Anatomy of a Relationship Doomed to Fail

There are times in which we ponder at how someone who we used to immensely adore can end up becoming so egregiously appalling. We cannot even stand them for more than a mere second before bursting into hideous vilification. You then wonder whether this loathing is justified. You look at yourself now in this cataclysmically unpleasant state: How did I turn like this? Was this a dark side of my personality uncovered, or did he impose this on me? But I used to be so caring; I used to love him for his flaws! Is he right in saying that I am selfish for not being forgiving enough? A part of you asks yourself these questions because another part of you believes your pain is genuine yet is unaddressed. Before standing up for yourself, you want to ensure that you are not deluding yourself in narcissistic self-justification. I have been through this too, and during those moments I had no one but myself to word out the mental turbulence. In this piece, I will put into words the frustrations you feel but cannot identify in your toxic relationship and determine why you are the way you are.

In one of the critical scenes of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, Levin — the main protagonist — hears that Nikolai, his brother, is dying. He intends to visit him along with his wife, Kitty. When Kitty arrives at Nikolai’s vicinity, she immediately ordered his room. She nursed him back to as much of a comfortable state as she could manage. Kitty could have done so because she is doing it out of objective pity rather than romantic attraction. Now imagine a scenario in which she is in love with Nikolai instead of being in love with Levin. After nursing Nikolai through an extended period — neglecting her own needs, she grows dreary and emotional, only to have Nikolai shout at her back, “Stop being hysterical, woman!”

A man who is blind to his faults will think you are crazy when you point them out. Ironically, you will indeed turn into the crazy one after losing your mind trying to understand: How is it someone is unable to see something so obvious? How can someone be so entitled and self-justified? How could I have fallen in love with a person like this?

When in love, according to Stendhal, crystallization — which is the process of turning the object of love into substance other than themselves, due to the service of our imagination — occurs twice. The first is before you have seen their vices, and you admire their exterior presentation. The second is after you have seen their iniquities, and you excuse them with something else. The reasoning goes, They must’ve had an excellent reason for choosing those — albeit manifested awfully — decisions. For example, a callous businessman who fails to sympathize with the employee’s personal circumstances is not heartless but simply results-oriented. You believed that if, quoting La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, ‘Behind every virtue is a vice’, then by extension, behind every vice, there must be a virtue. Heartbreak is the devastation in realizing that there is none.

Love is a double-sided coin. On the one hand, we love someone because we admire them for their strength. At the same time, their vulnerability and weakness strike a chord in our heart, from which bubbles the nurturing side of our souls. The latter is typically a more prevalent tendency in women, possibly due to social conditioning or biological imperatives — perhaps both. Or consider the cynical approach: we want to train our caring nature to appeal to the former criteria in future endeavors. Nothing is more appealing to the person we admire than an empathetic and nurturing trait. La Rochefoucauld declared, “Most women do not grieve so much for the death of their lovers for love’s sake, as to show they were worthy of being loved.” Likewise, I suspect that most women are not caring for care’s sake but to show they are worthy of being cared for in return.

Nonetheless, you are left asking: What were all those broken promises for? What was all that trampling of boundaries for? Why did he keep on doing the same things I told him not to do over and over again? And then had the audacity to call me “hysterical” for being upset at his behavior! In this piece, I would question to what extent is it your responsibility to tolerate your significant other’s flaws, detail how completely sane individuals can turn mad in toxic relationships, and describe the anger that surfaces after crystallization stops, as well as how to deal with it.

Responsibility

Marie Kondo would have fainted at the sight of your room — hair strewn all around the bed and floor, as if in a fit of lunacy, you have decided to uproot the hair on your head. What really happened, though, was for the entire night without your active consciousness, you tossed and turned in bed, trying to escape the invisible chains enveloping your body. The blankets that once resembled warmth and comfort became the literal manifestation of the restrictions to your freedom of movement. I need air, I want to be free, I want these chains off me, you think, what has become of me — whose thoughts am I having? Are your thoughts, actions, and decisions entirely yours?

For the duration of my relationship, I felt like I had no ownership over my life. I always sensed a vague, phantom omnipresence looming over me — my heart somehow felt heavy. Both directly and indirectly, he controlled almost every part of my life, despite it being a long-distance relationship. During times in which I wanted privacy and distanced myself from him, he would never fail to contact my 14-year-old sister to ask her where I was and what am I doing. I made it very clear that I do not appreciate him going through my family members to seek information about me, yet he did this repeatedly.

