Right now, as I type this, there are millions of women out there who have ‘settled’ in a poor or so-so relationship. Many of these love assclowns or emotionally unavailable men and have dug their feet in for the long haul because they believe that they love him, so things will change, or he must change. Even worse, he may continue to minimise his input into the relationship, so she will step up her input, rewarding his 10% effort with a spurt of giving, and pleasing, and willing him to recognise her greatness.
In recent posts such as Shades of Grey – Rationalising your involvement in a poor relationship and Why do we throw ourselves at bad relationships and then wonder why it hurts, I discuss the whole betting on potential, fantasising, and in essence being so optimistic it’s beyond scary.
But the eternal optimism of Fallback Girls and assclown lovers actually masks FEAR.
The denial masks fear too.
But because many of us don’t want to deal with our fears, we chalk it up to being ‘compassionate’, to loving him, to seeing the best in people, to being kind, to being wonderful women who have been dealt a bad card.
The thing is, are you happy living like this?
Are you happy being marginalised by a Mr Unavailable or an assclown?
Does the fact that you keep getting the same results from the same efforts not mean that you need to opt out and do something different?
The fear of being alone, of being wrong about your instincts, and your judgement. The fear that the next woman will suddenly turn him from assclown to prince. The fear that even though he hasn’t left his wife for the last ten years you’ve been with him, he might just do it once you’ve ended it. The fear of confronting your own issues instead of hiding behind his.
Does life work out better because you’re optimistic about a poor relationship?
Or do you end up realising that if you going to cater to fear, you’re going to have to suck it up and settle?
Or do you finally hit the ‘enough’ moment and take a chance on yourself in spite of those fears?
Because you see, the things that we’re afraid of that paralyse us in crappy relationships where we lament his misdoing’s and blame ourselves for him not being different, all end up being far less than the misery of catering to fear.
Unless you really love misery and really just don’t ever want to like and love yourself and want a better positive relationship, you will wake up one day and wonder what the frick you were scared of!
Often, even when we’ve been around a man for years, we’ve been lonely as hell.
You can only be responsible for you. His actions are independent of yours. You didn’t make him into an assclown – he is one, but by sticking around, massaging his ego, breaking him off a piece of sex, and essentially making yourself a sacrificial lamb doormat, you are enabling his behaviour.
Misery does indeed love company and self misery in the form of self hate and blame just LOVES an assclown.
You have no right to demand or expect change from someone just because you deem yourself to be in love with them. The fact that you love an assclown or a habitually emotionally unavailable man suggests the basis of your feelings for him are borne out of negativity.
You can’t force your love on someone or literally down their throat – is that what you want? To make someone love you?
Having ‘feelings’ for someone or having a desperate urge to have them in your lives doesn’t give you an instant IOU to claim on! Loving someone doesn’t make them love you. Really, if you don’t both have both of your feet in the relationship, you’re doing all the loving for the two of you. That’s really exhausting!
And believe me – if he was ‘the one’, if things were so amazing, if you were genuinely happy and not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, you wouldn’t need so many changes to occur for this to ‘work’ for you.
So if you look at your optimism about your involvement with him, for example, hoping he’s going to come back to you, even though he’s now shacking up with some other woman, or your denial where you tell yourself that that he’s going to change even though he’s been the same for the majority of the relationship; it becomes very clear that you’re afraid.
The relationship has left the building…you’re just sitting there pining at the window….
If you’re stuck in a poor relationship with a Mr Unavailable or an assclown, ask yourself what would happen if you stopped expecting, stopped hoping for change, and stopped fantasising?
Would he change? No. Would you be any happier? Unlikely.
What this says is that at the end of the day, if you apply optimism to poor relationships with no foundation, and a load of denial, the outcome is still going to be the same, it’s just going to be even more painful because you take a long-winded, self-mutilating route to get there when you could get off the path a lot sooner and take the chance on you and feel the fear that will invariably turn out to be less than what you expected.
Pain is not love.
If you’re in limbo and you keep engaging, and refuse to let go even when he continues his life elsewhere – that’s not him causing you pain – that’s YOU!
I know someone out there will go – but what will I do?
You know what makes you happy and it’s certainly not him and if you don’t know you need to find out so that you start living a life you enjoy instead of filling it up with assclownary.
Take responsibility and be accountable for your own life. Make decisions instead of being trapped in indecision and placing the onus on him to change and magically become the man you want. Do something. Cut contact, opt out, stop engaging – just do something and cold turkey it because the initial pain does pass. But you are the solution to your own problem – not him.
Your thoughts?
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oh, and a 100 comments down the road, we may “miss” the message of NML’s post – just DO something!
Astelle, I feel the same about your input!!
Happy New Year!!!
Astelle, I AM “DOING ” something, by doing nothing!
