Today’s been a day of reflection about a lot of my old relationships.
*side-note: sometimes I feel compelled to make this blog glitzy, or to pretty it up, or to be funny, but that’s just not real for me right now, and glitzy has never been. this is me, right now, that’s all there is.*
So my old relationships. I don’t call this thing the mal-adjusted monkey for nothing. I was a sick puppy. Notice ‘was’. It’s better now.
It all came up because two very important people in my life are both in sick relationships. Both are involved with partners who call them names, who yell at them, who are controlling, who comment negatively on their bodies, and exhibit various other symptoms of assholery and abuse. Both women know that this is wrong, but have a built a shaky wall of denial mortared with pity for their abusive partner (he has had it so rough you know, 35 and can’t keep a girlfriend!) and lame excuses like “but we laugh so much sometimes” and “good sex” and other such malarkey. As if you can ever really be laughing and at ease around someone your afraid of.
And I am well qualified to make such a judgement because I was once in relationships similar to those. With men who thought I’d be perfect “if your boobs were just bigger”. Or that I needed coaching on who to hang out with, because the friends I picked weren’t cool enough. Or that disagreements were battles and the one with the loudest voice if not the most accurate or reasonable stance, won.
Even when my relationships weren’t so spectacularly dysfunctional (which is a pretty kind term for what they were), they were sick. Silence, guessing games, staying with people I didn’t even like, cruel dismissals of people’s affection, refusal to trust, the list goes on and on.
I would like to chock it up to that I was using (I’m an addict in recovery), or that I had poor role models, as I come from a home with domestic violence. But figuring out a reason isn’t really as important as finding out how to break the pattern.
Today, talking with my two women friends about their relationships, I realized I have broken the pattern (for now) and for me, it happened unintentionally. It happened when I got clean. In many recovery programs (I belong to a 12 step fellowship) there is a suggestion that when you come in, you take a year off from relationships. It has nothing to do with sex really and everything to do with staying clean. And I took that year, not because I really thought one way or the other about my relationships, but because I couldn’t stop using drugs and was willing to do anything to stay clean, including quitting having sex for a year.
During that year I did a lot of work on myself. It was the first year, or actually any significant amount of time, that I spent out of a sexual relationship of some sort since I started having sex. I didn’t take the time to learn how to have healthier relationships. But that is one thing that came out of it.
There’s no magic bullet answer to learning how to have healthy relationships. I think self respect and respect for the humanity of others are key. I worry sometimes that I will be, or am, an abusive partner. Not in a screaming, name-calling or hitting way. I mean a more subtle, but still real, abuse.
I worry that I don’t support my partner enough, or allow him to be a human being doing things his own way and having his own process. For instance, we’re moving, and it is easy for me to decide the way he moves/packs/prepares is stupid, inefficient, and mine is better. But when I get real honest about it, the way he moves is different than me, but the other stuff is matter of opinion. If the house is clean and the stuff is packed at the end, is one really better?
And so is it then abusive if I try to act like he is not doing a good enough job, because he is not doing it my way? As I think about it lately, yes. It is controlling to insist that my way be the best and that he is doing something wrong by not adhereing to it.
This is on the low end of the scale of what I’m used to in relationships. It has been hard for me to detect. Shit, I used to be amazed we disagreed without screaming or dragging in our weapon stores of unrelated old wrongs and shortcomings to hurl at each other. But what this sort of thing I’m describing is is controlling, shaming behavior from me, and this refusal to support him if he doesn’t act like I want, is a behavior that I have to address in my life.
There’s always work to do.
