Do you give your undying loyalty to those who don’t deserve it; who do not value it?
Do you think sticking with that unethical boss, the deadbeat boyfriend, the pal who consistently makes you question your worth, makes you somehow noble?
Are you terrified of being perceived—by absolutely anybody, including the mailman— as being unreliable, or whimsical?
Well, maybe it’s time to stop acting like a Golden Retriever.
Before she moved back to North Dakota, my mother bought her cars from the same man every single time. It’s not that she particularly liked this dude, or that she thought she was getting a helluva deal, she just believes that a person—a person raised properly—should be loyal to the first car dealer God places in her path.
The car dealer thing is sort of funny, but that misplaced loyalty impulse is what ruled my mother.
She’d stayed with my father all those godawful years out of the same sham sense of loyalty. She kept her mouth shut and her hands folded despite the drunken rages, the constant threat of violence, and the words my father wielded against her like fucking two-by-fours. After all, she told my brother and me, nobody was perfect. Family, she would say with a quivering voice, is sacred.
When it comes to loyalty, my son feels just as strongly as his grandmother. He believes that, once a buddy, always a buddy, regardless of the situation.
At nearly 21, he doesn’t understand why his boyhood friends no longer want to hang with him the way they did when they were ten. Why that cross-country road trip they used to fantasize about never managed to materialize once they got their licenses. Why they didn’t all occupy one big, beer-can-strewn bachelor-pad the minute they could afford rent.
He doesn’t accept that things change; that people change. He doesn’t buy into the concept of nature’s predictable cycles of growth and then death, even though he loves all those season songs by Simon and Garfunkel. Anybody with a moral compass respects the immutable bonds of friendship no matter the circumstance, he claims.
Someone as fair-weather as me—a woman who divorced his father when he was four—just wouldn’t get that, though.
Perhaps I lack fiber, but it has never occurred to me to buy (or sell) a big-ticket item from someone who has not earned my trust. Do something to wow me, however, and I’m yours; hook, line and sinker.
More importantly, I refuse to cling to toxic relationships at this stage in my life. And, despite feeling sad when certain relationships have reached their expiration date, I will move on.
In a lot of ways, I think having an alcoholic for a father helped to counterbalance my mother’s loyalty indoctrination.
At 23, emboldened by my newfound financial freedom, I told my father I didn’t want to speak to him anymore. I was fed up with the rambling midnight calls, and his tearful confessions of guilt, and the on the wagon, then off again bullshit he put us through. It wasn’t until I was 27, a new mother, that I decided I could have a relationship with him again, on my terms.
Those four years served as a wonderful reset. So, when he died a few years later, I could feel sad. I lost my safety net, not my tormentor.
Sometimes you need to take a break from certain people in your life, those folks who consistently make you feel like shit, even if they don’t mean to.
Sometimes you need to stay away for good. Particularly when someone abuses the loyalty you’ve blindly given him or her.
It doesn’t make you unprincipled for calling it quits; nor does it impugn the other’s character. I’m saying this as someone who has been on both sides of the equation.
We all evolve. Situations shift. What works for you at twenty, no longer serves at thirty. Friends get married, have babies, move to Illinois, get divorced, and one day you have nothing left to say. Sometimes you’re looking for more than the other has to give. One morning you wake up and realize you have absolutely nothing left in common.
I’m a big proponent of doing what it takes to salvage a relationship (or a job). For telling the God’s honest truth about what you feel and need. For having the guts to fight it out even though you despise confrontation.
But. After all is said and done.
Sometimes you need permission to walk away.
Sometimes you need to know that you are not a disloyal, reprehensible human being for snipping the cord, or requiring more.
Sometimes you need to hear that it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that season thing we’ve been singing about.
And that, my Darling, is what I’m setting on your plate.
You’re welcome.