In the beginning, I thought it was thoughtful of him to get close to my reclusive sister, thinking it was nice that she now had a friend! Now I realize — though he denies this — that he had gotten close to her to find out things about me. Not only that, whenever I don’t reply after a short while, he would send her text messages intended for me and asked her to relay them to me. That way, I was sure to not have privacy and autonomy.

What is more offensive is that until now, I am not sure which one of his ‘kind’ gestures are genuine and which ones are meant just so I would think of him more positively. During Valentine’s Day, he told me about his ambitious plan to buy me a gift I really love, yet despite me telling him to not get me anything expensive, he told me I deserved the best. Little did I know, he asked my 14-year-old sister to pay for my gift. When I confronted him about it, his initial reaction was to get furious at me and said I was “slandering” him, only backing down after I showed him definitive proof and word-per-word what was said to my sister.

What frustrates me most of the time is the sheer audacity of not acknowledging one’s mistakes unless I have the wit and case building of a professional lawyer. Thanks to him, I need no practice in competitive debates to be good at building foolproof cases. He even “confided” in our relationship issues to my little sister; at that moment, I thought: Are you trying to bridge a gap between her and me? Thankfully, he was not aware that my relationship with her is much stronger than he anticipated. She revealed to me what happened instead of siding with him.

I still consider myself fortunate that he lives a seven-hour drive away from me because, in his previous relationship, his ex-girlfriend filed a restraining order against him. Despite needing to drive for seven hours, he mentioned open plans to escape his house to reach me, even though I told him explicitly that it is inappropriate given the rampant Covid-19 situation in my country, in addition to the fact that his parents would never let him take the family car to disappear for who knows how long and — in the eyes of his family — to go to an unknown location.

Among all the others, the most ludicrous aspect is that he is clearly not listening to my established boundaries! Because the first time he enthusiastically told me his detailed plans, I explicitly told him I do not want to see him, given the factors I have listed above. Yet whenever he saw the opportunity, such as his parents being away and so on, he would always propose it despite my apparent discomfort.

When I finally laid everything out to him, he said it was my responsibility to reprimand him every time and not just once, because according to him, my “hints of discomfort” were not an explicit “no”. Yet anyone in my shoes would have done the same — respecting the other enough to not reprimand them like a child every time and imposing the personal responsibility of upholding your own boundaries is a delicate and tricky balance.

Furthermore, he took up so much of my time, despite my evident distress. He told me it was my fault; I was not “clear” enough with my boundaries. Even though I repeatedly told him I was busy, my grades were dropping, I am so lonely I have no friends… yet he did not think that was “clear” enough. To be fair, you might argue it is ideally within my control to not fall under his influence. Yet relationships are complicated; you are eventually made to feel like you’re not a good partner (or good person) if you don’t do things that make the other person happy or satisfied.

He told me repeatedly, “Relationships are all about sacrifices.” Yet I ask now: What did he sacrifice for me? He would mention this or that, but does it provide real value, or is it just for show? The bare minimum to fulfil the objective requirement, seemingly sweet from a third-party’s perspective — yet he never listened to my real needs and boundaries. A “nice guy” is worse than a blatant asshole because, with an asshole, there is no additional pressure of looking bad in front of the public eye when one complains! When I express my needs, he frames it as if I am ungrateful and complaining.

He convinced me that he was so kind to have bought me sleeping pills — without my permission and despite me never asking for them. In fact, I was extremely concerned that he bought me drugs, but he told me he cared a lot about me getting enough rest, and I believed his intentions — though I told him to flush those pills down the drain. I only realized the obvious when someone else pointed out, “Let him drug you up so he can keep on calling you at the most inconvenient hours, even more so than before!”

I really felt like I was always someone’s something; I never once felt like I was my own person when I was with him. My only job is to be in service, a 24/7 therapist’s hotline. He even admitted he saw me as an MPDG in the beginning, but since my ex was “not like other guys”, he doesn’t “see [me] as a manic pixie dream girl anymore”. Yet he proceeds to call me unique yet hysterical, beautiful yet emotional…

One may be surprised by the discovery of how little freedom we have over our own thought processes. The stoics were wrong — we are not in complete control of our actions and words during certain times. No amount of emotional nullification can alter the fact that logic is the slave of the passions. David Hume famously argued that it is not reason that drives the wheel, but rather emotion. While reason can softly nudge emotion to one side of the road or the other, at the end of the day, it is still emotion that overruns reason, regardless of if it is working in our favor.