I’m glad you and Gaynor are loving each other’s advice and are so far down the road. It must be a comfortable position to be in .
I have only just started this. I can take the tough love, but the mutual admiration thing smacks of self -righteousness. And sharing my thoughts here is making me feel like I’m doing it wrong,so I’m going back to lurking.
But thanks anyway for even caring enough and taking the time to post. Some of us simply are not going to get it right away. Progress isn’t supposed to be linear, right? Two steps forward, one step back?
Happy New Year to all.
BK,
That wasn’t necessary at all. I respect the majority of advice given on this site, and have learned a great deal from all.
If you’re only here to get sympathy then I think you’re in the wrong place. Yes, we will give sympathy and support but we will also give constructive advice that will help one another move on from these ridiculous relationships.
I think you need to ask yourself if you are really on here to move on from this creep?????
BK, you are taking my comments way to personally. I never said that you are doing something wrong and I also understand that everybody will get over the heartbreak at their own pace. Eventually everything will be O.K.. Keep your chin up and Happy New year!
Gaynor I also respect the advice, but I have sensed that you are expecting my head to be on too sensibly at this stage of my game.
Your comment “Yes, but there’s giving updates and giving “updates” ,” was something I thought was unnecessary for YOU to say. Unlike other posters, you haven’t given me any credit for not initiating or responding to contact. The message I get from you is that I should be getting on with this all much quicker. After eight years, it’s not that easy, though I am trying. If I could have just been able to turn it off that easily I wouldn’t have needed this site.
I understand what has to be done and am NOT looking for sympathy, again just some pats on the back, which I was delighted to get from other posters. It made me feel stronger and able to do more of the same. I’m absolutely certain that I have been a complete idiot and doormat and need to get over it.
I am feeling pretty depressed and fragile right now, but I do not want to cause any bad feelings here.
Gaynor and Astelle, please accept my apologies for the comments I made that offended you. I’m sure I took them too personally, but for the nth time, this is something I only started TRULY facing 10 days or so, so the best thing for me is probably to refrain from posting until I have done more reading of NML’s posts and can contain my emotions a little better.
Happy New Year to All.
BK, 2009 will be a great year!!
Blackgnat, The project that he hosts for you on the internet – you have to break that connection. Don’t take ownership in, or use anything he is connected with. You are letting technology bind you into a phantom relationship, it paralyzes you so you do not control your own life.
If the web is a mystery – take a class. Sit down with a knowledgeable friend (other than this guy!) and take notes. Or hit the library and grab a book or two on the Internet.
If you want a web presence, set one up on your own – blogger and google and wordpress.com are free, as are some others. There are some awesome sites that help newcomers learn what to do and how to get things working well. But you have to look, and read, and practice. If he is big on facebook – avoid it. Clean out your own page, and leave. Protect yourself.
I am sure you know, that women and men communicate differently. Tell a man a problem, and the typical response is to try to fix it. Tell a woman a problem, and usually get emotional validation.
You are feeling hurt and frustrated because your problem isn’t getting the emotional validation you would expect. And you aren’t ready to hear a guy with a solution. Really.
One thing you might try – first is read NML’s books – then print out this whole post and comments, and read it through. Make notes, questions, etc. Then read it all again, top to bottom, and see if any of the meanings change. Put it away, and return the next day after a good night’s sleep. Then read again. What might happen is that you start to see your posts as others do, and perhaps see a different meaning, different things meant, unsaid, or implied. And perhaps more compassion than it feels like tonight.
Blessed be.
BK,
I wish you the best! Trust me it will get much easier with time.
Happy New Year!!!!
Brad K., thanks for your reply. The site I have is wordpress, but he hosts it-I paid him $200 for 2 years. I think I have the terminology right about hosting.
Anyway, I have deleted my blog entries and added nothing more. I would like him to take it down altogether but that would mean contacting him.
I will keep working on this, but I also wonder if returning to the site is a way of keeping him alive in my mind?
Blackgnat, When you have asthma, hay fever, pneumonia, etc. you understand that there are regular, everyday things that are problems for you. You get the stupid-looking dust masks, you keep the Saline Nasal Mist in your pocket, in the car, and on your desk. You consider your breathing capacity, the amount of exertion involved, the wind, the air temp and dust quality when you decide where to park your car – or whether to go shopping.
A casual parting of people dating is one thing. When you are entangled with an EUM or other pathological relationship, you have hazards that wouldn’t be threatening to someone else. Yes. Every tie, every aspect of relationship is going to keep re-opening the issues and emotions and ties from your heart to something hurtful. Your first issue is to remove the hurt, and then to heal.
If your hosting deal included a domain name, then sign up for a domain account with one of the registrars (GoDaddy, TuCows, HostMonster, etc.) and request a transfer – you should still be listed as registrant, the owner of the domain. Or ask your new host to help with domain name issues.
