Drama with Dave: How Fighting Made Me Feel Safe Again

-I know women who have been hurt in relationships.  I share this hoping that the restoration of my faith in marriage can lead to diminishing the hurt I know these women carry.-

I’ve decided that getting married (again) isn’t such a bad idea. For a long time I thought getting married again was a bad idea.  My first experience with marriage was, shall we say, not a stellar success.

I’ve heard it said that what one does with marriage after divorce indicates what one’s experience was of the marriage, regardless of it ending in divorce.  My ex got married again in 13 months while I have remained single for the past eight years.  In a backwards way I suppose it’s comforting that he found our marriage to be more enjoyable than I did.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that I didn’t want to get married again.  I ended the marriage fully expecting that I’d never find love again.  Over the years, despite saying I wanted to re-marry I’ve been told I don’t act toward men the way a woman does when she wants to settle down.  In recent months I told myself that I found the idea of being married distasteful and really not an endeavor in which I was interested.

Then God stepped in… again.  This is the second time He’s given me an experience that made me think, “You know, if marriage was like this- I might like it.”

The first time was several years ago.  I’d had a rotten day at work but gone to meet my dear friend at dance class regardless.  Knowing I was emotionally off kilter he offered to talk.  However, I had some idealistic notion that I should be able to emotionally right myself without help.  Additionally, (and this is the real point), my ex had been pejorative about my profession, my choice to be in it and my role in it when I’d brought up a bad day.  So I wasn’t about to incur the same rejection from my (male) friend.

After dance class, while sitting outside sipping our smoothies and chatting about life I worked up the courage to tell my friend about my bad day.  He sympathized and offered advice.  My emotions soothed, the conversation drifted on to other topics.  As we sat on the steps talking I found myself thinking that if marriage could be like this… help and support for my difficult times folded into the rest of the good, without resentment, bitterness or it derailing the day (yes, that was what marriage was like before my divorce)… then I would like it.  My anxiety diminished, I began to feel marriage was something desirable- regardless of if it was with that particular friend- the institution seemed palatable again.  My friend has never heard this story before, so he’s never known that his friendship with me restored my faith and erased much shell shock toward marriage.

Before all you romantics go off thinking this man and I will walk down the aisle, let me just say that will never happen.  Sometimes people are part of your life in intimate ways that have nothing to do with marriage.  That does not lessen the significance of the relationship. God gave me a precious gift when he brought that man into my life.

Years passed and I became fed up with the dating game.  I became worn by managing my own anxiety.  I became worn by managing other mens’ anxiety about romantic relationships.  I began to feel that marriage was all about fighting and I really detest fighting.  (I avoid it at almost all cost.  I only engage in it when it is very important and I cannot find a way around it.)  Increasingly paramount in my perspective was the love of my family, the acceptance of my friends and the richness of my profession and hobbies.  The idea that a husband could add enough to that love and richness to compensate for the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a relationship became laughable.

And so I lived my life until three weeks ago.  When I had one of the worst weeks in years.

Really it all started about three months ago when I agreed to go on vacation.  While I should have been looking forward to the trip, I was dreading it.  And the whole reason was because of a guy.  I was going because of him and I was dreading it because of him.  The not-so-secret-secret was that I’d had a thing for this guy for over a year, which he didn’t reciprocate (pathetic, I know).  In fact, he’d told me, just prior to talking me into the vacation, that he was pursuing another woman.  Despite knowing his emotions were engaged elsewhere, meaning we would go on vacation only as friends, I couldn’t help but say “yes” when he asked me to go.  The decision made I figured he’d do what any normal, male friend would do and leave me alone for the weeks leading up to the trip.  To my shock the ensuing weeks were filled with e-mails and texts.

Massive confusion entered my world.  The same world where I said I didn’t want to get married.  I even contemplated telling this guy that he could relax cause I would be one woman in the area who wasn’t considering “bedding and wedding” him.  Really my confusion was because of my own conflict, not what this sweet guy did.  I both wanted to be closer to him and was terrified of it.  I found him just what I wanted and also driven mad by him.  I wanted him to want a romance with me but wouldn’t let myself believe that he would and was very sad about my own hopelessness.

Being an ever logical gal, I came to realize that I could not both say I didn’t want to get married and feel hurt at the belief that he didn’t want to date me.  I couldn’t say I didn’t want to get married while kinda thinking this guy wasn’t so bad.  Now- I’m not crazy: I wasn’t ready to marry the dude… just pondering my own mental contradictions.  If I truly didn’t care about being married then I should not have cared how this guy acted toward me.

But I did care.  So with my heart in my throat I went on vacation.  And became an anxious mess.  Seriously, I was not me.  And that is lamentable because it caused some unnecessary friction, but not the point to this story.  What is the point is that I had both one of the worst and best experiences of my life.

This guy and I fought on and off during the trip.  Oh, not non-stop.  It felt like I’d barely started to re-gain my footing from one misunderstanding before another cropped up.  Despite neither one of us being into drama it felt like a whole lot of drama.  As I look back on it, that’s really all it seemed to amount to; a lot of nothing, like foam on the sea.  I’m really not sure what we were fighting about though I can re-count the conversations in detail.

My life would have been easier if this guy was a jerk.  But he wasn’t.  It would have been easier if he’d have told me to ‘deal’ and left me to cope on my own.  But he didn’t.  It would have been easier if he hadn’t been decent, kind, excellent at listening and working through the conflict.  It would have been easier if he didn’t seem to care about repairing the damage to the friendship.

