F*ck Feelings (26 page)

Unfortunately, as time goes by and your more everyday needs establish themselves, you depend on your partner's fragile ability to stay good, responsible, and sober to protect you from being hurt, humiliated, and dumped. Relying on your love to keep a damaged person whole and well-behaved is like expecting a trained bear to stay upright; eventually, after the music ends and the circus audience leaves, the beast comes down on all fours again. A trained bear is still a bear, and a loved person with impairments is still impaired.

If you love nurturing people (and many people in professions like nursing and social work fall into this category), changing someone for the better is a measure of success. If, however, you lower your boundaries and become overattached, and your nurturee's change doesn't last, your disappointment is likely to blossom into anger that feels as unacceptable as shaking a baby.

In addition, if you want someone to be motivated to change because he loves you, but then he doesn't change, it must mean he doesn't love you enough. You're not just disappointed, you're insulted, and left wondering whether the person you love would have changed permanently for someone else whom they loved more or who loved them better. In reality, the only person with the ability to facilitate that kind of change is a wizard or an exorcist.

So as tempting as it might be, don't think of love as an instrument of improvement or redemption. Don't measure love's strength by its ability to turn a bad boy into the dream man. Ask yourself whether you can accept someone the way they are. If you can, and still love them, then congratulations; your story is not going to be dramatized on basic cable, but it is what you need for a peaceful relationship that is likely to last.

Among the wishes people express are:

• To get someone to stop destroying their relationship, health, or job

• To get someone to see what they could accomplish if they were only more motivated, disciplined, or ambitious

• To stop someone from being a compulsive giver

• To change someone's sexual feelings

Here are three examples:

I started dating my boyfriend in high school, when he was in trouble with the police and using drugs all the time, and I got him to take care of himself and take work seriously. Now we're living together, and he works regularly, but he doesn't have any ambition and sometimes, when he gets into a funk, he binges on drugs. He adores me and tells me he would have been on the street if I hadn't rescued him, but I don't see him taking his binging seriously, wanting to get help, or doing more at work than showing up when someone gives him a job. I feel guilty about
pressuring him and damaging his self-esteem, but I don't see how we can raise kids unless he's more responsible. My goal is to get him to see why he needs to take sobriety and making money more seriously.

I always admired my husband's love for his son from his first marriage; it showed me what a kind, nurturing man he is. What I didn't realize before I married him, however, is that he has a hard time saying no. Whether it's something his nine-year-old wants, or his ex gets the idea that he needs completely new sports equipment, my husband drops everything to comply. Often, he can't afford the time or the money, so indirectly it impacts my budget and our time together. My goal is to get him to see that his ultra-responsiveness to his son and ex-wife isn't good for our marriage or his son.

My wife was my best friend and dream girl when we were dating, and our relationship was the envy of our friends. After we had a kid, she went through a bad postpartum depression and gained thirty pounds, and now she spends a lot of time telling me what to do because she's anxious about everything. This isn't what I bargained for. She's seeing a therapist, so don't tell me she needs help. My goal is to figure out how to get back the woman I fell in love with.

Love can only change how we act, not who we are. It can make us blind, crazy, and happy, as well as very, very attached, but it can't reliably alter our personalities, outlook, or sense of self.

If you acknowledge love's limitations, you're not belittling love, you're being realistic about the fact that some things about character and relationships are beyond anyone's power to change. That's why you must be careful, when you have a choice, to love only what you're prepared to accept and to accept only what is healthy.

The intensity of love may feel like a kind of authenticity that gives special meaning to both the relationship and to life itself. In actuality, that intensity can bind us to relationships that harm, belittle, and drain our commitment to what we value. That's one of the major issues when love doubles as a rescue mission.

If your love began with a relatively unselfish desire to save someone from themselves, you probably failed to look for the other qualities you require in a good partnership, other than for your partner not to get drunk, suicidal, or otherwise destructive. When the thrill of redemption passed, you may well have found yourself disappointed by his inability to be ambitious or share your interests—but of course, that's not what you bargained for or anticipated, since you were more focused on making him whole than making a life together.

Don't then stay committed because of guilt or the responsibility you feel for the stability you've helped someone establish. Instead, respect your discovery of your own needs and ask yourself whether it's realistic to expect your partner to meet them. If not, tell yourself that you've done a good job getting him started on the right path, but sooner or later, he must endure losses without relapsing, and the time has come.

Don't blame him or yourself for the end of the relationship; respect what you've accomplished together and accept the unavoidability of loss as you both move on. Learn your lesson and make different choices next time.

Sometimes you don't realize until you live together that the generous, nurturing qualities you admire in someone can also make him a pain in the ass. If he can't limit his giving to his mother, ex-wife, kids from a previous marriage, that one weird neighbor, or even the kids he shares with you, you may find yourself feeling lonely, resentful, and probably guilty about resenting obvious niceness. The more you express resentment, the more you drive him to give to the people who expect nothing from him and are thus always grateful.

Rather than letting him know you don't like to come last (and thus attacking his need to be appreciated), ask him to prioritize his commitments and budget his time and money. Urge him to consider how much time he wishes to spend with you, after thinking realistically about the claims and needs of others.

By accepting the limits of his resources and the fact that he will inevitably cause someone he values disappointment, he can gain an
ability to give according to what he values rather than in reaction to whoever sounds neediest or most appreciative.

