My Love Gone Wrong
Love is what comes after being “in love”. I’ve always believed in the theory that the first attraction is an animal instinct to continue the species. Not that I didn’t throw myself into this whirlwind of lust and obsession free of the cynic’s eye. I was brilliant at the in love stage. I would set up romantic surprises and drop in (with sunglasses on) at the sex shops to see if there was some new way to titillate and delight my willing partner. (I always left giggling and never bought a thing). We would swear undying love as we gazed searchingly into each others eyes and as I got older we would be aware that this was only a stage and that we wouldn’t always see ourselves this way and try desperately to hang on to these moments. There became a background awareness that those strange but cute little habits that made you swoon today would one day make you contemplate murder.
We all want the “can’t keep your hands off each other” passion to last, but it rarely does. The first time he comes to bed and rolls over to sleep with a weary “good night, my love”, is usually the beginning of the end, no matter how much we deny it. The honeymoon is over and now begins the work.
When things didn’t last much beyond this stage for me, the excuses of why this isn’t going to work, begin, the “I love you but…”. It was great when it happened to both of us around the same time. The knowledge that he wasn’t “the one” had nothing to do with it. Being dumped was hard on the ego and the pain of bruised pride was often mistaken for heartbreak. In my early days, I would blow it up into a dramatic love story, my imagination working overtime on how I would win him back, how he would see the error of his ways. All the time, I knew I didn’t even want him particularly, but if he got in there first with the goodbyes, he would be the center of my thoughts for weeks. The pain was real but rarely to do with the man. It was years later I started to understand about “abandonment” issues, which is another story.
But let’s get back to the relationships that are worth working on. It seems to me that couples that are deemed “made for each other”, start the first few years working through their differences fairly diplomatically. This learning stage seems to be where you store information about the other person on their triggers. “Ah when I mention that he is just like his father, his mouth turns down and he goes all quiet.” You learn to avoid or confront the issues depending on the reaction and how much you are willing to enter the mess.
It’s also a time when you are trying to sort out what is your shit and what is his. This is a complicated issue. His shit triggers your shit. You confront him on his shit because your shit from the past is being provoked by his shit, which is reminding you of your mother’s shit. This is all subconscious shit so you think it’s his shit. A lot of finger pointing at this stage.
If you are both fairly mature, aware, reasonable, enlightened individuals who really do love each other, you can pass through this with relative ease. You settle in and if it’s in the cards, you start a family. The amazing miracle of children is how absorbed you can be by them. There are so many scenarios that can start to happen when the children come. Husband feels rejected. Wife feels like a slave. Life takes on such a hectic pace that the relationship is low man on the totem pole in priority. Working out schedules, cooking, shopping, cleaning, bedtime, homework, doctors, dentists, renovating, yard work, your job, his job, money issues etc. become your life. Those long forgotten leisurely hours when you could discuss at length each others shit are a thing of the past.
Most people could not understand why my husband and I were getting separated. We had the unusual situation of being good enough friends to be able to live in the same house to continue bringing up the children together until they graduated high school. We got on better after we separated than when we were married. The pressure to be happy with each other was over. I could honestly say that I still loved him as a person and I felt that he still loved me. We were both good people, neither prone to being vindictive and had no feeling of animosity at our failed marriage. We always said we would be together for as long as we could and we were. In fact when we separated we were a lot happier than most of the couples I knew but we had to admit it was not a marriage despite trying for years to make it one. Once we saw the trouble we were in we went into therapy but it was too late, the heart was out of the marriage. Time to move on.
What I learned eventually about what went wrong had to do with intimacy. Although my husband was not perfect, he was by far the more stable emotionally. A life long pattern of mine was to avoid confrontation. Angry words terrified me. I luckily or purposefully picked a man who rarely got angry. We both retreated into our corners when something was sparked and worked it out alone. We came back into the ring as if nothing happened because in truth whatever triggered the conflict was usually trivial and not worth bringing up again. We once had our worst fight over the way I stacked pots and pans.
