WHAT I DID OVER SUMMER VACATION: Part I

First and foremost, I obviously became a lazy blogger. I plead Cranial Echo, which is a term of art I invented and which expresses perfectly what happens in the brain when you get to your very last thought, and further attempts to pursue cogitation result in that lone last thought just bouncing around in your skull.

(Hello?…hello…hello? Anything there?...there…there? No…no…no…)

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I actually had a very full summer, which means there’s way too much to catch up on in one, readable length, blog. Thusly this will become a serial blog for several entries. Hopefully not too many…I don’t want to have to write “What I did over the Fall and Winter” six months from now.

Logic seems to dictate that I start as close to where I left off as possible. So…let’s see what was going on the last time I was bloggingly useful…

Oh yes. I was growing!

Growth Lesson #2: Sometimes you have to Let Go to Move Forward

This is actually something I learned some years ago (but forgot to apply to other situations further on). About a million years ago, I was married. It didn’t work out. I left, and had to arrange for my things to be sent along later. My (now ex-) husband decided to be a total donkey’s derrière and keep many of the items that held sentimental value for me. I was furious about this for YEARS. So furious that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Ever. So my friends wouldn’t get sick of hearing me bemoan my fate, I stuck to making my psycho-therapist suffer through it. After all, I pay her to listen to me whine.

After a while, I realized that I was poisoning my system and it was seeping out into every interaction I had with the world. Knowing that this could not continue unabated indefinitely, I had to find a way to put it behind me and move on. Oddly enough, I just saw a movie poster the other day that spelled out exactly what I did. The flick is called “Things We Lost in The Fire” (and stars the ever-beautiful Halle Berry). That was my solution three or four years ago. I mentally envisioned my house in Illinois a heap of smoldering rubble, a fire having taken it and my beloved possessions with it (usually I added my useless husband to the pile – I know that sounds totally evil, but there’s little point in lying about it if I’m trying to open my mind and keep growing). It took a few weeks of working on it, but it worked.

I don’t use the fire perspective for everything, but the metaphor is adaptable.

For instance, when people unbelievably, unforgivably betray you – betray your friendship – you have to divorce them. Once, that is, you get over the shock and disbelief that such a thing could happen with someone you have known and cared about for years. One of the things I offer to, and expect from, people I consider my friends is loyalty. If there is a problem between us, it’s something that we need to address. It is not something I should find out about from a misdirected email, a slip of the tongue laying bare a blatant lie, or from being asked a seemingly innocuous question by a third party that I cannot back with information that meshes with what Friend has told them, because Friend didn’t bother to tell me what was going on.

Those are fairly obvious Divorce situations. Sometimes, though, the relationships are far more difficult and complex to distill down to “right” and “wrong” answers. When you have to cut those off, they go under the category of “Necessary Losses.”

I have never had a “Necessary Loss” situation. I hadn’t even had a “Divorce” situation until a few years ago – and then it was three, bang bang bang, one right after another within a few months. But it seems now that I am faced with a Loss choice.

In seventh grade, I met a girl who I was close friends with for the next three years or so. After our freshman year of high school, however, she transferred schools and we lost touch for the most part. Every now and again she would resurface, place a call to my parents (who have had the same phone number since I was 12 years old), and either reach me there or have my parents provide my current phone number or leave hers. I may have seen her a few times over the intervening years, but it was never “back together” for a significant length of time, as I was in college in NY, and she was following her then-boyfriend around the country.

The next time I really remember seeing her was around 1989, when I had the distinct displeasure of meeting said boyfriend. He was nouveau rich, arrogant, far more impressed with himself and his abilities than he had any right to be, and kind of homely. (Okay, I found him quite unattractive.) My friend, on the other hand, was a cute, petite curly-haired brunette with big blue eyes and a smattering of freckles. She was with this man because she thought him brilliant and because he allowed her to do the one thing she loved to do more than anything else…take care of him. I could go into a whole psychological profile and dissect her bit by bit, but the ultimate push is that she is insecure about who she is (and who she can be) and tends towards the “I’m nothing without a man” philosophy. She is in love with being in love, and while that, in itself, is, if not an admirable quality, at least an understandable and fairly positive one.

That is until it gets to the point of OCD.

For the past 18 years or so, she has been living the same relationship over and over and over. With different people, to be sure, but people with the same psychology (psychopathology?) and always the same result. Meet potential love interest, get together with potential love interest, have passionate sexual relationship with love interest, get treated poorly by love interest, refuse to accept that relationship shouldn’t continue, continue to get treated poorly by love interest whose psychopathology allows them to believe that they still deserve the fawning and worship since she obviously doesn’t have a problem with being treated poorly, relationship finally ends, three days later she’s out at a club or on the Internet looking for someone new. I am aware of exactly ONE relationship that she ended (rather than the other way around), and that was the anomalous one that was the complete antithesis of all the others – she was loved and cared for, treated like a princess by a stable, emotionally healthy person with the interest and means to indulge my friend in all the things she wanted to experience. That relationship was completely unacceptable, despite the fact that it was precisely what she is always wistfully wishing for. I believe she described it as “too vanilla.”

