F*ck Feelings Page 22

  Of course, it’s human nature for you or your partner to keep trying, and propose one more talk, therapy session, or set of rules for ending hostilities or solving an issue that isn’t going to go away. Yogi Berra would agree that it ain’t over till it’s over, but don’t pretend it’s not over when it is.

  If you want a chance to get back into the game with this or another franchise, however, you owe it to yourself to stop the bleeding, figure out exactly what went wrong, and either accept the team you have or start over. Obsessing or ruminating over what you should have done is a waste of time; learn from your mistakes and move on.

  Some people’s love has a limited use-by date (see: borderlines sidebar here) and when trust is gone, the relationship is over, even though, as far as you can see, you did nothing wrong.

  When she first loves you, she’s crazy about you because you’re better than all those prior lovers who always let her down, but when she sees you’re not the messiah, then she’s crazy with disappointment, or just crazy, period. Any anger, incomprehension, or protest you express is further proof you can’t be trusted.

  Look into your ex-partner’s past, and you’ll discover similar trust swings. The first swing may well have been triggered by actual sexual abuse, but later swings, you’ll discover, involved lovers who were not abusive, but your partner experienced them as if they were. So you’re fucked, but you’re not alone.

  While your heart is mending, learn to spot the warning signs so you won’t make the same mistake twice: e.g., intense intimacy right off the bat, a feeling of being a savior, if not The Savior, super sex (no offense to the Savior), and a string of evil past lovers. As we’ve said before, if a relationship begins with sudden or near-baseless feelings of love, don’t be shocked if it ends with sudden or near-baseless feelings of mistrust.

  More complex is the problem caused by a partner—usually a guy—who loves you but is also impulsively responsive to exciting, shiny new relationships and endless sexts from someone-not-you. If you’re a nice, humble person, you may wonder what you did wrong, or whether there was a problem that you failed to perceive.

  You will wish, very strongly, that you or a therapist could fish out an issue from your partner’s past or present involving hidden anger or unconscious needs that, once expressed and shouted or cried over, would never cause infidelity again. Unless your therapist is a genie, that wish will be in vain.

  The good news is that your partner probably loves you as much as ever. The bad news is that the tendency toward infidelity, like one toward addiction, is not curable, and that’s what a good therapist will tell you.

  Decide for yourself whether you can accept your partner’s having this kind of weakness and whether he recognizes having it and seems determined to do better at controlling it in the future. If he pleads and says it will never happen again, his thinking is as wishful/bullshitty as yours. If he says it’s hard to resist, but he’s going to join a twelve-step group to help him stay away from trouble, he might actually succeed.

  What’s most important is not to take the problem personally or try to solve it once and for all. Once the anger has started to fade, decide whether your partnership—which you now know is higher risk than you thought—is worth continuing. You can salvage it if you wish, but what you’re salvaging is not what you thought you had in the first place.

  Sometimes, of course, you’re the one who falls out of love, which is particularly likely to happen as you get to know someone who is not nearly as good at doing his share as he first seemed. That’s why the getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship is important and carries risks of heartbreak for both sides.

  Your job isn’t to feel guilty for dumping someone and then to stick around to feel her pain, particularly when you began a relationship honestly believing it could work out. Review your conduct to see if you did right, given how you felt at the time. If you were honest and had good intentions, the pain of a breakup can’t be helped and shouldn’t be your responsibility.

  Don’t try to “friend” your ex into feeling better, particularly when you see it prolongs their need to hold on to the old relationship. Say good-bye, putting your own judgment ahead of what your ex says is best and effectively putting her out of her misery. The difference in your perceptions is one of the main reasons you couldn’t continue the relationship and decided to move on.

  Don’t try to salvage relationships if it doesn’t seem possible or desirable. As much pain as it may cause you or your partner, accept what you’ve got and learn from it. Then you’ll be much more likely to do better next time and find a love that doesn’t need to be salvaged because it had a better foundation from the beginning. You might need a rebuilding year or two before you win it all, but it’s the losing seasons that make victory possible.

  Quick Diagnosis

  Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:

  • To avoid heartbreak for you or your partner

  • To keep a good thing going or get it going again

  • To not feel responsible for heartbreak

  • To take all the responsibility for mending the break

  Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:

  • Not be a schmuck, even though you’re hurting and it’s probably unfair

  • Do all the right things to communicate, figure out if you did anything wrong, make amends, and improve what you can (until you can’t)

  • Accept it when you’ve run out of things you can try

  • Decide what’s best to do with the pieces

  • Spot the flaws sooner next time (assuming they could have been seen in the first place)

  Here’s how you can do it:

  • Shut up about your negative feelings and be patient, attentive, and understanding, even if you’re hurt, angry, and misunderstood

  • Ask for ideas from friends, family, and, last resort (as they’re expensive), shrinks

  • List what you can do to improve the relationship, then go down your list and force yourself to stop if your list is complete and things aren’t better

  • Be judgmental—i.e., judge whose weaknesses are responsible for the breakdown—not in order to blame, but to decide what you can do

  • Ask yourself what you want to do about this relationship if it is what it is

  • Look for some way to improve your selection process next time, even if it means being alone for a long time.