All this trivial anger hid deeper issues that for many years neither of us were willing to confront. In truth as things got worse, he was much more willing to try to discuss things than me. By that time I had retreated into a very isolated lonely world where he was the last person I would let in. I spent many hours reading in my bedroom in full avoidance of the unhappiness I was feeling. What I couldn’t understand was this feeling of loneliness. I still had three children in the house and a husband who loved me. We never argued but had become strangers. He knew nothing of my inner world, not that he wouldn’t want to but I wouldn’t let him in. Somehow I had lost my trust of him with my true self. The secrets of my true feelings grew and I realized I was living a lie again, just like when I was a teenager. Such strong feelings that no one was to know about. We had a marriage that was carrying a heavy load beneath the veil of happiness. The estrangement became so profound that we couldn’t find our way back when we finally tried to fix it.
To have gone to him with my unhappiness would have been like confessing a lie. It was like when I finally went to my friends and family at the age of twenty-five and confessed that I had had a baby. With each confession, I was terrified and ashamed of the lies I had told them. Again shame, that nasty word that keeps popping up. It was only a few years later that I experienced true intimacy with someone that I could see how much it was missing in our relationship.
This is what I learned about intimacy. Intimacy is when you are willing to speak your truth at the risk of the relationship. Your truth is not necessarily “the truth”. Intimacy is not an avoider. Sometimes you enter into a terrible mess when you speak your truth. Intimacy is staying in the mess even when you want to retreat. True intimacy brings deep pain as well as profound joy. You have to be willing to feel both and the myriad of emotions in between. This is most important, you have to be willing to feel. Once you emerge from the mess, the sex is always amazing. Intimacy keeps the passion and your sex life healthy. Intimacy is based on respect. You need to be able to listen to the other person’s truth. Intimacy is a two-way street, otherwise it is not intimacy. You both have to meet in the ring and stay. A problem avoided does not go away until it is dealt with. It may go underground but it will rear it’s ugly head in more creative ways than you would think possible. Intimacy involves risk and to be in an intimate relationship you both need to be brave.
I would say in retrospect, that my marriage failed because I was not brave until it was too late. That being said, if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I might have been. But who knows, maybe it was just time to move on.
Love is what comes after being “in love”. I’ve always believed in the theory that the first attraction is an animal instinct to continue the species. Not that I didn’t throw myself into this whirlwind of lust and obsession free of the cynic’s eye. I was brilliant at the in love stage. I would set up romantic surprises and drop in (with sunglasses on) at the sex shops to see if there was some new way to titillate and delight my willing partner. (I always left giggling and never bought a thing). We would swear undying love as we gazed searchingly into each others eyes and as I got older we would be aware that this was only a stage and that we wouldn’t always see ourselves this way and try desperately to hang on to these moments. There became a background awareness that those strange but cute little habits that made you swoon today would one day make you contemplate murder.
We all want the “can’t keep your hands off each other” passion to last, but it rarely does. The first time he comes to bed and rolls over to sleep with a weary “good night, my love”, is usually the beginning of the end, no matter how much we deny it. The honeymoon is over and now begins the work.
When things didn’t last much beyond this stage for me, the excuses of why this isn’t going to work, begin, the “I love you but…”. It was great when it happened to both of us around the same time. The knowledge that he wasn’t “the one” had nothing to do with it. Being dumped was hard on the ego and the pain of bruised pride was often mistaken for heartbreak. In my early days, I would blow it up into a dramatic love story, my imagination working overtime on how I would win him back, how he would see the error of his ways. All the time, I knew I didn’t even want him particularly, but if he got in there first with the goodbyes, he would be the center of my thoughts for weeks. The pain was real but rarely to do with the man. It was years later I started to understand about “abandonment” issues, which is another story.
But let’s get back to the relationships that are worth working on. It seems to me that couples that are deemed “made for each other”, start the first few years working through their differences fairly diplomatically. This learning stage seems to be where you store information about the other person on their triggers. “Ah when I mention that he is just like his father, his mouth turns down and he goes all quiet.” You learn to avoid or confront the issues depending on the reaction and how much you are willing to enter the mess.