You may have to pull away, however, if he can't budget enough for your partnership to make it worthwhile. If this happens, you'll know you've done your best and haven't let anger drive your decisions. Learn never to date someone who is compulsively nice and can't say no, unless he acknowledges his problem and works hard to control it. Otherwise, accept that a relationship with someone who can't say no to anyone is something you have to say no to yourself.

Even if you've chosen a partner you accept completely, life reserves the right to mess up the mix permanently with aging, illness, and trauma, so you may well find yourself wishing you could change something that hurts your partnership now but wasn't part of the original package. You know it can happen, you promise to accept your partner no matter what, but you can't control how devastating certain changes can be, like those caused by dementia, stroke, or addiction, or how you'll feel after they occur.

Of course, try to get back what you had. If that fails, however, find the best compromise that's consistent with your values. Your goal isn't to be happy, but to do what's right and tolerate unhappiness if necessary. First, however, you must assess the benefit and cost of staying together, including the impact on your spouse and family. Putting up with a few extra pounds is worth it; putting up with an altered personality or dangerous behavior may not be.

Love is wonderful when you don't have to work at it and mutual acceptance is taken for granted, but love like that is reserved for fiction, pets, and inanimate objects. In real relationships—ones that involve work, kids, fatigue, and another human—it's a bigger achievement to smile and keep your mouth shut about things you can't accept or change, and have decided, for good reason, to bear.

Here's what you wish for and can't have:

• More strength for someone (who doesn't know why they need it, except to please you)

• Discipline for someone who wants pleasure, including the feeling of being loved by you

• Better behavior from someone who has never behaved well

• Self-motivation from someone who is motivated by impulse and reaction to your feelings

Here's what you can aim for and actually achieve:

• Search longer and more selectively until you find the qualities you know are necessary

• Change people with surgery or hair dye, not love

• Expect change if someone wants it for themselves, not for you, and shows results

• Accept people as they are, without necessarily being able to live with them

Here's how you can do it:

• Never mix loving and rescuing

• Know what you need from a good love and make sure it's part of your partner's original equipment

• Always present the need for change in terms of advantages, not disappointment

• Know what you need to do, other than blame or complain, if change is impossible

Here's what to say about romantic changes that are necessary but unlikely to occur.

Dear [Unsatisfactory but Irresistible Friend or More Significant Other],

I will never understand why you can't make the few small changes to your [character/substance habits/relationships/pants size] that would allow us to stop [fighting/living apart/going out together without knowing where it's going] but I realize you love me and that no amount of [synonym for interaction, naked or otherwise] is going to change things. I will accept you the way you are and I will not pressure you to change. Our relationship will continue with [marriage/occasional visits/occasional messages via carrier pigeon].

Given the pleasure we get from sex, particularly if we find a partner who shares the right sexual and personal chemistry, it's hard not to regard good sex as a legitimate goal in life.

It's also hard not to put a lot of value on sex considering that, in America at least, it's everywhere; if there's near nudity in a prime-time advertisement for fast food, there should definitely be some sexy full nudity in your own home.

Many therapists believe that accepting your sexual feelings is important to mental health, and argue that there's nothing wrong with sexual pleasure between consenting adults now that birth control can prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. They believe that if the little head is not happy, the big head will suffer.

Unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong with sex, at least potentially, and the first is that we have so little control over it. Like the adolescent boner itself, attraction, performance, and chemistry are all random, sometimes unwanted, and often embarrassing and regrettable.

Remember, sex has tremendous influence over your identity and morality, whether you like it or not. Sexual preference, be it wrongfully stigmatized, like homosexuality, or justifiably stigmatized, like pedophilia, can put you on the social margins (or in a morally impossible position).

Strong sexual urges are impersonal and push the horny to treat other people as objects—indeed, like fast food. A strong wave of lust can sweep away concerns about the damage that may be done even if partners consent and have equally strong desires. Even if you're eager and attractive and find lots of responsive partners, you can get hooked on a super-drug pleasure that causes endless breakups and betrayals and prevents relationships from lasting. You may be envied, but you're really fucked, and not in the way you think.

If you're horny and unattractive, you feel like a perpetual loser who is always being teased, excited, and then denied. When you aren't feeling defective and envious of those who are getting some, you're angry at those who turn you on by looking attractive and who rub your nose in your frustration, and that anger makes you uglier than any facial feature could be.

Even those lucky ones who find compatible sexual partners and stable relationships are almost certain to run into problems eventually when aging, hormones, or stress affect the intensity of their sex drives. Of course, it never occurs at the same time for both partners, which is why the test of a good marriage is not sexual compatibility but what you do with sexual incompatibility when it arrives.

So yes, sex is a major cause for sin if by sin we mean moral compromise, selfishness, and broken promises, and not just an abuse of social conventions from thousands of years ago. It's hard to have strong needs, particularly ones that so directly involve other people, and still act like a good person. Sexual feelings take tons of management, and that's not just a polite way of saying masturbation.

If you're sexually frustrated, don't assume it speaks ill of your character; you may be a good person managing a time of little sexual opportunity. Likewise, if you're sexually satisfied, don't assume you've got
it made, since you may have compromised more than you should or have formed a relationship that will not work out well.