“Too vanilla” apparently meaning “little conflict”, “little real reason to complain about the relationship”, and “being respected and desired.”

She thrives on controversy. She denies this emphatically, but reality directly refutes her. The more turmoil there is in the relationship, the longer she holds on, and the more love she professes. If someone is trying to push her away, it is because there is a beautiful, wounded child inside who doesn’t believe it is worthy of the love and affection she is showering upon it. This is someone who needs her, even if they can’t see it. Self-blindness being what it is, she does not, or can not, see that the person she is talking about is herself. Years of therapy have either failed to unearth this obviousness or she has refused to accept it. My guess is denial, as that is her modus operandi.

All this is a long preamble to get to the current day. For the past seven or eight years, we have both been in NY and had gotten close again. For the past seven or eight years I have watched this one relationship (and its one anomaly) play out over and over and over again. Standing by and watching it is difficult enough, but the really intolerable part is being subjected to listening to all the negative aspects of the relationship and love interest, and then being admonished for not liking love interest or taking the time to get to know them. NO I’m not going to like someone you tell me treats you with less respect than they might give their favorite pet. NO I’m not going to want to “get to know this person better”. NO I’m not going to keep giving you my opinion when you ask because you never listen to it and I’m tired of repeating myself. And NO it’s not unrealistic for me to take the position after seven years of listening to this ongoing monologue that if you aren’t going to do anything but complain, then shut up about it. You are absolutely right in concluding that I no longer have any interest in listening to your relationship problems because I’VE HEARD THEM ALL BEFORE. I hear the SAME PROBLEMS over and over and over again with different names inserted. It is a basic mathematical premise that if you have ONE constant, TEN variables and the same result each time, the constant is probably the culprit. That makes it a problem the constant has to come to terms with and address. And if said constant doesn’t do that, then it risks being placed on the Necessary Losses shelf.

I always liked her because she had a good heart. She was upbeat and resilient and saw the glass as half full. Although I am a hopeless romantic at heart, the world has jaded me somewhat, and I haven’t been Pollyanna since I was about fifteen. I admired that she was able to retain that spirit, and that’s why I was friends with her. Over the past few years, she has shed that spirit speedily and unexpectedly, and has become far more neurotic and bitchy than I would ever have thought possible. (In every area except romance, of course.) This has affected our relationship drastically, and when the dissonance of her romances is piled on top, the tower becomes precarious. As a result of an exchange of missives between us where she has “listened” but not “heard” what I have been saying to her, I finally have to seriously question whether this friendship is worth trying to salvage or if its time has passed. If she’s going to be another me and be jaded and spiteful, then she has ceased to have the beautiful qualities which drew me to her in the first place. If she loses those qualities, then I have to ask what else is there for us to base our friendship on.

Right now the focus of her life is her current marriage, and 99% of her conversations are about this. I think the marriage was ill-advised, that they rushed into it too quickly and that a whole lot of healing should have gone on with both of them beforehand. She is well aware of all this, and I don’t see any reason for continuing to talk about it. If I suggest we discuss something else, she gets angry and defensive and accuses me of being cruel and uncaring. This is a personal opinion, so I won’t deny her her feelings. We’ll work under the assumption that I am being cruel and uncaring. What she doesn’t see is that she is also being cruel and uncaring by not considering how I feel. If it has ever occurred to her that she causes me pain by constantly subjecting me to tales of a marriage spinning in an uncertain, unpredictable and unpleasant direction, she has never voiced it. All comments on the subject revolve around her in her mind. She doesn't see that she no longer has (if she ever did) a two-person marriage. I, for one (I won't speak to the opinions of her other friends), feel like I've been a part of the relationship since the beginning. And since it is a relationship I have never believed in, I am incredibly uncomfortable in that role. Her world has narrowed to the point that this is all her conversation revolves around. She hasn’t asked me anything about myself in months. Yet she can’t understand why I would even consider walking away – even if it’s just to give her a chance for her to work on her issues without having to worry about my approval, disapproval or input.

This is a difficult decision, but one I will have to make soon or there will be no decision to make.

Well, this seems a logical place to end Part I, so I shall do just that. Part II will be less heartbreaking, although it still involves being betrayed by people I considered friends.

Lot of weirdness with personal relationships this summer. I wonder if this is an unexplored effect of Global Warming…