  Your Script

  Here’s what to say when you’re faced with a relationship that’s ending.

  Dear [Self/Unhappy-with-Relationship Partner],

  I don’t want to [give up on/destroy/endure another painful second of] our relationship, but I’ve tried [expressing my feelings/shutting up about my feelings/making all the effort] and things aren’t changing. I will finally accept that we can’t change this relationship [in five minutes/with all the therapy-speak that ever was/if we’re arrested again] and decide whether we’ll live [together/apart/with one of us in witness protection]. Even if it can’t help me change this [synonym for shitshow], there may be a lesson here about what I need to make love work, and if there is, I will learn it.

  Did You Know . . . What A “Borderline” Is?

  “Borderline” might sound like a ye olde Madonna reference, but it’s also shorthand for a psychiatric term, “borderline personality disorder.” These are the people, usually women, who lonely, crazy-prone single guys often find irresistible.

  The term was originated to identify people who seem to be at the borderline of psychosis. The condition is something of a first cousin to bipolar disorder in that both disorders entail wild mood fluctuations and intense feelings. While a bipolar’s mood cycle can take weeks, however, a borderline’s moods/feelings about you can move at the speed of light.

  Borderline people quickly tear through friendships, careers, sex partners, and, more often than not, drinks and drugs. They see rejection everywhere, react before they can stop and think, and can’t tell the difference between
feeling hurt and actually being mistreated.

  Their dates (and friends and family) are always walking on eggshells, which makes sense when you’re dealing with someone who treats each thought and feeling as empirical truth; i.e., “I am attracted to that guy” quickly becomes “that guy is the best thing to ever happen to me and I must get his baby in me ASAP.” She is incapable of doubting her instincts, but she makes up for it by constantly doubting the motives of everyone around her.

  Borderlines always get dates because most men are biologically drawn to very emotional women, even when they’re not being sexy. The initial excitement borderlines provide can be attractive, sure, but they cast a kind of spell—the intoxication of intense, mutual attraction—that makes you blind to the fact that the fun girl you met in the bar is not so fun anymore. You can’t see how the girl who decided after ten minutes of chitchat to have sex with you in an alley is not actually just “fun,” but somewhat insane, even as she tries to burn your house down because she knows you don’t think she’s as pretty as that girl at the drive-through at Taco Bell.

  By the time you do finally figure it out, you may be so addicted to the excitement of starring as both hero and villain in her crazy drama that you ignore the warning signs in the next girl. Crazy becomes your new normal. Borderlines are addictively exciting, and it’s hard to say no to a girl who’ll jump your bones in a bathroom stall, or accept a dare to flash a cop, or drink you under the table. At least until she kills your dog.

  So, men, if you’re drawn to exciting women but can’t understand why they always freak out on you, this is probably why. You might want to consider dating women who are more boring, or at least own some life insurance. In short, a borderline is many things, but she is most often known as the reason men think all women are nuts (aside from the ones that actually are).

  Love and hate may feel like opposites, but they’re equally huge challenges to your being a good person who makes smart choices. Love can push you to ignore your own needs, get attached to the wrong person for the wrong reason, and feel like a loser simply because you’re loveless. Working hard at managing love doesn’t mean becoming supremely unselfish and generous in a totally unconditional, nonjudgmental way; it means becoming very judgmental about what you can expect from people and yourself and putting conditions on whom you allow yourself to get close to, love be damned. You can manage love successfully, but it requires lots of learning from painful experience and a willingness to do without until both your heart and your head agree that the right thing has come along.

  chapter seven

  fuck communication

  Even though it’s incredibly easy to communicate almost anything to anyone—via text, bumper sticker, or middle finger—most people wish they could communicate better. Turns out it’s much easier to tell someone via your shirt that you got naked in Miami Beach than to use words to explain why you’re frustrated in your marriage.

  Many people believe communication is the key to encouraging intimacy, straightening out misunderstandings, ending conflicts, and basically achieving everything short of cold fusion. They think that if you want a better relationship, job, or life, then you need to communicate better; that’s why people go to college to major in it and see shrinks or business consultants when they feel they can’t do it.

  Unfortunately, however, many problems do not, in actuality, represent a failure to communicate. Rather, they arise from differences in character, culture, or values, and communicating these differences is a bad way to bridge gaps and a good way to cause disagreements. If you’re doing a good job of being diplomatically persuasive and still find you’re getting nowhere, then you may not need to become a better communicator; you may need to find something better to talk about.

