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

Linda’s Story

Let me tell you about Linda. I worked with her when she was married to a very rich man. To put it bluntly, this guy had enough dough to make a lot of people stick around in an otherwise unsatisfying relationship with him. Linda was a person like this. I asked Linda question #6 and she knew without the slightest doubt that for her this guy was a mean, dumb, weird, ugly, smelly bastard. But while she was unhappy with him, there was frankly too much money there for her to want to get out.

But when a major business deal of his went sour and his net worth dipped below 5 million dollars, Linda finally left him. As Linda said, he just wasn’t rich enough anymore to put up with. It takes more than 5 million dollars to make it bearable to live with someone when you answer no to this question.

It’s a crude story, but isn’t clarity great?

6

You’ve Got a Hold on Me

Issue: Power—When the Other Person

Is Bossy, Controlling, Domineering,

Overwhelming ...

“Because I just can’t deal with her.”

“Because he’s impossible.”

“Because I have a terrible knot in my stomach every day while I’m waiting for him to come home from work.”

These are some of the most common things I hear from people who are wondering if their relationship is too bad to stay in. There’s something about their partner that frustrates and confuses and overwhelms them and makes their life unbearable. And that something has to do with power. Everyone intuitively understands there’s such a thing as being in a relationship with someone whose personal power is so overwhelming and destructive that you’ve just got to get out. That’s what we’ll deal with here.

HURRICANE SEASON

Have you ever been outside during a hurricane? I have. The wind was so powerful that it was almost impossible to walk in the direction I wanted to. Most of the time I could barely manage to avoid being blown over or carried away in the direction the wind wanted to take me. I didn’t want to conquer the wind. I just wanted to go where I wanted to go. But it felt as if the wind wanted to conquer me.

Imagine falling in love with that wind before it turned so powerful, while it was still a gentle tropical breeze. That’s what a lot of our relationships are like. Almost no one shows their true capacity for power when things are just starting out. Even young women who get involved with rich, influential older men find that generally in the early stages guys like that soft-pedal their ability to throw their weight around. They’re even careful to show how sensitive and considerate they can be. It all feels so good. Then with time the winds start picking up.

There’s a beautiful illustration of this in the movie Citizen Kane. When Kane first meets sweet young Susan Alexander, the incredibly powerful Kane is as cute and vulnerable as he can be. But before you know it, he’s ruling her life and everything in it.

When I ask people in relationship ambivalence to talk about the things that make them feel maybe they’ll be happiest leaving, the issue of power comes up a lot, one way or the other, even if the word power is never used. Everyone’s experience is a little different, of course, but here’s what one guy said that really captured the essence of what a lot of people have to deal with:

My friends tell me that years ago I said I wanted to marry a strong woman, and I’m sure I did. But Gwen’s more than I can handle. She’s so passionate about everything, and it keeps shading into rage or craziness. Plus she’s got this whole set of tricks up her sleeve—I mean, she’ll make a scene in public if it looks like she’s not going to get things her way, or she’ll win by making me feel like a jerk for wanting what I want. And she’s always got so many arguments for her side that half the time I feel like an idiot for even bringing things up.

It can be exhausting and demoralizing to live with someone like this. But if you’re in a state of relationship ambivalence, you know it can be very hard to see when the other person crosses the line from being just difficult to deal with to being too difficult to deal with. It’s not knowing where that line is, not even being able to see it, not feeling you have a right to draw that line that keeps you stuck in relationship ambivalence.

That’s what we’ll sort out here, so that you can discover whether your partner’s power is something you just have to deal with the way everyone else does or whether there’s something about power in your relationship that’s so bad that most people in your situation ended up feeling happy they left and unhappy they stayed.

Let’s begin with an example that’ll give us a frame of reference we can keep coming back to.

Rosemary’s Story

Rosemary and Vinnie came to me seeking help because of what they said was Vinnie’s unwillingness to “consider” Rosemary, as if this were one of those typical cases of the insensitive man and the oversensitive woman. But Vinnie was like a steamroller, and what does it mean to be oversensitive to that? You have to know how to get people to do what you want to run a successful restaurant like his. When Vinnie wanted things to happen, they happened. When he didn’t want things to happen, they didn’t happen. Vinnie was like a force of nature.

Rosemary went along with this for a while for the most obvious of reasons. Vinnie was a typical man, she thought, and what can you expect from a man? He had enough money to call the shots. His business was so demanding that he could get whatever he wanted by saying it was “for the restaurant.” Vinnie put out a lot of superficial respect for Rosemary as a “lady,” smart, educated, refined—respect she felt she’d lose if she got down in the gutter with Vinnie and challenged him. Besides, Rosemary was an accountant, and the restaurant was one of her accounts, which meant that in a sense Vinnie was one of her bosses.

Rosemary’s dilemma was this. Was Vinnie just a forceful, on-top-of-things kind of guy who seemed hard to deal with but who was really just trying to do a good job? Or did he have something else going on inside him, some need, some hunger, that made him a kind of Hitler unable to rest in peace as long as one single Poland remained unoccupied? Was Vinnie the restaurant’s servant or Rosemary’s dictator? Was there ever a chance he’d let her draw a free breath?

Let’s see just how badly Vinnie rode roughshod over Rosemary. One incident stands out for Rosemary as capturing the truth about who Vinnie really was.

At one point we had an extralong session devoted specifically to Rosemary trying to show Vinnie how everything in their relationship was set up for him to get everything he wanted and for her to get nothing of what she wanted. Maybe that wasn’t literally true, but it certainly felt like that to Rosemary.

Vinnie tried arguing with her. “Well,” he said, “we never have sex unless you want to.”

“I’m not accusing you of rape,” Rosemary said. “I’m just saying you always win. I wasn’t talking about sex anyway, but even there the whole thing is governed by your pressure, your moods, your schedule, your ability to make me feel guilty, your deciding when you want to initiate sex, your making me feel creepy whenever I initiate sex. But you’re even doing it now. We’re talking about sex. I didn’t want to talk about sex. How can you be so powerful to get us talking about sex when sex wasn’t the issue I wanted to talk about? The issue is that everything is what you want when you want it.”

Maybe Vinnie didn’t want to look bad in my eyes. So he suddenly became eager to learn all the things he’d been doing “wrong.” Rosemary complied. She poured forth a litany of instances when Vinnie had bullied and dominated her. They ran the gamut from how it happened that they still didn’t have kids even though Rosemary wanted them to how Vinnie ended up controlling her accounting business.