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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#28: "My Terrible Relationship Fell Apart Because I Didn't Try Hard Enough To Hold It Together."
When a relationship falls apart, there's often a game of blame and trying to dissect where it went wrong so that it doesn't happen again in the next relationship, and taking information learned in that past relationship to try and make a better future relationship. At least, that's the way it's supposed to go when the parties separate amicably and on decent terms with each other, and there aren't major issues in the way that prevent that amicability. If you've been following along all month, you already know that the separation from the person I call my terrible ex was not amicable.
It turns out there's more than a few weasels that come from that separation, though, and they're not kind to me and want to blame me for not doing enough to try and hold the relationship together. Yes, even though #13 exists in this series. Because one of the things that brainweasels do is refuse to follow logic and sense.
The first one is kind of obvious. Since I'm the one who decided to end the relationship, I'm the one who decided to stop putting in the effort to keep the relationship going. That seems clear enough, and I'm sure that by itself is more than enough for my ex to have pinned all the blame on me for the relationship. She was just fine with things continuing the way they were. (That they were unhealthy and that it really was an issue is secondary, because they could have been overcome with work.) I can tell myself that I decided to end it because continuing in that vein was going to be financially ruinous and I knew it, I can tell myself that the relationship was abusive to my mental and physical health and I was not being anywhere close to fulfilled in it, and I can tell myself that with time and perspective it's even more obvious how bad things were for me, and that weasel simply doesn't care. To have ended the relationship means that I decided the work wasn't worth it any more, and therefore, just like all the other men who deserve scorn and derision, I ran when things got tough.
The second one is unhappy that I decided I was going to leave rather than try to stick it through with things like couples counseling, regardless of how poorly those sessions were going. I also had an individual therapist in my corner who I was talking to about the whole situation and who was providing reality checks to me that some of the things that I considered normal and part of the relationship really were not. The therapist was also there because I'd had a few situations where I'd envisioned the future continuing as it was and it was enough to spark a panic attack or three. Several years into the relationship. But my parents have been married for a very long time, and so had my grandparents, and the expectation was that if I was in a relationship, then I was going to treat it seriously and try to work through whatever issues there were. Which I did, for as long as I could. And while we weren't married, as such, breaking off the relationship felt like divorce (and the fallout was very close to what it would have been had it been an actual divorce.) So there was a lot of internalized shame about leaving a relationship of many years. (On top of the worries that I had about what would happen when I did decide to leave.)
The third of those weasels tells me that I couldn't possibly have exhausted all of the possible ways to make the relationship work, and therefore I didn't really have justification to go, because I hadn't tried all the options. I hadn't tried some other combination of asking, refusing, and working with her that might have turned out to work perfectly, even though all the other, more obvious combinations had failed. I could have tried to get myself that second job for the weekends and seen if I could have sustained it. I could have tried to get myself into management, with the commensurate salary increase that would have come with it. There are plenty of scenarios that I didn't try, and even if I know in my head they were low-percentage chances, possibly even no-percentage chances, I can't truly know that they were going to fail unless I tried them. So I ran instead of exhausting all my options.
The fourth weasel is the "perfection is the only way to avoid trouble" weasel, back again for another round of "this relationship was perfectable, and you decided to leave rather than to find the way that would have perfected this relationship." To which the retort is "this relationship required two people to be perfected, and at least one of them wasn't interested in finding the way to perfection." But it still shows up even now as "you think things are going to be fine now, but when are you going to decide this relationship/this friendship is no longer workable and run away from it?" (I can sidestep this, to some degree, by pointing out to that weasel that my current relationships are founded on the idea of "for as long as we both want," which allows either of us to withdraw if we no longer want. So that nobody feels stuck in a relationship that they can't get out of and that drives them to drastic thinking. At least, barring some amount of decisions by legislators and others to try and force any independent woman-looking person into a relationship with a man-looking person if she wants to have access to any part of society.
