Over New Years we were sitting in a little wine bar up in New Hampshire having tapas when Walt and I spotted an attractive couple about our age. Like us, they were unusual in that they appeared to be madly in love with one another. So different than the other wilted couples at the neighboring tables, representatives of the same old same old, of a few too many years of child rearing, mortgage payments, television watching, and infrequent vanilla sex.
We watched as the man leaned in across the table, kissed his lady’s hand, caressed her check, and professed his love. As the woman tilted her head coyly and murmured in return. And it was only when I caught sight of her face—one moment mesmerized by her lover’s words, the next minute, mistrusting—did I realize the two weren’t married; they were having an affair. The furtive glances around the room, the missing wedding bands hadn’t clued me in, it was the intensity of drama between the two. Desperate salesman meets skeptical customer.
I recognized the plot because I’d once bought that three-wheeled Ford.
Why would a seemingly mature, sophisticated, pretty woman consign herself to a relationship with a man who isn’t free? Why would a woman, one who clearly would do well on the open market, settle for such a dud?
There is something marvelous about being involved with a married man. So aware of his obvious shortcomings—that unfortunate detail of having a wife and kids at home, people that he will never leave—he makes up for it in a thousand different ways. He is a master of romance. Sweet words pour from his lips like clover honey. He treats his woman like a princess, offering up sparkly dresses, expensive jewelry, and fancy trips. So desperate to be with his one true love—alas, fate, aka community property laws, keep them apart— he calls her ten times a day to remind her of his heart. He is just as dashing, and sorrowful, and yearningly impassioned as any woman could hope him to be. Because he can never actually live up to his promises, he has nothing to risk. He can spew troths that any available man would wisely hesitate to avow.
But the most magical thing about a married man is that he expects little in return. Lingerie, inventive sex, good dinner conversation, nothing more. He thinks he has all the power, but it is really the mistress who holds the reigns. So busy making up for his deficits, so intent on putting on his dog and pony show, of keeping his impatient woman hooked, he has no time to notice her serious flaws.
The relationship is a perfect hiding place for a woman with little sense of worth. For a woman convinced that within her lies some great big ugly sin.
The best part about dating a married man— like a closeted homosexual or a pedophile or a drug addict or a sixth grader—is that the rejection is built in right up front. When the relationship goes south, it will never be attributed to the woman’s lack, but the obvious obstacle.
Still, there’s something perversely pleasurable about slamming your head against a brick wall, in proving to yourself, once again, that no matter how good you are, how kind and nice and smart, you’re not quite good enough to win yourself true love.
I started recognizing this tendency to go for impossible men late in life. In my late teens, early 20’s, I gravitated towards foreigners because I could always use the cultural differences as an excuse for why things didn’t work out. The married man was great, as was the guy who lived an ocean away in Italy, then the narcissist. None of the relationships thrived, not because of me, or so I postulated, but because I was barking up the wrong sort of tree. Oh, so many lovely, juicy things to blame.
It was in the narcissist’s library that I came upon a book that illuminated this pattern: Daily Afflictions: the agony of being connected to everything in the universe, by Andrew Boyd.
I adore this little book. I read it over and over again, each time finding some new insight. In one-page segments, Andrew Boyd renders a topic—a problem, a human tendency, an affliction—to the bone, leaving an idea so perfect, so pure, so funny, so truthful as to leave me speechless. His section headings include: life, self, family, love, career, death, and more. Being female, being me, I turned that first time to the topic of love.
Loving the Wrong Person
We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness.
Of course when I read this the first time, I didn’t consider myself. I drew parallels to my parents instead. Beyond finances, the noble-sounding notion of keeping things together for the sake of the kids, there was a really good reason my mother stayed married to my dad. Infantile in her avoidance of responsibility and growth, Mom wanted to do what she wanted to do, without any challenges, without much effort on her part. In short, she wanted to float. A deeply insecure, paranoid, lonely man, Dad wanted to hide from the world in the basement, saw away on his fiddle, lose his past in the bottle, shrug off the mantle of family involvement. He wanted to escape.
Co-conspirators in marital misery, they were a perfect fit.
I don’t say these things to be mean. To say shitty things about my parents, who, like all human beings, did their level best with what they had to work with. I say this because I recognize the tendency— to find the sort of twisted relationship in which I can remain in a position of comparative moral superiority— in myself.
It’s why I stayed married to a man even after he took a second wife. Surely if I survived the ordeal, I would be forgiven the things he held against me—my lack of virginity, the bone that stuck in his craw. I would be ensured of my husband’s undying love and attachment. I would have finally earned it. I would be expected to do nothing more.
Remaining in such a tit-for-a-tat relationship—you put up with this, I’ll put up with that— is simply a way of shirking real intimacy. Intimacy is tough when you want to hide the dirt. Intimacy opens up the door to having requirements placed on oneself: to step up, to grow up, to tell the truth.
Without being consciously aware, damaged people smell each other. They choose each other, like a serial killer his prey.
Cleaning my ex-husband’s apartment after his death, I chanced upon letters written by his latest lover. I was fascinated. So insecure, so idol worshipping, she sounded, at least on paper, just like I once had. Where had he found so similar a creature? How had he thought that same dynamic might actually work out for him the next go round?
A married man, or a husband who takes on a second “wife,” or falls in love with a bottle, seeks the kind of damaged woman who is too afraid to demand much from him in return. These men, like their women, are cowards. If they were not, they would either exit a relationship acknowledged to no longer be working for them. Or they would be home, battling out their differences, negotiating life’s bumps. Like big boys and big girls.
It isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that you’re ready to find a life long mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, ‘This is the problem I want to have.
Before I could open myself up to a healthy adult relationship, I had to face my sense of wrongness. What was it about me I deemed so unforgivable? So unlovable? Not such big things, really, when I shined the klieg light on them.
I had to learn how to respect myself. I had to learn how to demand of myself. To step up to the plate and take responsibility for myself. To speak. To act. To set goals. So I wouldn’t be afraid when someone else demanded more from me. The running helped. The writing. Going back to school. Walking through fires: the death of my father, my ex-husband, losing a couple of jobs, dealing with my troubled children, becoming a stepparent. Two things are true: what doesn’t kill you makes you strong. It’s not that you fall down; it’s how quickly you get back up.
A work in progress, there are days that I recognize I have a long way to go.
Here’s the good news, at least for me. In Walt I have found the right kind of wrong. Neurosis, restlessness, striving, intensity, his problems are the ones I want to have. He expects more from me than I have ever expected from myself. Being honest is really, really hard. And we battle issues through more often than I’d care to admit. But this intimacy stuff is really sweet. It’s worth the sweat.
So. In whom or what do you hide to avoid living up to your potential? What do you put up with so you don’t have to try?