In line with stoicism, it is in the hysterics’ personal responsibility to halt themselves from acting hysterically. The notion of personal responsibility is a difficult question, and for millennia’ personal responsibility’ has always been used to undermine the weaker party in any field. If you are stuck in the poverty cycle, it is your personal responsibility to beat the odds. If you are a slave, it is your personal responsibility to not let uncontrollable external factors influence your internal peace. If you are a woman, it is your personal responsibility to display yourself in a way that does not attract unwarranted attention.

While stoicism and the notion of personal responsibility might be empowering in certain instances, it certainly puts an unfair amount of personal responsibility on the party that suffers instead of the party that inflicts suffering. I am not to argue that the notion of personal responsibility should be disposed of. The question simply becomes: Whose personal responsibility is it? Is it the slave’s personal responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of his own life, or the master’s social responsibility to not enforce their will upon unconsenting subjects? Likewise, is it your personal responsibility to adapt to your beloved’s troublesome conducts, or is it their responsibility to improve themselves for you?

Descent into Madness

“That’s terrible!” you exclaim, as he shows you incriminating screenshots of how his ex-partner verbally abused him. Your criticisms serve to hide the obvious fact that deep inside, your attempts are manifestations of actively trying to be contrary to the unfavorable example. We all like to believe that we are in control of ourselves all the time. Henceforth, we think, In no world am I going to become like that! What we overlook, or simply cannot afford to sympathize with at the moment, is that every effect has a cause. Sometimes who is the victim is not really obvious as once thought. The abuser may have a victimized background, and the victim is not exempt from abuse.

The situation becomes muddled when you personally know one party and not the other. When it comes to sympathizing with an intimate’s woes, our first instinct is to ask, “Are you alright?” Whereas a third party perspective would be, “You’re a bastard.” We sympathize easily with people because we position ourselves in their shoes and know what led them to decide what they did. Once we understand someone’s principles and limitations, we see that they are governed by those rules and cannot act outside of them. Yet, what sympathy fails to do is extrapolate the consequences objectively. Therefore, with the risk of sounding controversial, I implore you to take an objective economic approach internally whilst displaying empathy externally. Say you understand where they are coming from, but never assert that they are right. For rightness is subjective, and good judges do not declare their verdict before hearing both sides of the court.

I find it appalling whenever he tells me that he also functions as my emotional support center, “making it even”. Even though I am emotional because of conditions caused by him! He is essentially my source of misery, yet I can’t escape from the suffocation because I have nowhere to run to. It genuinely felt like I had no option: I was just so used to this daily servicing routine without any meaning for my own life and no other friends to turn to. How could I contact anyone in this desperate state? They will think I am “emotionally slutty” for blabbering in the conversation with so much weeping and wailing. And after not contacting for months? Out of nowhere, what gives me the right to say, “I need your help”?

I am also reluctant to discuss relationship issues with anyone outside of the relationship, therefore confining myself to only him. For a long time, I doubted my memories, emotions, and whether I am right or wrong — because he never acknowledges them. Unless I say precisely, word per word, what he said that hurt me or explain in pedantic detail what he did, he would continually deny his actions and say that I am lying.

I tend to be forgiving with minor issues that are not worthy of fighting about, so I only bring up my concerns if I see a general theme of concerning behaviors. For example, I don’t mind if someone is late for an appointment. But if this keeps on happening continuously, I will tell the person that being on time is important. Often people appreciate this, but instead, he would demand that I have to cite enough specific examples of when exactly he exhibited these behaviors that are of concern. Unfortunately, I don’t like to recall particular times when someone does something wrong. Still, if a recurring theme exists, I have no choice but to be concerned about it, for it is bound to occur next time. When I cite the examples he asked for, he would either always have a different excuse for each of them or argue about a minor detail slightly off the mark, hoping that that refutation will invalidate my entire point.

He would also argue that I am misrepresenting the case because I didn’t “see it from his intentions”. Do you think for everything you do, I have to crack open your head, see your intentions, word it out and only then my concerns are valid? The world is governed by external results, not internal happenings which are unfalsifiable.

