Kirshenbaum, Mira - Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

What does it mean if you felt something like that? It might mean that you’d pinned a lot of hopes on this relationship and that you’re convinced your life will be empty without it. If that’s the case for you, then you’ve got to face the possibility that there are a lot more negatives for you in this relationship than for someone who’s just as ambivalent as you are but isn’t so hopeful. With all of your hopes, it would take that many more negatives to make you feel so ambivalent.

So as you read through the material to come, don’t let your hopes blind you to the realities in your relationship. If it’s too good to leave, that should only be because it is too good to leave, not because you want it to be too good to leave.

On the other hand, your being that incredibly hopeful even though you’re stuck in relationship ambivalence might mean you’re a candidate for couples therapy if you haven’t tried it already. If that’s the case, you might find the following Perspectives especially helpful.

PERSPECTIVES: A NOTE ABOUT COUPLES THERAPY

I rarely see people in relationship ambivalence who haven’t worked hard to make things better. And that means there’s a good chance you’ve already tried some kind of couples therapy or workshop. So I’m reluctant to urge people who’ve already worked on their relationship to work still more on it. At some point enough is enough.

If you haven’t worked on your relationship, though, that changes things. All the recommendations I make here are based on the current realities between you. I’m saying that if a specific reality is true at this moment, then other people for whom that’s true felt they were better off breaking up. But I’m not saying that it must be true, that it can’t change.

A really good couples therapist can sometimes change things between you that seemed horrible and unchangeable. So if some reality in your relationship points to your leaving, you always have the option of going to a couples therapist to see if you can change it.

But you want to avoid falling back into relationship ambivalence. Here’s the test. If your experience with the therapist is “Gee, she’s really good” and yet there’s no change after nine months in whatever it is that makes your relationship too bad to stay in, then you can feel confirmed in your sense that it’s most likely unchangeable. You’ll know you’ve done everything you could do. And that can make it easier to accept that you’ll be happier leaving the relationship.

When I’m working as a couples therapist, for a couple, I feel that it’s my mandate to always work to save the relationship, to never give up, to always search for a sign of life. A doctor shouldn’t give up until death wins, because that perseverance often enables a doctor to achieve victories over death. I feel the same way about the death of a relationship.

But I’m also a therapist for individuals, who have to make decisions about what’s best for them as individuals. And that’s my function here with you, to help you get out of the pain and waste of relationship ambivalence. So if you haven’t tried to make the relationship better, then by all means do so. But if you have tried and there’s no change after working nine months with a good therapist and your answers to the questions in this book point to leaving, then you can feel comfortable that you’ve been smart and responsible if you decide to leave.

5

Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love

Issue: Preconditions for Love

FITTING LOVE INTO THE EQUATION

I’ve never met anyone in a state of relationship ambivalence who wasn’t trying, in one way or another, to find a way to fit love into the equation. One of the biggest issues that keeps coming up is whether love exists between you at all. This is a question most of us have been asking ourselves since junior high school. “Do I love him/her?” “Do I really love him/her?” “How can I tell if I love him/her?” “Am I in love with him/her or do I just love him/her?” “Can I love him/her if I feel so frustrated and angry so much of the time?” It can be very confusing.

There are ways out of this confusion. The way we’ll look at right now is to see if the preconditions for love still exist in your relationship. The issue of love is endlessly mysterious, but it certainly helps to know if love is possible. If it’s not even possible, then it sure can’t exist.

You know how in some cartoons the character runs off the edge of a cliff but stays suspended in midair until he looks down? Only when he sees there’s nothing under him does he start to fall. It’s like that for a lot of us in iffy relationships. We’re up in the air because we haven’t looked down to see that there’s nothing under our love to hold it up. If we hadn’t fallen in love with this person in the first place, we wouldn’t be in love now.

So if you’re trying to find the truth about whether you’ll be happier if you leave or stay, it’s important to explore the foundations for love in your relationship. Wouldn’t it be great to know that love was possible? Wouldn’t it be great to know that there was a foundation for your love to rest on?

Then you’d have something you could point to to say yeah, let’s do it, let’s fall in love.

STEP #5: STAYING ALIVE

Sometimes things look dead and they’re not. I remember years ago when I was a kid growing up in New York City on the Lower East Side. We moved to a new apartment and there was what looked like a dead tree outside our door. New York is a tough place for trees, and this tree looked really dead. I must have some kind of an instinct about life and death because when some neighbor said she was going to call to have the tree removed I found myself insisting it was still alive. I made a bet with her—I’d give her free babysitting for a year if that tree didn’t bring forth leaves in the next spring.

Of course the tree did sprout leaves. Somewhere under the dry, peeling bark and the brittle branches was some current of life.

I think about that tree from time to time when people come to me for help figuring out what to do about their relationship. Like my neighbor, they’re sometimes pretty sure it’s dead and are looking for my advice about removing themselves from it. And yet they’re asking my opinion. That tells me they’re still ambivalent. They suspect that maybe there’s a current of life, of love, still flowing through their relationship. They’re hoping I can point to it, show it to them, hold it up to them right under their noses so they can smell it.

Jack’s Story

A few years ago a man came to see me because a lot of things weren’t working in his life. Jack was a corporate consultant and trainer and seminar leader. With the busy, dizzy pace of his life, Jack had grown emotionally estranged from his wife, and that bothered him. He felt the two of them should be connected, the way they’d been years ago because, he said, when things between them had been at their best they’d been very good indeed. Disconnected as he was from his wife, he wondered if he didn’t owe it to himself and to her to leave the relationship. It’s not that it was too bad to stay, but he couldn’t see how it was too good to leave. “What should I do?” he asked. I felt he was asking me to find a sign of life in his relationship. I asked Jack the question I’ll ask you to answer for yourself:

Diagnostic question #5. In spite of your problems, do you and your partner have even one positively pleasurable activity or interest (besides children) you currently share and look forward to sharing in the future, something you do together that you both like and that gives both of you a feeling of closeness for a while?