A friend said this to me recently.
I’d rather adjust to his absence than put up with his bullshit.
It’s crass, brilliant, and so simple. Why don’t more of us think this way?
Full disclosure — Even though I’m a therapist, I have no idea whether your relationship can work for you. If it’s working now, good. If it isn’t, even your therapist can’t tell you whether it ever will or not. We can give you techniques, communication skills, and some idea of the prognosis, but we don’t really know.
In this case, I think it just might work out. Here’s why.
She means it. Once a person gets clear that they can be just fine — or even better off — on their own, it becomes more imperative for the partner to figure out how to stay. People in general, but particularly in relationships, respond to your confidence and firmness of decision.
Soon after she made this statement to me, her partner started doing what they need to do, to not only stay in the relationship, but to take better care of their own physical and mental health. She’d asked him to do some things — like go to the doctor and get a therapist — but didn’t give a deadline. She had one in mind, but didn’t share it so the deadline wouldn’t be an ultimatum. He agreed and set his own deadline.
Not inconsequentially, she also set some firm parameters around how he could talk to her and treat her. So far he’s acting better.
In the past, there’s been a cycle, where he acts better, then reverts to old behaviors. Not being a hands-on parent to their child. Ignoring my friend. Saying mean things to her.
This time seems different. It’s lasted longer, for one. He and their child are getting to know one another better. He is no longer saying mean things.
Why is this time different? The difference is her getting clear for herself what she wants and doesn’t want from him and the relationship.
Unless someone is abusive and/or has a personality disorder, they will respond to your boundaries. When you actually set them, that is.
Why do we so often not set those boundaries in a relationship? In long-term relationships it’s familiarity. False feelings of comfort in the familiar. Fear of change. Fear of abandonment. In recent relationships, it’s our fear that they’ll leave and no one else will come along.
We all carry some form of fear of abandonment from infancy, childhood, and often previous relationships. I’m not recommending we play on our partner’s fear of abandonment. I’m suggesting we heal and release our own.
When we are able to imagine standing on our own, or actually do it, we might still feel the fear, but the fear won’t be in charge. The fear of abandonment won’t get to make our decisions for us any longer. The blinders come off and we can see other pathways clearly.
Why did my friend “put up with his bullshit for so long — 17 years and counting?
Because she knows his trauma history.
She knows it, and she has compassion for him. However, she now realizes she’s let that compassion allow his bad behavior to exist and continue throughout the relationship. That’s enabling.
Compassion in a relationship, when it isn’t enabling, is a good thing.
Recently, she told me she realized how touch deprived and skin hungry he’d been as a child. Instead of requesting more affection from him, as she had in the past, she started being more affectionate toward him. She didn’t tell him what she was doing, she just did it.
Guess what? He responded and began being more affectionate in return.
I’m not suggesting a patriarchal trope of the woman always being the one to nurture and change first. The principle of compassion combined with self-love and healing works for relationships with all types of gender combinations.
We stay in relationships that aren’t satisfying, because they’re familiar and we’re afraid of change or being alone. We conquer those fears by doing our own healing. By providing more nurture to our own inner child.
When we nurture ourselves, feel the fear of change and embrace it anyway, and realize we are perfectly fine alone, then we can help create a healthy relationship. If we don’t, then we’re often two scared children clinging to one another in the dark, and then taking our fear and anger out on each other.
Eckhart Tolle says in the “Power of Now” that we have three options in any situation:
We can accept the familiar but uncomfortable, we can work to change our fears and as a result, possibly the relationship, or we can adjust to their absence and no longer have to put up with their BS.
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This post was previously published on New Choices.
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