Welcome back! Have you got my ebooks - The No Contact Rule and Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl? Also become a fan of Baggage Reclaim on Facebook, follow me onTwitter, and join the forum.
Right now, there are thousands of ‘ladies in waiting’ in relationships; women who are willing, waiting, and hoping that the guy they’re with, will leave their girlfriend or wife. ‘Is he going to leave her for me?’;'When is he going to leave her?’ and ‘Why hasn’t he left her yet?’ are just some of the questions that come flooding in via email, especially since I wrote a post ages ago about how to cope with being the other woman (also see the original), with many hoping their relationship is the exception.
It’s tough; you want to know that the pain and effort of effectively playing second fiddle, hanging on the sidelines, and having to operate on marginalised terms in your relationship with a married or attached man, is worth it. I should know…I spent about 18 months being the other woman to a guy with a girlfriend several years ago. I asked those questions frequently and many more.
For the many women who find themselves involved with an attached man (read: the cheater), even though they start out feeling that they can handle things and can be ‘patient’ or may not even want anything more, as time progresses, feelings progress, and so does the desire for the ultimate validation in this situation – to have a man leave another woman to be with you. In fact, I’d argue that part of the ‘feelings’ that arise in this situation, do so because playing second best screws with your self-esteem – BIG time – and so sometimes, you want them, not really because you want them but because you want to be validated in and feel the ‘love’ that comes from getting a man through exceptional circumstances.
I remember seeing myself as a smart, independent career girl who was just out of relationship (broken off engagement) and yet, it took a few short months before I was pressing the repeat button on the never-ending discussing and questioning of exactly when he was going to leave her and getting confirmation that it was indeed me he loved. Of course he’d say he loved me, but he didn’t do the necessaries to make that ‘real’ in my eyes.
And let’s not forget that some of the women who find themselves with the cheater, didn’t actually know that there was a third party until they had been involved for a period of time. Somehow (it normally has to be dragged out of them after ‘evidence’ comes to light) they make the discovery and then often, no matter how mad they are, they feel like they’ve come so far down the road, they want to get a ‘return on their emotional investment’ – the struggle in this scenario is reconciling the reality of the fact that he’s involved with someone else with the image of the man they thought they knew.
But there is a problem with 1) wondering if he’s going to leave ‘her’ for you and 2) having to ask.
I appreciate that life throws some curve balls and you don’t know when you might meet the person who you genuinely feel like there could be something pretty big with, and that sometimes when it happens, that person is involved with someone else.
However (and it is a big however), people who genuinely love, care, trust, and respect you and want to be with you in a committed way, are not going to engage in an ongoing deception.
If you have to wonder or ask if someone is going to leave someone else for you, it says the following:
Whatever you both have going on between the two of you, he has not given you enough (or even any) security and assurance that you and him are going to have a bonafide relationship.
[click to continue…]
A couple of years ago, I received an email from Baggage Reclaim reader RES thanking me for writing this site, and letting me know that in spite of the painful revelations that resulted from reading, she was ready to take a break from relationships (something I recommend to help you gain perspective as distance from situations gives you objectivity) and deal with her own issues whilst she worked on loving and being at peace with herself.
Late last year, another email arrived that was in stark contrast to the previous. After a year out which she describes as “the most difficult period of my life”, she had met someone who was also in stark contrast to who she’d been previously involved and is now engaged. Very happy and enjoying her life, I’m delighted not only that she has met someone and is enjoying a healthy, mutually fulfilling relationship, but that she’s also found herself.
Like me, he is not the man she thought she’d be with (we both thought we’d be with our warped image of relationships), but he’s infinitely more because in the time that she took out, she reshaped her image of relationships, and she’s happy. If for whatever reason, something were to change in the future, she also now knows that she has the ability to make herself happy.
She still stops by the site and a number of readers asked her to share some of her wise words and RES shared some of her painful assumptions and beliefs that she’d had about herself and relationships and takes you through the shift in her thinking – this is RES having an honest conversation with herself so that she can have a better relationship both with others and herself – being authentic in authentic relationships.
At the start of her journey, where she was reeling from the hurt of spending the previous 7 years (5 years with an assclown and 2 years with a Mr Unavailable) in dubious relationships, her assumptions and beliefs were (I’ve bracketed my comments]:
1. Relationships are painful. They always end, and there is always pain. I go into relationships waiting/expecting them to end. I wait/expect pain. [This belief ensures you choose partners that reflect this belief - neither of you is heavily invested even if you think you are. Having no faith in relationships is effectively starting out with a heavy level of distrust.]
