I’m a big fan of the awesome Carolyn Hax, the only advice columnist I have ever given a damn about (I am way suspicious of people who make a living telling strangers how to make personal choices). I like her a lot. Based on her print/online presence, she’s friend material. Her advice is consistent and always focused on relationship, communication, connection, being human around other humans. The way that we all abrade each other sometimes. Common courtesy. Kindness. Having the back of people you love.
I’m sending you off to a column from a couple days ago. It’s a two-parter: you’ll find the link to part two at the bottom of part one (or at the end of this post). Part two is the payoff, but part one gives you the context.
And although I’ve started this post as a fangirly squee-out to Hax, really it’s all about the part-two story that Jersey Guy tells. It made me cry. Some of us are never lucky enough to have this moment of realization. And although I think all of us make big life-changing mistakes, some of us are never lucky enough to make them with people who will forgive us.
I’m one of the lucky ones: for all the countless thoughtless ways I have fucked up with my Most Important People, I have been forgiven, and for most of the ways that people have fucked up with me, I have forgiven them. Sometimes only after a long time, and sometimes with very little grace. But I am working on it.
I get so tired of my own defensiveness, my own special-babyness, my sometimes utter lack of kindness, my occasionally incredibly limited perspective. I need stories like Jersey Guy’s to remind me that if I’m special, then we’re all special, and that I’d better not forget that we’re all only human. Only is a funny word: it implies “merely” or even sometimes “unfortunately” — but I think the real lesson here is that only human is a vast, complicated and lifetime-project thing to be. It’s a thing worth being the best at that we can; because the best is so fucking beautiful it turns my heart inside-out.
Some wise person once said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” We can easily forgive people we don’t know. It’s forgiving people we love that twists up our entrails and makes us sweat. The price of that forgiveness is much higher. Thank you for the aesome post from Hax.
We cannot control how we feel, but we can control our actions. While I think Jersey Guy was an idiot for sharing his feelings (that was an action designed to make him feel better, at the cost of making his fiancee fee worse), at least he didn’t betray his fiancee with his actions.
Hmmm, I’m not sure. It seems like he’s saying that he loves his fiancee because she’s a bit of a pushover. Kindness is definitely a virtue, but I think self-respect is more important.
Now he knows he can step on her and she’ll put up with it.
Kelly, well, mileage varies (smile). We all get to decide for ourselves what our boundaries are, and when we are being a pushover versus when we’re rising to the challenge of staying connected to someone who has just really fucked up. I don’t think it’s about kindness — I think it’s about forgiveness.
If he really got the lesson, then in fact he will be a lot more careful about stepping on her next time. Because now he knows that nothing is more important than preserving the love of someone who has seen you at your asshole worst and still is willing to love you.
Chris, I think JG owed it to her to tell her. If he was just having feelings, that’s one thing. But he was thinking about leaving her, which makes it an actual threat to the relationship. I think both people deserve to know about that if it’s happening.
Barbara, you’re right. When someone has the power to hurt us deeply, and then they do — wow, that makes us so vulnerable.
Life is a series of choices about how to respond. I’ve spent a lot of time learning to set boundaries. Now I’m trying to learn the difference between someone hurting me and someone wanting to hurt me. Most of the time my thorny fences go up, it turns out that the other person had only good intentions, they were doing their best. And so I’m trying to learn to do my best too.
Interesting quote Barbara. I think I disagree tho – I’ve felt like a ‘stranger in a strange land’ enough to think that some people’s behavior is totally alien to me…. But i know what you mean about forgiving people that matter to us.
It is one thing to forgive and another to forget. I’ve forgiven people for things which I have initially thought unforgivable ( and some few things *are* unforgivable in my mind). Once I even said to someone who told me in advance what their behavior would be: ok, but I’ll never speak to you again if you do that. I did eventually forgive them (three people I loved) for their actions. Still, I’ve never forgotten who they are as defined by that choice, and we are no longer friends of any substance. Because they never were sorry for the choice – just for hurting me. And I have forgiven other major figures in my life for bad things they did, but I have not forgotten. And a big part of forgiveness for me is when someone does something that is unquestionably wrong. Then they apologize. (20 days or 20 years later) But. Then they keep acting like the same old jerk — over and over again. Ok, I can have empathy for what made them the way they are, and I can even forgive their behavior because of that. But I will not put myself in a position to be hurt by it again.
I did not get the feeling that Jersey Guy’s GF was letting him walk all over her. When I read the story, I thought of the thing about holding something we love too tightly. The familiar (corny) analogy about trying to hold onto a butterfly. We have to let the things we love fly as they will. Maybe they’ll come back, or maybe they won’t.
I hope his love is true, but I did wonder as I was reading (what sounded like) his sudden epiphany. And I wonder what Carolyn Hax thought given her last comment.
I read some of her other articles too – I like her comments.
