Once you’re in a relationship with someone, you’ll always be in a relationship with that person. The only question is, what kind of relationship will it be?
Seizing the rope
Picture yourself having fallen off a cliff and hanging on to a bush. Just as the roots are beginning to give, someone lowers a rope down to you. It’s the person you once loved, who hurt you, and you no longer trust.
Do you grab the rope?
I think, no matter what you might say, you’ll grab the rope, but maybe not until after the bush begins to give way.
If you don’t grab the rope out of spite; because you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of saving you, then you die.
If you do grab the rope, then you’ve demonstrated that, no matter how untrustworthy a person is, if the need is great enough, you’ll trust him.
After he hauls you back up and you catch your breath, you might not fall into his arms and live happily ever after. The wounds of the past are still unhealed. He may have saved your life, but he’s still a jerk. However, you have succeeded in setting aside your differences to work together towards an important goal. You briefly re-negotiated your relationship.
I tell this story as a way of saying that sometimes, not only when you fall off a cliff, you still have a need that only your former loved one will satisfy. When that happens, you re-negotiate your relationship.
The re-negotiated relationship
Once a relationship is made for one purpose, it’s possible to change that purpose to another. When you get together with someone to hang on Friday nights and end up having sex, you re-negotiated the relationship. When you decide to be exclusive, you’ve re-negotiated it again; and again, when you give her a ring. Before you know it, your relationship is all about raising kids and paying off a mortgage. Hopefully, you still enjoy each other’s company on Friday nights. In long, vibrant marriages, purposes accumulate. In ailing ones, they die off.
If you have lost some purposes, but others remain, then it may make sense to re-negotiate the relationship. People do this all the time when they get a divorce but cooperate with each other to raise kids. They say their union is finished, but it’s really not; it’s been converted into another kind of union, working together towards a different purpose.
The couple might not achieve authentic reconciliation this way; they never go back to the fullness of their relationship as it existed before. You don’t need to trust that your husband won’t sleep with other women, for example, you just need to trust that he’ll bring back the kids. These can be very satisfying and valuable relationships, nonetheless, for both of you and, especially, for the kids.
Re-negotiating and growing up
You can see this process of re-negotiation in any healthy relationship between parents and children. In early childhood, parents are responsible for everything and they can claim almost complete access to their child. When you were young, you crapped in your pants and your parents had to clean you up. When they did so, they would touch you in a private area. As you got older, you had to clean yourself up and doing so; you earned the right to set boundaries on your parents. As an adult, your parents can’t touch your ass; they may even have to knock before they can come in your house; but you can have a very satisfying, valuable relationship with them, nonetheless.
In cases where you have been harmed by a parent, you may need to re-negotiate the relationship further. If your father can’t say three words to you without being critical, then you may not want to play golf with him every weekend because you can’t trust him to go eighteen holes without getting on your nerves. On the other hand, you might not want to sever the relationship completely because you don’t think that would be right. Besides, you still want to see your mother. That’s what Thanksgiving dinner is for, I guess. For the sake of peace, your relationship has been re-negotiated into one where you have a meal once a year.
The long way to reconciliation
When someone has been harmed in a relationship and the relationship is re-negotiated into something more limited, we can’t really say the partners have achieved full reconciliation. It’s not like they’ve gone back to the way things were before; but they have negotiated a peace, so to speak. They instituted a demilitarized zone that none can cross. Having this understanding is so much better than all-out war, but the partners still warily patrol the border for violations and incursions. In time, if the DMZ is respected, it can turn into an ordinary boundary that requires no special defense. Then you might say there’s reconciliation, if only because the two parties simply don’t need to fight.
It’s hard to believe that two former British colonies, the United States and Canada have, several times in their history, fought wars against each other. The issues between them have long since passed away and only historians remember why they fought. You could say that the two countries have reached reconciliation without ever uniting. This is the long way to reconciliation, which is achieved, not by the members working it out, but by agreeing to leave each other alone.
Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice and the author of The Road to Reconciliation: A Comprehensive Guide to Peace When Relationships Go Bad, from which this article is adapted.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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