Breakdown Vs Break
February 22, 2006 by The Tattoed Debutante
My kids just finished reading “Echo and Narcissus: Why Can’t You Love Me?” for our Mythology unit. In a nutshell, both characters fall in love with someone who doesn’t love them in return and die as a result. I asked them, as a journal, who they thought got hurt worst in a breakup, the boy or the girl. I thought I knew the answer, but I’m starting to wonder.
Now, all erroneous details aside, assigning no blame, most people would say that the woman is hit harder because women are more emotional and invest more of themselves in relationships. We are the more fragile, docile sex, and therefore we are certainly more prone to emotional breakdowns and rampant mourning. Here’s the problem with that theory. We are allowed to be emotional while men are supposed to be stronger than tears. We can sit with our girlfriends and cry into our ice cream, and men are supposed to be at strip clubs feeling no pain. Women can break down, but maybe men just break.
We all know broken men. I know more than my fair share. Some of them were broken by someone else’s relationship, specifically one between their mother and father. That love was less than ideal, forever was proven a fairytale, and they have no desire to end up that way. I wasted almost two years of my life on a man who was so broken over the misery that was his parent’s marriage that he had become literally incapable of truly loving another human being.
Others (and I encounter these more and more) are broken by their own failed relationships. These are the saddest kind of men, though they will appear to the happiest. These are the men who live to excess, who change women the way others change socks (and treat them almost as well as people treat their socks). These men cannot stay faithful. These men cannot STAY period. They’re constantly running from anything and anyone who gets close enough to love them. The fear of being hurt again, being wrong again, keeps them from loving again. And on they blindly stumble through meaningless encounters and doomed relationships, while hurting countless women along the way. They may know they’re doing it, they may not, but I am not sure I believe they can stop.
Ladies, you cannot change this man. The only way for him to heal is to realise what he’s doing. The hours of crying will not do it. Treating him well will not do it. Pining away for him will not do it. You could go as far as to hire a witch doctor to concoct Love Potion #9, and it wouldn’t fix him. He’s gonna keep running, sleeping with random women, cheating on them with other random women, intentionally hurting the ones who love him most, and never understanding how much damage he’s doing until he decides he’s ready for something more. All your solutions are like band aids on a bullet wound. He’s got to pull the thing out himself, bury it in the backyard, and stitch his chest back up. Until then, don’t be angry with him, don’t be hard on yourself, just feel sorry for someone whose heart can’t work the way it’s supposed to. That’s got to be the hardest way to live, if you even call that living.
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Hrm, this may help me understand more my failings in relationships… thanks
I’m so glad! Hope it helps!