Jennifer, I guess I just mean do unto others as you would have them do unto you. When I was a lawyer, my clients used to tell me they wanted justice and I would tell them that they would be better off asking for mercy.
I’m curious about what makes others tick, and I’m especially curious about my MIP (to borrow Kelley’s “Most Important People”). I appreciate honesty, even if it means that the story keeps changing: yesterday I wanted to marry you, today I’m not so sure. We’re all multifaceted beings, with drives that pull us into different and, at times, conflicting directions. I don’t like to feel deceived, but my definition of the word has nothing to do with my partner having actual sex with or sexual feelings for someone else. If they choose to hide that information from me, then I feel deceived. I want to stay in the loop and in a position to asses the ground I stand on.
My reaction to Jersey Guy’s confession wouldn’t have included crying. I would have definitely given him a hug, yes, his sweetie and I agree on that one. It’s so hard for people to communicate, especially when they fear they’ll be judged, rejected, punished as a result. After reassuring Jersey Guy that we’re okay and telling him I appreciate his trust and understand how scary it is to share such things, I would have asked many questions because I’d be curious to know more about that other side of him better, the side that lusts after his summer fling.
According to my sweetie, I’m the least pushover person she’s ever met, yet I’m very tolerant (her word choice). Her reasoning is that pushovers do what other people want them to do, and she says I’m always looking for ways to do exactly what I damn please and won’t settle until I’ve tried out everything and/or got my way. I wouldn’t say I’m tolerant (let alone forgiving), but I’m grudge-challenged. Grudges are big energy sucks. It’s even harder for me to develop enough anger or contempt to begin with, because I also tend to assume responsibility for the outcome of relationships and the situations involved. My phrases: I allowed this to happen; I should have seen it coming; I should have paid more attention to the warning signs; I should have asked how she felt more often; I was irresponsible when I tricked myself into thinking I could handle this situation and keep people from getting hurt; I should know better by now; I should listen better; et cetera.
It doesn’t often get to that point where I chant the “I should have” mantra because I don’t let many enter my inner sanctum—i.e. I don’t have many close friends. I’m bad at assessing risks or people’s characters over an extended period of time—I’m lazy that way—so my filtering system involves granting an unusual and generous amount of access right off the bat, give free reign over anything I can afford to lose. Then, sit back and see what happens. Most people screw me over the second I turn my back, they run off with the loot as fast and far as their feet will take them. All that’s left for me to do is sigh, lose a turn, return to square one, and go, “Oh, well. Good riddance. Finding I can’t trust that one came cheap.” But once someone passes my first screenings, they’re in for better or worse. The only way I can keep myself from being hurt by a MIP who has become/is on a path to becoming a repeat offender is to move to another city or, better yet, country—change my email, my phone number, all that fun stuff. I usually feel very happy whenever a MIP gets in touch with me regardless of how much damage they’ve dealt me.
I don’t know what this makes me. Not forgiving, not kind, not a pushover. Only human, I guess, trying to do the best I can with myself and my curiosity and the voices in my head. I read “Breaking Strain” by Arthur C. Clarke last night and found so much insight into my own character and drives—I’d be McNeil, if you are wondering. And I guess this extremely long comment means I’m back to riffing. Yay? 😉
If we take what Jersey Guy said as what he actually did (no reason not to, except that a lot of letters in these sorts of columns are so clearly “revised”), then it was psychologically necessary and pretty brave. The pay off, so to speak, would be considerable.
Secrets like this fester. Not the lust, not the unrequited love, not the what if—but the fact that you had this reaction and then must decide to hide it. The hiding—because it’s important, because you’re second-guessing other people, because it’s not the same thing as the secret itself—can become a great big nasty ball of pus over time and poison everything. Telling his fiancee accomplished a number of things. It lanced the boil, as it were, and it gave him an opportunity to see how much he trusted his fiancee, never mind how much she trusted him. It showed him something about himself that he will value for the rest of his life, that honesty is better.
What if his fiancee had told him to FO and left? Tragic, sure….but she would have to know that he had things in his past that could reemerge unexpectedly and she would have to deal with them, pleasant, unpleasant, other. If she couldn’t handle this—a biggy—then how would she deal with other things later? Like the changes in behavior we all go through under stress (job loss, sickness, death of family and friends, etc etc).
He purged the poison and learned something about himself, about fantasies, and about his fiancee. Good for her that she gave him the chance to see her at her best, too, under tough circumstances. They’ll have a better chance now.
There’s all this stuff we carry around, a mixed bag of old curios, some good, some bad, some embarrassing, some so far down at the bottom of the sack we’ve forgotten it’s there. Some of it will make our partner a little nuts to know about, but in the end the only thing that you can say, that really matters, is “I’m here with you now. This is where I want to be.”
Past is prologue. Today is the real story.