future. In avoiding a medical issue he doesn’t want to face, he will create major problems in a relationship he values.

Make it clear that you’re not asking him to talk to the doctor in order to make you happy and that pleasing you is not what this is about. Don’t let him trivialize the issue into one of relieving your anxieties by making it clear they’re not the issue, nor are his anxieties about doctors. You think he deserves good medical care and that he’s the only one who can ensure he gets it.

In addition to wanting him to be safe and healthy, you need to know whether he has the ability to take care of himself. No matter how much you love him, it will affect your hopes for the future of your relationship. If he shows that he can’t be relied on to attend to his own health, you’ve got to attend to the problem of finding a new relationship.

STATEMENT:
“I feel nothing is more important than getting my boyfriend to a neurologist before his seizures become uncontrollable, but I know that his refusal to care for himself is just as big a problem. I will find a way to be persuasive and even intervene on his behalf if it’s necessary, while making clear that self-responsibility is a positive value that I regard as an absolute requirement for the future of our relationship.”