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Welcome to my blog!

I am Buffy, I live in Iowa with my kitty cat Meowshine and stay rather busy trying to be healthy, eating right, working out, working my full-time job and running my own custom jewelry business on the side. Thanks for coming along for the ride :)



Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Thoughts about relationship demise

I’ve come across a few things in the last few weeks that I feel like I need to reflect on. So bare with me.

The first was from my friend while we went for a morning walk in Mexico. She prefaced it with, ‘I don’t want to offend you, or upset you or anything but my husband and I were talking and we were wondering why did he leave you for that? We just don’t understand the reasoning behind it’.
I struggled with that too, for a really long time and I don’t know if it became clear to me until the conversation that followed. The girl he cheated on me with is larger then I am. She is actually probably the size I was when we got married, my heaviest, my rock bottom as far as the weight thing goes. She was who I was before I decided I wanted more of my life, before I grew up. Of course he would find her appealing, he was looking for an immature idiot like himself and when I stopped being that I wasn’t appealing to him anymore. But we were married and we were stuck.
After we got married I realized I didn’t want to live my life standing still. I wanted more. I wanted to do all the things I dreamed of but was too afraid to act on. I changed and for him that wasn’t a good thing. I think the way I lived my life was hard for him. He liked being lazy, sitting around, doing nothing. One day I asked him what he wanted from his life to which he replied with, ‘I don’t know’. I asked do you just want to work, drink and brew beer and that’s it? He replied with yeah pretty much. I didn’t understand how he didn’t have dreams, how he didn’t want to make more of his life then just to merely exist. It was very apparent that we were two totally different people. He could not understand my yearning for more, my need to make my life something special, my want to help others. The empathetic, caring girl married a self-centered, heartless boy. How could that ever work?
The girl he cheated on me with was similar in aspects to the old me (minus the self respect, integrity and conscious not to sleep with a married person). She made it ok for him to be who he was. He could be lazy and fat and not want more of his life. That is what he wanted and I couldn’t be that girl. He didn’t want to feel bad about his life and how he lived it. I’m not saying excusing what he did in any way because I will never be ok with it. I know I deserved more then that and I deserved him being an adult and ending our marriage in a more deserving way. But I think that is asking too much for him. He is far too immature to have handled it in any way then how he did. None of this should have been a surprise but since I lied to myself for so long, it was. He was exactly who he showed me he was; it just took me forever to see it. And I think there is something to understanding the whys behind it for your own piece of mind and to put yourself as ease that maybe you won’t make the same mistake in the future.

Second…“People don’t cheat if they are happy”
My teacher said it in class about divorce and co-parenting.
At first the comment made me defensive. It reminded me about Dr. Laura and how she tries to blame the woman for men cheating on them. Again I will repeat I did not deserve to be cheated on. I did not deserve him throwing me away like he did. I deserved more then that.
But to understand what happened to me I have to admit to myself that he wasn’t happy with me. I can’t say that I’m totally responsible for his unhappiness because I did try to make him happy but as unhappy as I was I couldn’t really do that. In a relationship isn’t that the point, for both partners to be happy? I know I wasn’t perfect but no one could say I didn’t try. And he sure as hell wasn’t trying to make me happy anymore either but after a while I stopped trying with him too. The thing is I wasn’t the person for him just as much as he wasn’t the person for me. We were not going to be able to make each other happy because we both wanted two totally different things. You cannot make a square peg fit into a round hole no matter how hard you try. And you can’t make that square peg change no matter how well your intentions are, no matter how much better it would make that square peg’s life. You keep trying to jam that peg in and in time you will just be frustrated and eventually stop trying. You shut down, you give up but what if you are legally bound to the hole or the peg? It makes giving up hard and scary and makes you stay in a situation you would have walked away from a long time ago.

I’m mature enough to realize that we weren’t the right people for one another and that is how it should have ended. Not inflicting more pain on one another. Unfortunately he will probably never really understand that and not that that matters because the results of his actions are the same. He intentionally broke my heart because he could and the fall out was mine to deal with. It doesn’t matter to him (or to his girlfriend) that he destroyed another person because he is too heartless to think of someone else even if he promised me he would never hurt me like that. Promises to people like that are just another lie they spew to get what they want at the time. Genuine, honest people have a hard time understanding that mentality. Anyways the main thing I’m trying to say is that I knew I wasn’t happy and would be crazy to think he was. But I didn’t realize he was as unhappy as I was. I didn’t realize how unfixable we were. I was completely delusional thinking I could fix it, that somehow it wasn’t yet beyond repair. I didn’t want to give up on him and I thought I was the one that was most miserable. I was the only one voicing it anyways. Every opportunity he had to say something he never did. I was blindsided by the cheating because I was in denial about how unhappy WE were. I only saw how unhappy I was.

Multicausality
I learned about this in my attempts to catch up with my readings for another class before my test on Thursday. The basic concept is that there are multiple causes that get people to where they are, requiring the need to get help from others. People with the same issue don’t get there in the same way, for the same reasons; there are lots of causes ending in the same result, say divorce or alcoholism. It’s hard to pinpoint how or why people get to where they are because they vary and for one person there are multiple causes. I thought about that in the context of the divorce. The cheating was the last incident that completely broke us, but we were mostly shattered before that whether I wanted to admit it or not. And not admitting it didn’t make it any less real. I was trying to hold us together and not very well. There were probably a million reasons and all complicated. I think it is important to identify as many as you can so you can resolve them and move on. I think it’s important to take responsibility for your part in the damage so you can be better next time. I think that people often like to blame the other person for their part in the demise but both parties contribute. As my teacher said, maybe not 50/50, sometimes even 90/10, but both have a part in it. I know where my blame lies. I have reflected a lot about my role as wife and where I played into our faults. I see where my shutting down and side stepping problems caused larger unresolved cracks. I realize now how my poor self esteem held me back and kept me in the role he wanted, but one I despised. But that is who I was when we met so I can’t blame him for wanting what I once was. He liked that insecure little girl, he didn’t want a woman who was self confident and loved herself. I changed. For me it was for the better no doubt, but for our relationship it wasn’t. I wasn’t honest with myself about what I needed. When I figured it out and tried to talk to him about it, he tried to push me back into my old self. And I shut down. I didn’t want the conflict when I tried to ‘fix’ things and nothing got better. No matter how much I wanted things better between us it didn’t change the fact that we were on different paths that were not compatible. I was not his mother and it was not for me to decide what was best for his life. But I hard time seeing that. He’s an adult and was hell bent on dragging himself down and there was nothing I could do to stop that (no matter how well intended I was). He was going to drink himself into a stupor and made it very clear I had no control over him and what he did. I was a wife, not a mother. I was married to an immature idiot who liked to drink too much, but I chose to marry him. I did it to myself in a sense. The point is that we all make decisions in life and you have to take responsibility for your part in that decision. Not everything happens to us. We are active participants in our lives. Things to happen to us but we do have the control over how react to those things. There are a lot of reasons why we are who we are and just as many reasons as to why our relationships are the way they are. It’s the sum of what two people bring to the table and there are some reasons to why we act the way we do in those interactions. Good and bad.

Since I find myself in love with a new fella I can’t help but want to resolve as many of my issues from my past as I can. Because I want the best relationship I can muster, I don’t want to set us back before we have a chance to become something beautiful. We both deserve the best we can put into this. I guess I wanted to reflect on this stuff because it had been floating around in my head and I wanted to make sense of it all. I wanted to share in case someone else was wrestling around with the same issues. It took me a year and a half to come to some of these conclusions so maybe I can save someone some time. Thanks for sticking through to all this.