  If you can’t get through to someone, take time to figure out why communication isn’t working, because maybe it just can’t and, more important, really shouldn’t. Communicating may do more harm than good when what you’re trying to communicate is perhaps best not shared in the first place. In the end, knowing that your communication abilities are limited is essential if you are to know when to shut up, leave things alone, and console yourself that you’re not responsible for whatever happens next.

  The potential for communication may seem infinite, but if you find yourself incapable of communicating something more complicated than what can be expressed via a text or tweet, then you may have to accept that sometimes, communication is not possible. Even then, it’s not the end of the world, just the end of that particular conversation.

  Nurturing Closeness

  Any relationship guru worth his or her Internet certification will tell you that you cannot have love without communication. In some ways, that’s true; opening up to a new partner is a big part of falling for them, and so much importance is attached to communicating the words “I love you” that you’d think somebody was getting royalties.

  Communication may be a key part of a relationship, but that doesn’t make it a cure-all. Sure, being shut out of someone’s feelings or thoughts can feel like you’re no longer close or important to them. That leads to trying to fix the situation by talking . . . about why you don’t talk anymore. Which can often lead to yelling about how annoyed you both are.

  Then you find yourself going to a couples therapist, so that one person can find out why the other person isn’t close and at least feel closer by hearing her share with the therapist what she won’t say otherwise. The problem is that most of that stuff went unsaid because it was unpleasant, mean, or unconstructive enough that it never should have been said out loud.

  So while communication is important, you can have too much of it. Cheese is the main building block of pizza, but if you push the balance too far, you’ll either ruin the pie or destroy your health.

  If you try to fix a broken relationship with communication—stuff the crust with it, as it were—you may just do more damage, especially if you’re in a relationship with someone who isn’t much of a talker, is poor at describing his feelings, or has those fun feelings that are best left unexpressed.

  Closeness also cannot be forced, particularly when people are familiar with one another. A couple may feel close without being able to talk to each other, or may never be able to feel close in spite of lots of talk, but short of cramming themselves into a small space, they can’t will closeness into being.

  So accept the fact that there’s much about communication and closeness that you can’t and don’t control and don’t rate the success of your relationship by how you’re performing in those areas.

  Then be proud of your ability to make the most of a relationship, and accept its limits, even when they prevent you from feeling close or sharing what you’re thinking and feeling, whether it’s love, hate, or anything in between.

  Here are communication tools you wish could make your relationships closer, but don’t:

  • A translator you can hire to turn your words into the language of your listener, carrying your meaning but leaving out the irritated, insulting bits

  • Charisma that makes someone trust you and want to talk with you, even after you’ve lived together and shared the same sink and toilet for five years

  • An answer to the question “Why can’t we just get along?”

  • A human shock-collar that monitors what you’re saying and shocks you whenever you should just be blandly agreeable or silent

  Among the wishes people express are:

  • To get through a wall of silence

  • To open up oneself or others

  • To find words for reducing loneliness or conflict

  • To create trust and teamwork

  • To say what will make others happy

  Here are three examples:

  My wife says I never talk to her, but I’m just not a big talker, period. I like to talk about sports and business, I guess, but they aren’t her interests, and I don’t know much about most of her interests, so when she talks about them, I don’t have anyt
hing to say. She says I keep things in, and that I’m not interested in what she has to say about important things, like her friends and the kids. It leaves her feeling alone and resentful, so she never feels like having sex. My goal is to figure out a way to communicate better so she’ll feel closer and our marriage, and sex life, will get back on track.

  My son and I have always been close, particularly since he was four and his father divorced me and went to live in another city. He loved to tell me everything that was going on and spend time together, until suddenly, a few months ago, he clammed up. He’s a good kid, still doing well in school, and I’ve got no problems with his friends, but he has stopped confiding in me; he answers every question with a one-syllable response and spends most of his time in his room. When pressed, he says there’s nothing wrong and that I’m being too sensitive, but I think he’s going through puberty and doesn’t want to talk to me because I’m his mother. I know if I push him I’ll make it worse, but I guess I just miss what we had. My goal is not to lose the wonderful closeness we’ve had as mother and son.

  I think I’m a good boss and like to run a happy office, but the five people who work for me just don’t seem to enjoy one another’s company. They’re all competent and hardworking and seem to like what they do here, and there’s not a lot of conflict, but there’s also very little team spirit, which can create a really strange and unpleasant office environment. I’m thinking of hiring a psychologist who will put them through a ropes course or something that gets them to loosen up and get to know one another. My goal is to create some closeness and better communication.

  Sharing thoughts and feelings with someone is always a delicate business; you have to be comfortable enough with a person in order to be honest and open, but you also have to know that person well enough to judge when it’s time to shut your mouth and listen instead.