Guys run around wondering what will make a woman happy. Really, it’s very simple: We want to feel safe.  Safe from physical harm.  Safe from the unpredictableness of the future.  Safe from relational isolation.  Make a woman feel “safe” and she will melt.  In human relationships safety is not about always being happy together.  Safety is knowing that misunderstandings, problems, threats to the relationship, and to the self, will be solved through collaboration with another, trusted person.  In children this is primal: Lack of safety leads to death through lack of care and protection.  In adults the threat is more mental… we can physically live without care of another but we emotionally wither without love and support.  This is why C.S. Lewis’ definition of love feels the most accurate to me, “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

If this guy had left me to cope on my own, had not cared to fix the problems, had not taken care of me I would not have felt safe.  Paradoxically, every fight he worked through served to strengthen my feeling of being safe with him and decreased my anxiety at the vacation.  I came to feel that fights were annoying but I was confident that he would work it out with me.  Between fights he did little things that made me feel valued, made me sure that he still liked me and having me around.

This was in direct contrast to how I previously felt toward fights with men.  After all, fighting with my ex had led to the death of our relationship.  There had not been the relational repair, the fighting fair and caring between fights.  Couple this with my innate abhorrence of disharmony in relationships.  Then perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that the first fight I had with this guy during the vacation had me convinced that the friendship was over and I should just leave.

By the end of the trip this sweet man had healed one of my deepest wounds.  I had experienced fighting to resolve, not win.  I had experienced what it felt like to fight because I was cared for.  I had seen anger leveled at me as a way to heal, not destroy.  I had been called out for my own follies while being apologized to for his follies.

To someone who started out thinking that fighting made marriage worthless, who only remembered fighting as tearing down, who thought that a fight meant to give up and go home this vacation was a revelation.  What my mind knew logically from my professional work my heart learned to feel: Fighting can show love.

As before, marriage to this sweet guy is not likely and is not the point.  The point is that I now know what it feels like to be prized even in the midst of conflict with a guy.  All I have to do is look for that feeling again.  I am so grateful to the guy… he healed me without knowing it.  He will forever hold an important place in my life because of it and because he restored my hope for a happy marriage.  

Almosts

Almost: Slightly short of; not quite; very nearly but not exactly or entirely.

Some people are “Almosts”. They are almost what you want for the job. Almost what you want for a friend. Almost what you want in whom to date or marry. And out of all the people you meet only one (if you’re lucky) will be more than almost for this last category.

Q: Then are we doomed to meeting and disentangling ourselves from one almost-the-person-you-want-to-marry after another? A: Pretty much.

A friend and I recently had a conversation about Almosts where the term “deal breakers” was brought up. It quickly became apparent that deal breakers are not a categorical do/don’t do... they are a continuous range from very specific to all encompassing. For example, he suggested a deal breaker was not being married in the Church. As if that was one deal breaker. But really it was a whole lot of them all summed up (i.e. faithful religious observance, certain dress code, certain health code, etc.). The implication being that some poor person could find themselves disqualified from the “marriageable” list for any number of reasons… they could be an Almost for any number of reasons. And not necessarily the stated reason: “I can’t marry you in the Church,” would be vague to the point of meaninglessness. A true statement but not really anything that one could hang their hat on, so to speak… nothing they could address as a personal point of self-improvement or dismiss as nothing they needed to act upon.

I found myself wondering how many poor girls had been head over heels for this guy and found themselves quietly but firmly dropped without a real clue as to what just happened. The funny thing was that my friend had not thought of his one deal breaker as a summation of multiple deal breakers until that conversation. So I flipped my mental question on it’s ear and wondered how often my friend had set a girl aside because she was an Almost to him without really knowing why he’d just done that. A quick mental review found many friends who had a long list of Almosts in their history because of so called deal breakers that were vague, shifted with their mood or just dumb.

Seeing people as Almosts is a double edged sword: It’s a nice way to let people go without putting them down, getting angry at them or placing blame. It’s also a way to keep from exploring your own motivation and thought process behind labeling someone an Almost. A fine line exists between saying someone is an Almost so you can let them go without endless attempts to make a relationship work when it should be let go or using it as an excuse to avoid examining your own needs and motivations.

For example: I have a non-LDS friend who has been infatuated with at least a couple LDS women, two of them he can’t get enough of even though they won’t seriously date him. Yet he staunchly proclaims them Almosts… or rather, proclaims himself the Almost because even when asked to do so he is not willing to change those things about himself that make him clearly not LDS. Never once have I heard him stop and ask himself what he finds so dashing wonderful about these women that he wants them in his life and what he should do to get those qualities more intimately in his life.

Worse yet, you can use the category of Almosts to avoid truly coming to know yourself. For example: I was recently proclaimed an Almost. Mutual friends professed being mystified when the guy made his choice because they though I splendidly fit the bill of what this guy said he wanted. He tried to explain it to them. But in the end it came out muddled- presumably a representation of the muddled state of his thinking about what he actually wants out of a woman. This did not stop him from blithely going on in his self-contradictory state because in his mind I was the one who was not desirable and he was perfectly clear. With mutual friends all invested in his and my happiness and willing to help further those states (whether we got together or not) he could have used his rejection of me as a chance to come to know himself better, but he didn’t.

Robert Frost debated this very issue. “Good fences make good neighbors” (said the neighbor). But there was an important question before the neighbor’s answer: “Before I built a wall, I‘d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out”. It is not the use of proclaiming people Almosts that I suggest must be done with introspection, indeed I find the whole idea very helpful. Rather, as did Frost, I like to really understand whom I am including and excluding and most importantly: Why?