I did try in that relationship. I tried hard. I tried to keep up my end of the expenses. I tried to make sure I followed what rules and guidelines I knew about. I tried to take care of the animals, and I tried to take care of her. I tried not to indulge myself in too many things, and I tried to make sure she stayed happy when she wanted little treats. (That I didn't also partake with her in many of those was a thing that made her unhappy.) I saved what I could, I tried to make sure there was something available for the inevitable unexpected expense, and I tried to keep the house in good repair (mostly, in this case, by paying other people to do that.) I tried to be present and to spend time together, and to support her in her hobbies, including the ones that she grudgingly tried to turn into hustles because I was fretting about the money so much. I was friendly to her friends, even when her friends became the only people I saw, since she had mostly driven away the people who wanted to see me without her by insisting that she should come along with me to as many things as possible and not really giving me space to be myself around them. And perhaps if I had been wealthier, or with more income, or otherwise able to succeed at the increasingly impossible tasks before me, we might still be together, because I was definitely trying to make that relationship work. (If you asked her, I'm sure she would say the same, that she was trying as well.) But because I left and she didn't want to (why would she, things were going great for her), I have to wrestle these negative feelings.
It's not true, by any objective standard, that I didn't try hard enough to make that relationship work. Several objective standards (meaning, the opinions of the people around me who have watched this whole thing and heard at least my side of it) would tell me that I tried harder than most, and would probably say that I was trying harder than she was to get it to work, since I was trying to adjust and she wasn't. The therapist of the time certainly believed I was trying hard to fit into a situation that wasn't normal or healthy. I kept a journal of things that were unhappy-making, or relationship-harming, just to be sure that I wasn't gaslighting myself into believing things were better (or worse) than they actually were.
The wreckage of the relationship still influences the ones I have now, and it makes me sensitive to the thought of someone else committing themselves so far in that they won't be able to easily get out of it again. They can stay in as far as they want for as long as they want, but I want them to be able to leave, and leave cleanly, if that's what they decide is best. Because I don't want them to have to deal with this same situation that I did, and so that they can leave with many fewer weasels about the effort put in to the relationship. (And so that someone else doesn't decide to weaponize the "well, if you leave, then I'm going to be on the streets homeless with the pets and you're not the kind of person who would do that to someone" idea. She was right, I'm not that kind of person, which is also why I hope that the pets she takes care of live long and happy well cared-for lives.)
I did try in that relationship. A lot. That my own brain believes it wasn't enough is unhelpful. That I'm happier now in my current situation is proof that the relationship was bad and it was a good decision to leave, but there's always that piece that wonders whether it was possible to work it all out, and what it would have taken to actually do that.
#28: "My Terrible Relationship Fell Apart Because I Didn't Try Hard Enough To Hold It Together."
When a relationship falls apart, there's often a game of blame and trying to dissect where it went wrong so that it doesn't happen again in the next relationship, and taking information learned in that past relationship to try and make a better future relationship. At least, that's the way it's supposed to go when the parties separate amicably and on decent terms with each other, and there aren't major issues in the way that prevent that amicability. If you've been following along all month, you already know that the separation from the person I call my terrible ex was not amicable.
It turns out there's more than a few weasels that come from that separation, though, and they're not kind to me and want to blame me for not doing enough to try and hold the relationship together. Yes, even though #13 exists in this series. Because one of the things that brainweasels do is refuse to follow logic and sense.
The first one is kind of obvious. Since I'm the one who decided to end the relationship, I'm the one who decided to stop putting in the effort to keep the relationship going. That seems clear enough, and I'm sure that by itself is more than enough for my ex to have pinned all the blame on me for the relationship. She was just fine with things continuing the way they were. (That they were unhealthy and that it really was an issue is secondary, because they could have been overcome with work.) I can tell myself that I decided to end it because continuing in that vein was going to be financially ruinous and I knew it, I can tell myself that the relationship was abusive to my mental and physical health and I was not being anywhere close to fulfilled in it, and I can tell myself that with time and perspective it's even more obvious how bad things were for me, and that weasel simply doesn't care. To have ended the relationship means that I decided the work wasn't worth it any more, and therefore, just like all the other men who deserve scorn and derision, I ran when things got tough.
The second one is unhappy that I decided I was going to leave rather than try to stick it through with things like couples counseling, regardless of how poorly those sessions were going. I also had an individual therapist in my corner who I was talking to about the whole situation and who was providing reality checks to me that some of the things that I considered normal and part of the relationship really were not. The therapist was also there because I'd had a few situations where I'd envisioned the future continuing as it was and it was enough to spark a panic attack or three. Several years into the relationship. But my parents have been married for a very long time, and so had my grandparents, and the expectation was that if I was in a relationship, then I was going to treat it seriously and try to work through whatever issues there were. Which I did, for as long as I could. And while we weren't married, as such, breaking off the relationship felt like divorce (and the fallout was very close to what it would have been had it been an actual divorce.) So there was a lot of internalized shame about leaving a relationship of many years. (On top of the worries that I had about what would happen when I did decide to leave.)
