“We’re a team.”
The phrase stuck with me. I was arguing with my secret lover, Jared, over something. Jared was in a long-term and serious relationship with a woman who had moved three hours away from him and their house and business together. He was heartbroken and lonely when we met. So I was, for different reasons. Fueled by overwhelming lust, we began an illicit affair.
“We’re a team,” he told me.
Oh no, he wasn’t talking about him and I.
He was talking about him and his girlfriend (common-law wife, as they’d been together 7 years at that point). I must have been poking and prodding, passive-aggressively shaming him for putting his truck in her name. Looking back, it was a small-spirited and jealous way for me to minimize their relationship, although it’s also true that I did suspect that maybe he was putting loaned purchases in her name because of a (suspected) shitty credit score. But really, what business of that was mine?
Still, his response to my catty little accusation silenced me. It made me pensive. I’d never considered the mentality of teamwork in a relationship before, sad as that is to admit.I suppose I wasn’t raised to see relationships as a sort of teamwork. My parents, fiercely academic but otherwise out-of-touch with real life, often seemed to avoid each other’s company and my mother was increasingly a hermit misanthrope.
Teamwork. I liked that definition of a relationship. Conceptually, it warm and positive.
I started to view their relationship differently.
The house they bought together.
The small business selling beers that they started together.
The two kids from his divorce that she helped raise, apparently barren herself.
My tunnel-vision perception started to evolve and widen, even as my heart ached. I started to see more clearly the flimsiness of our intensely overwhelming sexual attraction. Illicit, lust-fueled fun that became increasingly less fun and more painful as time stretched onward and I began to long for something deeper, in the way women do.
Maybe I did want commitment, after all.
Not with him, though.
The dreamy, mushy feelings were there in spades. In a distant childlike place in my mind we were happy together, but only there. He was — I hate to write it — a broken man, badly abused as a child and cripplingly alcoholic as an adult. Plus, he was taken, a fact for which I felt deep gratitude, because the thought of dealing with all his emotional issues honestly scared me.
Still, even these glaring flaws of his made me ponder more deeply the nature of teamwork in relationships. How scary it can become when the going gets tough. The importance of choosing someone who you can endure even when they make life a living hell. The importance of being the bigger person, instead of trying to be right.
I started to ask myself important questions about intimate relationships, concepts I hadn’t truly considered before because I’d somehow assumed since childhood that the perfect relationship would one day fall in my lap. Effortlessly. Like it were owed to me. Jared, however, had rid me of that illusion. I saw how hard and messy life was, how flawed, how human.
How would I treat my future partner when he fucked up?
Acted human?
Weak?
Maybe even petty or mean.
I know think that I would like to react from a mentality of teammanship. Not right vs. wrong. Not me vs. him. I want a new narrative around myself and my relationships. Support. Constructive feedback. Open, honest communication. Even when it hurts or is super awkward. Suddenly, I was realizing on a deeper level what I’d already always known.
I have deep-seated intimacy and commitment issues, no doubt propelled into motion by a childhood that felt lacking in affection and attention, and occasionally downright abusive.
…
I’d always known that I attract emotionally unavailable men because I, myself, am emotionally unavailable. I’ve struggled with intimacy since childhood, most likely due to cliche mother issues. A fragile, neurotic woman, my own mother regretted motherhood, maybe even life itself, and regularly took out on her simmering self-hatred on her four children — particularly me, as the oldest and the least obedient.
But now, post-Jared, I finally felt myself changing inside. I’d gotten an insider’s look at a broken man in a broken relationship. I saw the flaws and I saw the beauty. I witness how easily poor values can destroy a relationship. But I also witnessed, conceptually at least, the beauty of what of could be. The beauty of authentic commitment and real intimacy. Trapped in an impossible love triangle of my own making, I wanted out but I also wanted in.
With the desire to change, however, comes deeply entrenched shame and embarrassment over my actions. Ashamed of the carelessness with which I engaged with a taken man, though I did try to take care to make sure that his girlfriend wouldn’t find out. She did, of course. More than once. Thankfully, she chose to stay with him. If she hadn’t, my shame would run even deeper. I would have been a verifiable home-wrecker.
What’s more, Jared can’t stand to be alone, and perhaps would tried to pressure me me to begin a bonafide relationship with me in her absence.
I have a daughter. I just couldn’t.
I feel another kind of shame, too.
At thirty-five years of age, with a fourth-grade daughter, I am mortified that I am finally asking the right questions and truly learning about what it means to be in a committed relationship.
I have friends who seemingly figured it out in their teens and twenties. I have friends who have been married over a decade now, with gaggles of cute kids to prove it. I feel very late to the game, like I’m finally figuring out one of life’s simplest, purest formulas decades after everybody else did. Then again, there are an awful lot of divorces these days. Some of which were probably caused by affairs not unlike the one in which I engaged. Still, there’s a sort of morbid comfort in knowing I’m not the only “failure” at commitment.
I’m at a sort of liminal crossroads now as I come to terms with the fact that at a time where my peers were marrying or raising kids, I was canoodling with a drunken cad. I guess I wanted both excitement and a sure-fire roadblock to commitment, and I got them both.
In the end, the price was steep — my own heart, soul and feelings — and I left with one burning gift: the desire to be partner in a team I support. The desire to become softer, fuller, more capable of giving and receiving love.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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