Relentless Inquiry

or maybe a glimmering of daylight?

Thanks for all the support. We had one of those no-holds-barred kind of talks last night, but at a very adult and rational level, and both laid a lot of previously hidden info out on the table. That was good.

I'm taking a rationalist approach to all this, and am hoping that it works out. I feel a lot better about it today than I did yesterday.

The ironic thing about this is that what makes me feel good is that I'm going to go into a mode which, to me, looks very largely like being single. I'm not out to blatantly disregard my partner, but I am going to enjoy the level of autonomy that I customarily back off from during a relationship. But simply not losing huge amounts of energy to feeling 'blocked' is a giant win.

We talked about this. I have a belief that in some ways a relationship is like people being on one of those little playground fake merry-go-rounds. It's always moving- life pushes it. If you're not actively holding on, you get flung off into the maelstrom. Your partners and friends are people on the same merry-go-round, and you're all on these retractable bungie-type cords, where people radiate in and out of the center. If you're in the same orbit, you can interact. If you don't try matching orbits deliberately, you may be around a common center but you don't actually interact, even if you stay only a ring or two away, within talking or shouting distance.

The circumference between people increases as they go further from the center, of course, and they get further apart. Without attention to reeling oneself in periodically, eventually the cord will stretch and part, as some other merry-go-round tugs it. We're all anchored to a multitude of these things in N-space, labelled 'home', 'work', 'my old dorm roomies', 'the computer club', etc. It's not just a relationship model. It's kind of mathematical, though you can only get a slice-view at any one time. I think this is several years back-brain processing of concepts in “the Ship that Sailed into the Livingroom”, finally percolating up where I can see them. Anyway.

So I gave Mike notice that this is kind of my model. I haven't seen any long-term healthy relationships close up on which to model, I may be wrong. I think that what will happen if I stop putting energy into reactively matching orbits with him, and into thinking first about whether something will loosen my grip on the merry-go-round, is that our lives will separate and we'll drift apart. I don't know for sure.

What I do know for sure is that I can be very happy with either an independently pursued life, or a life that revolves around a common center (children, causes, etc). What makes me unhappy is feeling that I have sole responsibility for making sure there's still some kind of merry-go-round whose common center we orbit, that they don't disconnect the power and lights, etc. I gave notice on that. I quit.

I don't want to quit the relationship with Mike. What I want to quit is acting in ways I've always believed were the life-n-death of a relationship, because those ways inevitably make me very, very unhappy. To me, it feels like that's tantamount to breaking up.

Mike's model of relationships is quite different. He feels that what I'm doing isn't of great value in keeping the relationship going, and that it's actually making it hard on both of us. He may be right. At least I feel clear ethically now, which frees me to act on my own recognizance: I want to drop these behaviors, I think that will break our relationship, please know that's not what I'm trying to accomplish by dropping them. So we're on the same page.

We both acknowledged each others' models, and that they ARE models– neither of us says 'my model is the way things really work', they're just constructs trying to explain reality. Understanding more about the models' clash points is helpful.

So, where does that leave us? Still married, still partnered, still living together. Both aware that there are challenges ahead, and surprises– both good ones and less-good ones. Both planning to be sharing them together, but with a really different set of ground rules in place. Speaking of which…

The other thing I gave notice on is ego protection. I'm not an easy person to have as a partner, at least for guys. With women, I tend to just take on the guy role– which is pretty natural for me. I am very competent in many areas that guys get self-esteem from, and almost every guy I've been involved with has seen that as a self-worth issue on some level. Sorry. Life's tough. I can't do everything, and I'm not equally good at everything– pick any two people, or 3 people, etc, and some will be better at some things than others. It will be unusual to find folks whose skill sets so completely overlap that one person is better than the other at *everything*– I don't think I've ever seen that, in fact.

Yet I have spent every long-term romantic relationship, and even a few long-term friend relationships, backing down from my core competencies when they overlapped with the other person's, unless they were explicitly asking for expertise. The cycle can feed on itself to the point where the other person maps me as 'fragile'– and is then surprised, post-relationship, at the things I do for myself. Well, I'm just damn tired of that.

If someone asks me “if you can fix things, make things, and do things, why do you need me?”, my response is going to be “I don't *need* you, but I'd like to choose to associate with you. Isn't that a better, more free, choice than 'need'?” If they can't deal, so be it.

I think he'll deal. If he doesn't, oh well. He'll join a long list of those who couldn't, and he's done me vastly less damage, and more good, than any of them, and been around at least double the amount of time by far.

OK, I got a zillion plants to water and a client site visit, gotta go. Thanks again for all the caring. I get uncomfortable ack'ing it in person sometimes, but I do appreciate it. All the self-analysis doesn't mean I'm actually socialized, I just have a tool with which to approximate it out in public.