When I was younger, I was the dumpee more often than the dumper. Depending on your perspective, my girlfriends either had the sense or the strong desire to terminate relationships that “weren’t going anywhere.”
Looking back, I am both grateful and not the least ambivalent about that turn of events. Many of the women I was in relationships with had some of the same maturity issues I suffered from. Enduring relationships would have been abusive. Luckily, they had enough sense to know when to pull the plug on US.
So, despite many quashed relationships, I got the better part of the deal. I eventually wound up in therapy.
Was I such a bad deal as a boyfriend? I probably wasn’t a great deal. Going through therapy, I realized that through many of those relationships, I was at the emotional maturity level of a sixteen-year-old. After some grueling years, I started indexing my maturity level upward.
One of the things I learned in therapy was that you do not have to give up being young or having fun. You need to do those things responsibly and respectfully.
When to pull the pug? Well, the best I can say is that when you realize that time after time, you are the adult in the room, and your partner is behaving like they are sixteen, you have a strong indicator. A strange revelatory moment happened when I broke up with a girl named Susanne. I felt connected in sympathy to the women who had dumped me. I saw what they saw and realized that what I was doing was the best way out of an abusive relationship. It was like living in scenes from “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.”
As to how you do it? As Paul Simon suggested, “There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”
Go ye forth and sin no more!
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Sometimes I look back with melancholy at 40 years with not so much as a kiss to show for it. Then I read all the stories of relationships gone bad and think ‘Actually did I dodge a load of bullets?’
A good look at a life full of rocky relationships and the fall out. Well done, Lou.
There is a lot of truth in what you said, Mason.
At this point I realize that I was too damaged as a kid to be good at relationships. Relationships demand relating and I don’t know much about that. Therapy helped me see what my childhood family life was REALLY like. I needed that. But how to communicate stuff like feelings when you don’t even know what your feelings ARE? Yikes! That said, I have had some really great relationships, probably with people who were no longer 16 (haha). Still, I prefer coming home, opening the door, closing it behind me and closing out the world.
Well, therapy isn’t about getting fitted for a suit or a wedding gown. It is about finding a way in the world and finding peacewith who you are, and who you are becoming. You are you, and we are grateful that you are the one and only and not a second rate copy of someon else.
Thank you, Lou. My therapist totally got me. I owe her so much.
The gown was really pretty, though. http://marthakennedy.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/me-wedding-8191972.jpeg
Gee Martha, You were gorgeous!
“Were”???? 🤣 Thank you Lou. 🤗
1972
Ahhhh, but you’ve matured soooooooooo well!
You’re wonderful 😊 I was thinking, the person I am now would look ridiculous with that 20 year old’s face. Strange…
I’ve heard that expression before.
‘Pull the pug.” But it does not fully compute. My Pug pulls me, over 90% of any walk he is straining at the leash. Once he wears out, we become equal partners in the stroll dynamics. Which is much similar to my relationship with my spouse. She pulls me along for 90% of the stroll, and then it all evens out. Meanwhile, I get my ears scratched and kibble in my bowl, so mostly it all works out.