2. I don’t ask questions because I am afraid that the answers will be too painful. [This doesn't change the facts plus when we fail to ask questions, we make assumptions and see meaning where there is no meaning - we make it up as we go along.]
3. I need to be validated by others to be happy with myself. [This means you can't trust your own judgement or be happy in your own skin by yourself.]
4. When people you love hurt you, you forgive them and love them anyway. [Boundaries are required in your relationships especially if you are loving unconditionally without basis and without love for yourself.]
5. I want him because seeking validation from emotionally unavailable men is normal. I loved my grandfather. I wanted him to be happy with me; to be proud of me. He was incapable to giving me what I needed. My father, for the years he was alive was aloof/involved in his work. He was busy and dealing with his own cancer. He didn’t validate me either. [Recreating a familiar pattern and hoping to squash the pain of old hurts by righting the wrongs of your past with your relationships and then inadvertently creating more pain.]
6. If I love him enough then he will validate me. I would conquer my need and defeat it. But is this really true? [No. By the time you're done trying to get validation, you have even more insecurities than you started out with.]
7. I loved my grandfather. I loved him very much. I still do. I wanted both my grandfather and my father to love me. To show me they loved me. To tell me that I was loved. They didn’t. They couldn’t. I need “Mr. Unavailable” to validate me. This is what loving someone is supposed to be like. This is how relationships work. You love, and wait and hope for love in return. Relationships are about waiting for validation. ‘Holding out’ for love. This is normal for me. [Recognition of the pattern]
[click to continue…]
Yesterday in part one, I explained about how we often base our thinking about what’s likely to happen in our relationships based on exceptions and anomalies instead of the reality. Part of this stems from what can be a tendency to dine off illusions in poor relationships, but it also largely stems from the fact that many of us pursue relationship agendas where we effectively hope that in spite of someone’s consistent behaviour, that they’ll make us the exception to their rule.
This feeds back into pursuing the fairy tale, albeit a warped one where “The frog has become symbolic of taking a man, any man, and no matter how badly he behaves, believing with all of our hearts, minds, and souls, that in there, lies a prince. After all, one day, our prince will come, won’t he?”
You’re effectively believing that the reward of gambling on this person and it coming through will outweigh all of the pain en route.
However as I talked about in my post on knowing when to fold in relationships, it’s a bit like betting on a 3-legged horse and wondering why it doesn’t race and win like a thoroughbred….
If the 3-legged horse did win, it’d be like a miracle…or something straight out of a fairy tale…
By choosing relationships that have negative patterns at the heart of them and then wanting to be the exception, it’s like actively seeking out ‘less than’ partners and hoping that with the right amount of love and care, that they will ’see’ you and ‘value’ you, and make you the exception to the rule of treating people poorly. Unfortunately, when we ‘love’ and ‘care’ about people who not only don’t feel the same way but have some pretty poor relationship habits themselves, we send a signal that we can’t possibly like or love ourselves very much and this is often exploited.
Shouldn’t you want more than a ‘less than’ partner?
More often than not, the overwhelming rule is that when someone acts without love, care, trust, and respect towards you and doesn’t want to be in the relationship in the way that you want to be in it, you will end up in a negative cycle of feeling invalidated, seeking validation, and feeling perpetually disappointed that they are not changing and ‘reciprocating’ in spite of the fact that you’re there.
You’ll feel aggrieved that you’re showing and giving all of this ‘love’ and feel rejected by their lack of care with what you’re giving. However in spite of the fact that you know you’re not being treated that well, you’ll stay, partly because you feel like you’ve invested so much that you want to see your investment pay off, and partly because in choosing this destructive relationship and feeling rejected, you keep trying to ‘prove’ yourself and assume it’s something flawed in you that has caused it. You hope that the ‘work’ you put in will pay off – you think that the ‘end’ (I guess that would be the fairy tale ending where they eventually make you the exception), will justify the means.
[click to continue…]
I
‘ve finally gotten around to reading Superfreakonomics, the follow up to the bestselling Freakonomics. Pitched as a “rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”, authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are deliciously clever and funny, exploring everything from why sumo wrestlers and teachers are the most likely to cheat, to the economics of prostitution and how they cash in on seasonal increases in demand such as July 4th, much like department store Santa’s rake in the cash in November and December.