He promises he’ll change, promises he’ll stop… yet he never delivers on them. Every single time I confronted him, my ex says the same thing and the way he says it is so convincing that I end up extending the grace period. It came to a point where I am so used to being disappointed that I expected disappointment to be the normal state of things: He comes to me still being the same, and I accept it — stupidly.

In politics, whether it be politics of courtship or real-world politics, men always seem to have this narrative that emotions (especially when coming from the opposite sex) are irrational and that it is their responsibility to rein in their horses and act ‘rationally’. But what is rational? I will argue from an internalist perspective first rather than externalist, because politics and human affairs are too complicated to be judged by objective principles. In most cases, not even the fairest judge can assert the appropriate degree of ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’. Therefore, it would be irrelevant — in most cases, but I would get to the exception later — to argue that reason should be judged by some objective reality when that objective reality is the matter being put into question. Hence from an internalist perspective, one is deemed reasonable if one acts on decisions that accomplish their desires.

We can infer, as such, that the topic of debate is not whether or not some parties are emotional, but what the display of emotion is for — to accomplish their desires. By extension, the critical questions become: What are their desires? Are their desires appropriate? For example, suppose we take the common stereotype of the partner who brings old issues back to light. In that case, most people will argue that is not the appropriate course of action, yet fail to consider this person’s desires — to have emotions that are previously not appropriately addressed to be addressed at some point, which they decide to be now. Therefore, bringing back the issue is not something unreasonable that serves to offend their partner but merely a decision in line with their desires. If a partner eventually screams — it may seem challenging to empathize with this person — but consider their desires: They have reasoned rationally, calmly, with dignity intact multiple times before, but as nothing changes, they see no other alternative but do the undesirable. On the other hand, if a male wants sex from a female and acts on decisions that hurt the unconsenting party, their decisions are technically rational, but their desires are dishonorable.

However, there are instances in which reasons internalism breaks down because some parties have a distorted view of the world — be it extreme degrees of solipsism, mental illnesses, a weakened ability to reason, and so on. Reasons externalism dictates that reasons for actions are objective and outside of our subjective mindset. If the method of achieving our goal is not objectively reasonable, such as making a fool out of yourself in the attempt to impress someone, regardless of whether the pursuer thinks their method is correct, it is still incorrect. Therefore, self-awareness is a crucial factor in determining whether our actions are reasonable. Suppose he says the reason why he is conducting harmful actions is that he loves me. In that case, he might think those actions are loving instead of harmful, but if the consequences prove they are harmful, then they are regardless of what his intentions were. If one day you find yourself asking, He says he loves me, but if he is so great, why am I so miserable? I implore you to take the externalist approach.

Dealing with someone impossible to reason with — regardless of various causes such as apathy, doltishness, vanity, or the like — would always result in seven main steps:

1. Stress resulting from the other party’s initial mistakes and/or vices causing the issue at hand.
2. Stress resulting from the burden of explaining and correcting the other party’s problematic behavior — as you expect the proper action to be rather apparent to any reasonable party. You ponder why is it your responsibility to correct someone’s clearly inappropriate transgression.
3. Stress resulting from the other party unwilling to listen or understand your reasoning, displaying clear visual or verbal signals that they are batting your concerns away as if your words were analogous to vexing flies.
4. Stress due to hearing the other party’s disjointed response — a response so confused and aimless, it is a non sequitur. Additionally, they might commit other logical fallacies that you are aware of but fail the necessary eloquence and technical knowledge to explain how they are fallacies.
5. Stress as a result of having to repeat your point again in further detail. Those well-versed in the art of conflict resolution might fare better in this department, utilizing empathy and — if they are well-read — might even dispel the previous logical fallacies uttered by the other party. Nonetheless, most in this position tend to have only partially formed thoughts and sentiments and cannot do much besides repeating their original point, hoping this time their partner will listen due to the apparent pertinence of repeated substance.
6. Stress resulting from the other party still not willing to understand your position and instead repeat the non sequitur, red herring, or other logical fallacies, which only serve to result in muddling the discussion. Not all conflicts reach this point of stubbornness, yet readers reading this piece must have a reason to, hence the logical conclusion of what caused them to arrive at madness must be with dealing with a partner of this sort; unable to listen or comprehend your perspective, only repeating their disjointed understanding of the matter of which you have no idea where they were coming from.
7. Stress due to having the other party either play the ‘unconditional love’ card — for the sensitive, romantic types — or the ‘why are you so whiny and demanding’ card — for the egotistical and proud types. On top of all the previous stressors, the final one is also the most provoking. You are blamed as the wrong party who is not understanding enough. This is the most infuriating because your inner voice is split into two. Women doubt themselves much more than men in everyday matters, especially in love — a part of you thinks, am I not understanding enough? On the other hand, why do I have to be the understanding partner while he does not bear the same responsibility?