The third of those weasels tells me that I couldn't possibly have exhausted all of the possible ways to make the relationship work, and therefore I didn't really have justification to go, because I hadn't tried all the options. I hadn't tried some other combination of asking, refusing, and working with her that might have turned out to work perfectly, even though all the other, more obvious combinations had failed. I could have tried to get myself that second job for the weekends and seen if I could have sustained it. I could have tried to get myself into management, with the commensurate salary increase that would have come with it. There are plenty of scenarios that I didn't try, and even if I know in my head they were low-percentage chances, possibly even no-percentage chances, I can't truly know that they were going to fail unless I tried them. So I ran instead of exhausting all my options.
The fourth weasel is the "perfection is the only way to avoid trouble" weasel, back again for another round of "this relationship was perfectable, and you decided to leave rather than to find the way that would have perfected this relationship." To which the retort is "this relationship required two people to be perfected, and at least one of them wasn't interested in finding the way to perfection." But it still shows up even now as "you think things are going to be fine now, but when are you going to decide this relationship/this friendship is no longer workable and run away from it?" (I can sidestep this, to some degree, by pointing out to that weasel that my current relationships are founded on the idea of "for as long as we both want," which allows either of us to withdraw if we no longer want. So that nobody feels stuck in a relationship that they can't get out of and that drives them to drastic thinking. At least, barring some amount of decisions by legislators and others to try and force any independent woman-looking person into a relationship with a man-looking person if she wants to have access to any part of society.
I did try in that relationship. I tried hard. I tried to keep up my end of the expenses. I tried to make sure I followed what rules and guidelines I knew about. I tried to take care of the animals, and I tried to take care of her. I tried not to indulge myself in too many things, and I tried to make sure she stayed happy when she wanted little treats. (That I didn't also partake with her in many of those was a thing that made her unhappy.) I saved what I could, I tried to make sure there was something available for the inevitable unexpected expense, and I tried to keep the house in good repair (mostly, in this case, by paying other people to do that.) I tried to be present and to spend time together, and to support her in her hobbies, including the ones that she grudgingly tried to turn into hustles because I was fretting about the money so much. I was friendly to her friends, even when her friends became the only people I saw, since she had mostly driven away the people who wanted to see me without her by insisting that she should come along with me to as many things as possible and not really giving me space to be myself around them. And perhaps if I had been wealthier, or with more income, or otherwise able to succeed at the increasingly impossible tasks before me, we might still be together, because I was definitely trying to make that relationship work. (If you asked her, I'm sure she would say the same, that she was trying as well.) But because I left and she didn't want to (why would she, things were going great for her), I have to wrestle these negative feelings.
It's not true, by any objective standard, that I didn't try hard enough to make that relationship work. Several objective standards (meaning, the opinions of the people around me who have watched this whole thing and heard at least my side of it) would tell me that I tried harder than most, and would probably say that I was trying harder than she was to get it to work, since I was trying to adjust and she wasn't. The therapist of the time certainly believed I was trying hard to fit into a situation that wasn't normal or healthy. I kept a journal of things that were unhappy-making, or relationship-harming, just to be sure that I wasn't gaslighting myself into believing things were better (or worse) than they actually were.
The wreckage of the relationship still influences the ones I have now, and it makes me sensitive to the thought of someone else committing themselves so far in that they won't be able to easily get out of it again. They can stay in as far as they want for as long as they want, but I want them to be able to leave, and leave cleanly, if that's what they decide is best. Because I don't want them to have to deal with this same situation that I did, and so that they can leave with many fewer weasels about the effort put in to the relationship. (And so that someone else doesn't decide to weaponize the "well, if you leave, then I'm going to be on the streets homeless with the pets and you're not the kind of person who would do that to someone" idea. She was right, I'm not that kind of person, which is also why I hope that the pets she takes care of live long and happy well cared-for lives.)
I did try in that relationship. A lot. That my own brain believes it wasn't enough is unhelpful. That I'm happier now in my current situation is proof that the relationship was bad and it was a good decision to leave, but there's always that piece that wonders whether it was possible to work it all out, and what it would have taken to actually do that.
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Date: 2023-12-29 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-29 05:53 am (UTC)