When I was young I wished for a love like in the movies. I craved that earth-stopping, heart-racing romance and passion.
Of course, there are no blockbusters with low drama; there is always some sort of misunderstanding, complete with hurt feelings and a giant romantic gesture to win back love. The relationship is not easy, nor straightforward. It’s not a steady love, it’s a chaotic and often toxic love. Unfortunately, it’s also the model we most commonly see for relationships. Because of this, we romanticize the trials of love and equate the idea of a grand gesture with a gigantic all-encompassing love.
While I now prefer the idea of consistent, reciprocal love shown daily in both word and deed, I know far too many people who are still hung up on the idea of testing their partner’s love for them and craving those grand gestures. The problem is, when we test someone’s love and commitment to us, we are assuming they love the same ways we do. We assume they show love the same and would respond to a test of the strength of their love the same way we would. We forget to make allowances for the fact that they are completely different people with different frames of reference and different past experiences that shaped them. We forget that they may have different core values and needs, and different ways of approaching those needs or getting them met. Instead of laying down our armor and laying ourselves bare and vulnerable before them, we poke and prod and ask them to “prove their love” to us. We invite the drama, and then when this test of commitment backfires, we seek comfort and justification for our actions.
My friend Drew called me out of the blue the other day, gut-punched because his girlfriend won’t take him back, and asked me to weigh in on whether he is the asshole in the situation. I don’t like to make judgment calls about other people’s experiences like this: While I have my opinions, I generally leave people to do their thing as long as it’s not harmful to others, but I also know that usually when people ask “AITA?” there is a good chance they know the answer is yes. (If you hadn’t heard of this before, it means “Am I the asshole?”) They mostly want to present their side of the story and get rationalization, or sympathy for what they’ve done. If you can’t be happy, at least be right, I guess. It’s also pretty obvious that those dubious actions are masking great pain.
Drew has dated his girlfriend Leia for a year and a half, and they lived together, though, at every stage of the relationship, she’s been more ready to progress than he has. She wanted to move in with him after six months, but he slowed her down. When he finally did ask her to move in a little over a year in, he prefaced it with telling her he wasn’t anywhere near ready to propose (although she had already admitted to looking into converting to his religion and had created a joint email account #DrewLeia).
On the whole, Drew is a sweet — if slightly neurotic and insecure — guy. Leia is a stunning ex-ballerina-turned-sommelier, though I know her credentials better than I know the woman herself. The entirety of the relationship, Drew has expressed his insecurity about Leia’s beauty, the high-powered crowd she’s friends with, and her ex-boyfriends, wondering if he’s good enough for her.
Several months ago, around the time they were moving in together, they got into a heavy discussion where he confessed he didn’t like how much she drinks (and how sloppy she gets) and she retaliated that while she loves their emotional connection, she has never been physically attracted to him. This was brutal to his already-existent insecurities, but he was hedging his bets during their whole relationship: Drew’s marriage before he met Leia ended in infidelity. He first had an emotional and then a physical affair with his friend Camille and though he and Camille never dated openly once they were both single, he kept in contact with her as one of his best friends. While Leia knew about how Drew’s marriage ended, she wasn’t aware that he and Camille still talked regularly — she thought it was over and done between them. And she certainly didn’t know that Camille was trying to convince Drew to move to Chicago and give their relationship a shot.
Drew shared that he had decided to find out exactly what was between Camille and him. He broke it off with Leia, intending to move to Chicago for a month, but realized just days in that the bond he shared with Camille was rooted in their past and not their future.
He moaned to me about how Leia wouldn’t take him back now that he’d decided to move back from Chicago and asked aloud if he was being unreasonable. I pressed my lips together, trying to keep my initial reaction in and buy some time to gather my thoughts.
“Do you want me to make sympathetic noises and tell you I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, or do you want my true thoughts?” I asked.
“Both,” he said.
“Let me start by asking you why you think you want her back? She told you she’s not attracted to you…so why do you want to be with her? Why would you want to be with someone who has told you that you’re not enough for them?”
“She’s beautiful and smart, and talented, and we get along really well…” he said, and then paused. “I just feel like if she really loved me, she’d have fought for us when I was telling her I was going to go to Chicago.” Ahhh. I could hear the hurt in his voice but wanted him to also see it from her perspective.
“Drew?” I asked. “If Leia had told you that she was going to move back to LA to date the man she’d been with right before she met you, that she’d carried on communicating in a flirtatious way with throughout your whole relationship, even though she knew you were bothered by that particular friendship and thought they no longer talked, and then she decided that she didn’t feel that spark with him after all and she wanted you back as if nothing had happened, would you take her back?
For that matter, would you have begged her to love you and to stay with you? Would you be okay knowing you were merely a backup choice to her, knowing she didn’t love you enough to stay committed to you, and just wait around in the relationship for the next time a guy piqued her interest enough that she had to ‘see about it?’
Would you feel emotionally safe with her? Would you trust her? Or would you have felt like this whole situation was the gut-wrenching breakup that she intended it to be when she told you to get out of her house and that she was moving to explore a potential relationship with someone else, then grieved the relationship, but let her go?”
My comment was met with silence. “I’m sorry this hurts so badly, Drew,” I sighed. “Breakups suck. I would encourage you to seek out a therapist and look into why you kept one foot out the door, trying to cushion, during the whole relationship. Was this a way to wound Leia for the way she hurt you?Was it something special in Camille, or were you just not that into Leia? And are you capable of fully committing to someone in the future, now that you’ve put the question of Camille to rest? And would you really want to proceed in a relationship with someone who you know isn’t attracted to you? If so, why?Especially when you already felt insecure about dating her. The answers to those questions might help you move forward.”
“Thanks for your honest feedback and not holding back,” he finally told me glumly, about to hang up.
“Before you go,” I said, “one more thing: Those big tests for someone to prove how much they love you? It’s far more effective to have a calm conversation with someone and tell them you’re feeling insecure in the relationship and maybe suggest a couple of ways to reassure you rather than devise secret trials they have to pass through in order to prove themselves. Those trials either make you feel let down if they can’t match your expectations, or erode their trust in you. No one likes to feel constantly tested. It’s exhausting.”
Drew blew out his breath. “Yeah. I can see that. Now.”
His situation was tough. I have empathy for him, in a relationship where it seems they were both holding back or hedging their bets. It’s hard to be in a committed relationship with someone who tells you they’re not attracted to you. I know first-hand: My ex told me that kissing me “is like kissing worms; I find it repulsive.” And whether he was merely trying to wound me (he was successful) or whether it was a passing thought that faded, it stayed with me, as Leia’s comment has stayed with Drew. I don’t know what it would take to move past an experience like this. Though my ex made that comment (on two occasions) about four years before we actually split, we never adequately addressed it. He sort of apologized when I told him how hurt I was, and then immediately sought to justify his comment. I don’t know if Leia and Drew addressed their issues either. Perhaps his pain is why he felt compelled to hurt her back by leaving her for the one person Leia was sensitive about.
When we cushion our relationships (hedging our bets and testing out the next one while we are still in this one), when we seek to justify actions that we know are hurtful, it is masking pain. And only when we address that deep pain can we move on and have healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
—
Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com