Remember to keep it really simple – if asked, yes, you are requesting the domain name be transferred/changed. No one needs to know why. Telling the story, keeping the drama alive, is another tie – get used to not telling, so the story can fade for you, too.
These relationships with EUMs are addictive. They are not normal relationships for us. I’ve have researched and read about the topic and the pull these types of relationships have can be from “attachment hunger (Howard Halpern’s book),” which is a primitive type of reaction due to our childhood and infancy needs which defies logic, common sense and what is best for us. We are recreating with this person (EUM) what we did not get from our parent very early in life. This EUM (addictive person) represents our chance at getting that need met that was not met in childhood. So, ultimately, we fight so darn hard at it that it drives us literally crazy and we cannot understand our behavior. We will sometimes conveniently forget their bad behavior when this drive takes over. This is not an excuse for our behavior, but helps to understand why we behave the way that we do sometimes when we know something is bad for us.
I’ve been crazed since my EUM contacted me a few times under the guise of the holidays. It stirred up this craziness in me that I thought I had totally under control. His uncaring, selfish ways have not changed and I am seeing him in a clearer light with some distance…but the lenses get very foggy when there is contact. Somehow all of my sense goes flying and I am weak when confronted by his voice or email. I realize that NC is the way to go, but understanding what got me there in the first place and why is helpful too!
To happy and healthy relationships only!!!!!!!
Aw, Finally, take care, how long had it been NC?
I had a big setback when I saw him, just out of the corner of my eye at a show. It had been a month and a half of NC. I looked away real quick, and he must have left quickly too. But that glimpse set me back quite a ways. I would have a real hard time dealing with what you just had to, which was very conscious and purposeful on his part.
In _Emotional Unavailability: Recognizing It, Understanding It, and Avoiding Its Trap_ by Bryn Collins, she says one thing that really spooked me and agreed with stuff Natalie says about the EU thing being a socially transmissible phenomenon. To paraphrase, she says that women who get abused or traumatized in their adult life will quickly start displaying the symptoms of women who were traumatized/abused as children! So not all of us can trace it to our childhood and upbringing. But I’ll still be looking for this book.
New Years was also really hard for me, even without any contact, I can only dread how it must feel when you got that contact.
Regina, thanks for your support…it feels good to know there are other women out there going through the same thing. It had been 3 months of NC and 4 months since we saw each other. The relationship was 2 1/2 yrs (1 year straight and then the last 1 1/2 on and off, with me ending it when I couldn’t stand the pain anymore). I have the Bryn Collins book you referred to and read it over the summer…I’ll have to reread it again…the sad part is that even though I know how bad he is for me…there’s a part of me that misses him and the good times we had…I guess it’ll take time to get back where I was.
Regina, How long has NC been for you?
Are there any ladies who are from the NYC metropolitan area?
Hi Finally, I am a little over two months NC (Oct. 25th) of a six year relationship. New Years Eve was always very special for us…we didn’t go to parties, we would go camping alone together. Really this holi was harder than Xmas or my birthday, which is between the two…I mean, if he hasn’t come crawling back by now, and its the new year, well, it’s really over right? Fresh start, baptised with tears.
What did you do for NYE?
Regina, to your point about EU being transferable-that ALSO spooked me, but it is helpful too, because I really feel that I had a happy childhood with good parents.Having said that, my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was 14 and maybe that’s when it started-I know I had to push an awful lot of feelings down and ignore stuff that was painful.
Maybe that’s why I have been so easily able to mask the pain my EUM has caused me, plus exhibited those symptoms myself. Maybe I was pretending it wasn’t really happening, or I’d “get through it”.
So thanks for that bit of info.
blackgnat – my brother was hospitalized for psychosis/bi-polar when I was in my teens as well. I think you and I did both learn to mask the pain at an early age.
Update on my EUM, like Regina I had a brief setback. I saw him by accident waiting in line at the grocery store. Didn’t know he was there until we were basically face to face. As soon as I figured out it was him I looked away and didn’t look back. He chuckled …just so that I could hear him…not unlike a serial killer. I obsessed about it for the rest of the night. Other than that, still no contact since August. Finally and Regina – he makes my skin crawl, but like you two I sickly still miss him at times. One day at a time, right?
Hi Regina,.. You definitely had a tough one this NYE…but you made it through. I went to a party at a friend’s house. I was thinking of the ex and I think he was with someone, which hurts me.
BBP – some of this defies logic and it’s just something we need to face like an alcoholic has to…one day at a time…
I know I mentioned it on the other thread but after reading the above comments makes sense to mention it again “Obesseive Love” by Susan Foward and Craig Buck .. will reinforce a lot of what you said up above Finally about recreating childhood situations .. and it also talks about your situation Blackgnat it just reinforces all what NML is saying to us as well.. another resource if you like.
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