It’s also a time when you are trying to sort out what is your shit and what is his. This is a complicated issue. His shit triggers your shit. You confront him on his shit because your shit from the past is being provoked by his shit, which is reminding you of your mother’s shit. This is all subconscious shit so you think it’s his shit. A lot of finger pointing at this stage.
If you are both fairly mature, aware, reasonable, enlightened individuals who really do love each other, you can pass through this with relative ease. You settle in and if it’s in the cards, you start a family. The amazing miracle of children is how absorbed you can be by them. There are so many scenarios that can start to happen when the children come. Husband feels rejected. Wife feels like a slave. Life takes on such a hectic pace that the relationship is low man on the totem pole in priority. Working out schedules, cooking, shopping, cleaning, bedtime, homework, doctors, dentists, renovating, yard work, your job, his job, money issues etc. become your life. Those long forgotten leisurely hours when you could discuss at length each others shit are a thing of the past.
Most people could not understand why my husband and I were getting separated. We had the unusual situation of being good enough friends to be able to live in the same house to continue bringing up the children together until they graduated high school. We got on better after we separated than when we were married. The pressure to be happy with each other was over. I could honestly say that I still loved him as a person and I felt that he still loved me. We were both good people, neither prone to being vindictive and had no feeling of animosity at our failed marriage. We always said we would be together for as long as we could and we were. In fact when we separated we were a lot happier than most of the couples I knew but we had to admit it was not a marriage despite trying for years to make it one. Once we saw the trouble we were in we went into therapy but it was too late, the heart was out of the marriage. Time to move on.
What I learned eventually about what went wrong had to do with intimacy. Although my husband was not perfect, he was by far the more stable emotionally. A life long pattern of mine was to avoid confrontation. Angry words terrified me. I luckily or purposefully picked a man who rarely got angry. We both retreated into our corners when something was sparked and worked it out alone. We came back into the ring as if nothing happened because in truth whatever triggered the conflict was usually trivial and not worth bringing up again. We once had our worst fight over the way I stacked pots and pans.
All this trivial anger hid deeper issues that for many years neither of us were willing to confront. In truth as things got worse, he was much more willing to try to discuss things than me. By that time I had retreated into a very isolated lonely world where he was the last person I would let in. I spent many hours reading in my bedroom in full avoidance of the unhappiness I was feeling. What I couldn’t understand was this feeling of loneliness. I still had three children in the house and a husband who loved me. We never argued but had become strangers. He knew nothing of my inner world, not that he wouldn’t want to but I wouldn’t let him in. Somehow I had lost my trust of him with my true self. The secrets of my true feelings grew and I realized I was living a lie again, just like when I was a teenager. Such strong feelings that no one was to know about. We had a marriage that was carrying a heavy load beneath the veil of happiness. The estrangement became so profound that we couldn’t find our way back when we finally tried to fix it.
To have gone to him with my unhappiness would have been like confessing a lie. It was like when I finally went to my friends and family at the age of twenty-five and confessed that I had had a baby. With each confession, I was terrified and ashamed of the lies I had told them. Again shame, that nasty word that keeps popping up. It was only a few years later that I experienced true intimacy with someone that I could see how much it was missing in our relationship.
This is what I learned about intimacy. Intimacy is when you are willing to speak your truth at the risk of the relationship. Your truth is not necessarily “the truth”. Intimacy is not an avoider. Sometimes you enter into a terrible mess when you speak your truth. Intimacy is staying in the mess even when you want to retreat. True intimacy brings deep pain as well as profound joy. You have to be willing to feel both and the myriad of emotions in between. This is most important, you have to be willing to feel. Once you emerge from the mess, the sex is always amazing. Intimacy keeps the passion and your sex life healthy. Intimacy is based on respect. You need to be able to listen to the other person’s truth. Intimacy is a two-way street, otherwise it is not intimacy. You both have to meet in the ring and stay. A problem avoided does not go away until it is dealt with. It may go underground but it will rear it’s ugly head in more creative ways than you would think possible. Intimacy involves risk and to be in an intimate relationship you both need to be brave.
I would say in retrospect, that my marriage failed because I was not brave until it was too late. That being said, if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I might have been. But who knows, maybe it was just time to move on.