Anyway… there is this brilliant paragraph where they explain how they deal with questions of being the exception to the rule that really gets to the heart of why I try to empower people about relationships:
“But while there are exceptions to every rule, it’s also good to know the rule. In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking – our daily decisions, our laws, our governance – on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.“
Here on Baggage Reclaim I’m always emphasising reality because so many people get lost in illusions and create reasons for themselves to be the exception, even though the basis for believing their situation to be the exception may be skewed. Particularly with Mr Unavailable’s (emotionally unavailable men) and assclowns, holding onto relationships with them is about wishing, willing, waiting, and hoping, that you are the exception.
I wrote a little about our desire to be the exception in my recent post on Forget Mr Good Enough, Mr Perfect, and the Fairy Tale – “It’s the desire for the ‘happy ending’ that lets so many of us try to extract relationships from assclowns and Mr Unavailable’s. We hope our tale will be different. We want to be the exception.”
I discuss this further in my shortly to be released ebook How To Lose an Assclown in 90 Days because the reality is that many women are aiming for a pretty messed up fairy tale:
“Somewhere along the way, the lines have become more than a little blurred.
When the frog turned into a prince, it was about looking beyond the superficial. In the modern day fairy tale, this message has been lost and instead we are ignoring fundamental characteristics and behaviour that will make it very difficult, if nigh on impossible for us, to forge a healthy relationship.
The frog has become symbolic of taking a man, any man, and no matter how badly he behaves, believing with all of our hearts, minds, and souls, that in there, lies a prince. After all, one day, our prince will come, won’t he?”
[click to continue…]
by NML on February 25, 2010
One of the things that I consistently say about healthy, positive relationships is that it takes two people with both of their feet in it to make it work. When one person is a solo thinker whilst the other person is thinking as a team and trying to make up for the other person not pulling their weight, it cannot work. I remember doing a project with someone at university and she slacked off and of course took the credit when after I stepped up and compensated, and then we got a high grade… It was a deflated success and I realised that not only was she taking advantage of our friendship and my conscientiousness, but that I had allowed her to and assumed that she was on board the way that I was on board. When I’ve been in ‘relationships’ with lazy or reluctant team mates, it’s been comparable to trying to cycle a tandem bike on my own with the ‘team’ mate on it, with a flat tyre… Very tiring and a pain in the arse.
Many people assume that if they feel a connection, the other person feels that ‘connection’.
Many people assume that if they do the work of both parties in the relationship and love unconditionally without boundaries, that somehow they’ll reap the reward at some point in some sort of ‘cup runneth over and reciprocates eventually’ sort of fantasy.
The types of people that need you to have little or no boundaries and values in order to be with them assume that if you’re still there, that you are OK with doing things on their terms – see my post on terms and conditions in relationships. This is another example though of someone projecting their vision of things and assuming that the other person is on board – in this instance, the solo thinker, because they can’t see past their own nose, thinks that stuff they do in their interests is in your interests, because they’re happy or it ’suits’ them.
Either way, you’re not a ‘team’ or a ‘partnership’ or at least not a healthy one.
You both existed before you met. If you cannot identify who you are and merge in your personalities, characters, interests, desires etc, it is very easy to become lost and co-dependent.
By the same token though, you can be an individual with boundaries and values within the team – it’s called ’sense of self’. It’s called being an individual entity with a decent level of personal security.
It is really important in relationships that you keep your feet in reality. That’s not to be a killjoy; that’s so that you enjoy a real relationship but are also aware of when things have shifted significantly enough for you to sanity check your decision to be with the other party. One of the key reasons why we can find ourselves in dubious relationships is that no matter what we believed the person or the relationship to be at the outset, we have received contradictory evidence that indicates that we need to adjust our perception of things, and ignored it.
We’d rather opt for the illusionary alternative where we hope they’ll return to what we thought they were, or realise potential that they’re not actually going to realise.
Even if at one point you were on the same page, sometimes things change and if we keep on blindly assuming, blindly trusting, and blindly loving, we miss problems that are right in front of our faces. We don’t live in a bubble. Life moves on, circumstances change, and things that are often out of our control influence the relationship or the other person – if we’re not aware of factors that are impacting on the relationship because we’re assuming that things are the way that we envision them to be, it’s like falling asleep on the job.
[click to continue…]