When people tell themselves that they can love and accept — and perhaps change — a problematic man, they usually think only of one layer of stress: the stress associated with the primary troubling matter. Yet they overlook the six additional layers — some layers have a much more infuriating effect than the first. Without this realization, they form a habit of getting into relationships that slowly but surely deteriorates their ability to reason over time, given repeated occurrences of multi-layered stress.

In the past, I kept on begging: Please stop invalidating my concerns, please stop giving me false hope and promises that will never come true, stop framing me as if I’m crazy and delusional, stop taking away my individual autonomy, stop making me your slave, stop using my family and friends to infringe on my boundaries, stop directly or indirectly distancing my relationship with them, stop making me lose my sanity day by day… Finally, it occurred that it is never going to stop, no matter how much you love him. The only solution is to stop loving and leave.

Sunken Cost

A man who repeatedly breaks a woman’s trust and expects her to forgive him is delusional because he is attempting to go against the law of nature — it is equivalent to breaking a vase, gluing it back together, and breaking it again… repeating the process until the vase has crumbled to dust. No amount of glue can return it back to its original shape. Expecting the contrary would be absurd.

Likewise, love cannot be unconditional. The appeal to ‘unconditional love’ is a manipulative weapon — whether the wielder realizes it or not. Practically, it functions to deflect the responsibility to change ourselves for the betterment of the relationship. Technically, it is fundamentally hypocritical — they would not have dated you had you not have specific conditions that warrant attraction in the first place.

As appealing to ‘unconditional love’ is an easy persuasive method utilized by those who harbor undesirable conditions, those blessed with better conditions should be wiser with their approach: acknowledge you have the bargaining power that the other does not. Upon realizing this, crystallization stops, and your rational mind starts to think economically. You are now angered at the wasted time, effort, and love you have invested into the sunken cost.

The majority of people resort to ad hominems out of sheer frustration. Unfortunately, insults only close any possibility that the difficult partner might turn their heads around. Moreover, seeing as they do not understand your initial frustration in the first place, they are likely to interpret your anger as verbal abuse. It is much more effective to try delivering the truth empathetically — if possible written instead of oral — so that they can refer to your message at any time once they have done self-introspection. Even if, seeing as they have not been cooperative with your explanations before, hence might not be now, explaining the truth empathetically through text can describe your logic — so if your partner tries to send screenshots or speak negatively of you to third-parties, you will have the fact written as proof.

My ex would always “accidentally” spill our relationship issues to my friends, forcing me to distance myself from them because I don’t feel comfortable being indirectly pressured to explain things from my side all the time. It is frustrating to have him misrepresent the situation because he genuinely does not understand what he did wrong. My issue is not in people seeing me in a negative light, but rather firstly, they are my friends whom I introduced to him, making it very inappropriate, and secondly, I prefer personal issues being kept private instead of being subject to public scrutiny — even though I no longer care now.

You might be asking at this point whether this level of vindictiveness towards your significant other is justified. You are plotting a scheme against them and have now understood that indeed, love is war. Not only are you trying to achieve the most strategic position for yourself, but you are also calculating how you can get what you want from them.

Seeing them as sunken cost, yet still, without the courage to leave, you might be inclined to ask for reparations or reassurances. I had fallen into this trap before, so I urge you — do not even attempt it. They will never provide you with the consolation you need; a person who has displayed repeated patterns of an unreliable nature is highly likely to turn reliable overnight. What is the use of trying to take what you are denied when you cannot take anything out of them? The only source of value is within yourself — you can turn your suffering into art.

The French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne suffered greatly from kidney stones, which with modern medicine can be cured, but during his time were extremely painful; the only way to get the stones out were by urinating. Instead of lamenting his predicament, he channeled his pain and experiences into writing books still admired today. You do not have to write like Montaigne to appreciate that taking solace in creative expression is a beautiful way to remedy pain — whether of the body or the heart. I began with scribbling my scattered thoughts and emotions on scrap paper in the dead of night. After some time, I decided to compile my findings: the result is what you are reading now.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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