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

• Can I be naked and yet you still feel safe? Can I reveal through word and deed who I really am and how I really feel without making you feel uncomfortable?

Let’s take just one issue: expressing anger. Kiesha, a twenty-eight-year-old police officer, felt that her anger was something very deep and personal, something to share only with someone she was very intimate with. So for her feeling safe enough to feel emotionally naked meant getting to the point of feeling free to show her anger. But for her partner Dennis, a fireman, feeling safe meant feeling protected from her anger.

What made this so hard for them to deal with was the fact that Dennis’s being emotionally naked in the relationship meant feeling free to say how really uncomfortable he felt with Kiesha’s expressions of anger. But for Kiesha to feel safe, she needed to feel protected from Dennis’s saying things that made her feel bad about having her feelings.

You can see how your needs for nakedness and safety and your partner’s different needs for nakedness and safety can get so tangled up, regardless of the issues you’re trying to deal with. The things that you long to feel safe enough to reveal might be the very things your partner wants to feel safe from having revealed to him.

Balancing Act

All couples try to balance safety and nakedness. Usually they find a way to work it out. They do so because each person recognizes that they both have to feel safe while they’re both being naked. That’s the kind of place love is.

But sometimes people come into a relationship with a need for safety that overwhelms their partner’s ability to provide safety. This extra need for safety can come from needing to feel safe from the other person (from insults, rejections, attempts at control) and in needing to feel safe in themselves to do what they want. If one person’s extra need for safety is so great that he can’t allow the other person to both feel safe and do what she wants, that’s a relationship that’s too bad to stay in.

Off-the-table-itis fits right into this. The person who takes things off the table is basically saying that your getting naked—by showing the issues that are important to you and showing your need to resolve them—makes him unsafe. So he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to make you unsafe by not letting you talk about it.

Question #1 asked if things were good when they were at their best and question #5 asked if there was one thing you and your partner did together that felt good and that you looked forward to. That is the issue of pleasure.

Now I’ve just talked about the issue of safety. This, too, came up before, for example in question #2 when you were asked if you’d been physically abused and in the previous chapter when we talked about power people and your being in a relationship where it’s not safe to have any needs.

These twin issues of pleasure and safety will keep coming up over and over as the underpinnings of what makes a relationship too good to leave or too bad to stay in.

STEP #10: TO TELL THE TRUTH

Off-the-table-itis is bad because it prevents communication. Lying is bad because it subtracts from communication. If someone lies to you, then you’re worse off than you were before. Before, you just didn’t know. After the lie, you think you know but you’re wrong. Lying is to communication what murder is to life. Both are a taking away of what’s real and precious. Murder is worse, of course, because you can always bring the truth back to life, and yet we feel almost the same loathing for real liars as we do for murderers.

But there’s a paradox. Almost all of us lie, from little white lies to spur-of-the-moment lies to protecting-the-innocent lies to just-not-telling-everything lies to it’s-all-for-the-best lies to saving-your-butt lies. Some of us lie more than others, but Diogenes attests to how difficult it is to find someone who never lies. So if the fact that you’ve caught your partner in a lie were grounds for ending a relationship, we’d all be alone.

And that’s the problem we have to sort out here: how to find our way between the fact that lying is the norm and the fact that lying is the worst possible thing that can happen in communication, even worse than off-the-table-itis.

The key here is safety. The fact that most people lie a little makes most of us feel okay with the idea that our partner might lie from time to time, especially if they’re just little white lies. As long as we can say, “Well, he’d never lie to me about anything really important,” most of us aren’t too upset.

But when you lose your basic trust that the other generally tells the truth, there’s a fundamental obstacle to your relationship ever being satisfying. And so the next question is:

Diagnostic question #10. Have you gotten to the point, when your partner says something, that you usually feel it’s more likely that he’s lying than that he’s telling the truth?

Some people get to this point if they catch their partner in even one big lie. Others can tolerate a lot of little white lies and even a few big lies. But wherever you draw the line, the question is whether you’ve gotten to the point where, if you had to bet, you’d bet that what your partner says is a lie.

Ronnie’s Story

Crabs don’t lie. That may be their only virtue, but for Ronnie it was the kind of virtue she’d been looking for for a long time.

Hal, Ronnie’s husband, was her pride and joy as well as her biggest disappointment. He’d grown up in what he called the town of Nowheresville, Rural State, USA. But he had the look and the voice and the ambition for doing TV news, as well as the luck of there being a small TV station nearby. While he was still in high school he got a job reporting the news on weekends. The day he graduated he became one of their regular reporters. There was little money and not much prestige in that job, but Hal felt he was on his way to bigger and better things.

After a couple of years of sending tapes around Hal landed a job with a major market TV station. That’s when Ronnie met him. She was an image consultant for a local department store, and Hal needed her badly because he was still the boy from Nowheresville and he had none of the polish and manner he needed in the big city. Ronnie taught him everything, from how to dress to how to comb his hair to how to behave in a restaurant. They soon got more and more involved with each other and fell in love.

Was their relationship doomed from the start? I don’t know, but by the time I saw them a lot of damage had been done. Ronnie had been blinded for a long time by Hal’s charm. She was also profoundly misled by how well he took to her coaching. Most of her friends could barely change anything about the men they were involved with. It seemed to Ronnie she could change everything about Hal. Except, she found out, his propensity for lying.

It was his talent for lying that prevented her from seeing, for many years, how often he did exactly what he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it no matter how it affected anyone else. He saw himself as a future TV news star and thought he was entitled to get now as a young man what he might have to wait many more years to get.

At first Ronnie was aware of only a couple of lies, like his saying he was on assignments when he was out with the guys. Then there were a series of misdeeds, nothing really terrible but all reasons to be angry and disappointed, such as large, selfish expenditures of money, all protected by a cocoon of lies.

And as the cycle of screwing up and lying about it worked its way forward, there were repeated breakups and reunitings and a baby and another breakup and another baby and a coming back together yet again. An all-too-typical tale of relationship ambivalence enacted not in the seesaw motions of the heart but on the canvas of life.