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

The last time they came back together, Hal made promises that Ronnie wanted to believe because Hal always seemed like such a nice guy. She couldn’t believe what he said, and yet she couldn’t admit that she couldn’t believe him.

That’s when the crabs entered the picture. How could she have possibly gotten pubic lice? She knew she hadn’t been with anyone else. She asked Hal and he said he had crabs, too. Where did you get them from, she asked. A public toilet, he said.

But Ronnie knew this was impossible. The crabs were telling a truth that Hal was unable to tell. Ronnie could no longer lie to herself about the fact that she knew that Hal was a liar. And that she’d have to assume that anything he said would be a lie.

What devastated Ronnie was the terrible waste of years. It’s not just that the relationship hadn’t worked out but that she’d stayed in it years after she realized that if Hal said something it was probably a lie, years before the day of the crabs.

Here’s the guideline for question #10:

GUIDELINE #10

If you find yourself thinking, “He’s probably lying,” whenever your partner says anything, or even if you just find there’s a tightening in your gut that indicates you’re expecting a lie, nothing good is going to happen for you in that relationship. Everyone else in this situation is happier leaving and you’ll be happier, too. Quick take: When you’re married to a liar, your marriage is a lie.

Let me make something clear about this guideline. In a troubled relationship, one person often catches the other in a big lie, such as when one of them has been having an affair. But being found guilty of a big lie is not a relationship-ending offense, not necessarily anyway. Relationships can recover from someone telling a big lie. Yes, trust can be easily damaged, but unless it’s completely destroyed it can still be rebuilt.

Guideline #10 doesn’t refer to the person who’s told one big lie; it refers to the person you believe may be lying almost whenever he talks to you. It’s not about how “bad” what he did was; it’s about how bad an impact what he’s done has had on you, and not just one lie but the pattern of lying.

So you have to be careful with this guideline. The fact that someone’s lied to you can make you feel very angry and very mistrustful and very unsafe. It’s natural after being told a big lie to go through a period of being convinced that everything else your partner says is a lie, and maybe everything he’s ever said to you has been a lie.

But you’ve got to distinguish between your emotional reactions, which may or may not be warranted and from which you may or may not recover, and an abiding gut sense that if you had to make a bet, you’d say your partner was lying when he opened his mouth.

A Life of Lies

Why are most people happier when they leave if they answer yes to question #10? It’s because of what it does to you to live with someone you’re convinced is more likely lying than telling the truth. You’re headed for a state of bitterness, paranoia, and despair. Your world will turn nightmarish. The only way you’ll manage to feel safe if you stay is to disconnect so profoundly from your partner that it’ll be as if you’ve ended your relationship anyway. You might as well in fact do now, cleanly, what you’ll do in spirit later, painfully.

And the lying won’t get better. As things between you become more difficult, your partner will have just that much more incentive to lie.

As one woman who’d left a man she’d come to see as a liar said, “Every day in my new life on my own is a treat because, no matter what, I know the person I am living with—me—will always tell the truth.”

8

What Is This Thing Called Love?

Issue: Is There Real Love Left?

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES

Sometimes when a relationship is hanging by a thread, it’s a thread of love. Much in the relationship is bad, only a little is good, but the one thing that keeps you hanging in there is that love connection, that thing you say to yourself: “But I love him [or her].”

This is one of the reasons the balance-scale approach to deciding whether to stay or leave drives people crazy. For more than twenty years, people have come into my consulting room carrying their relationship cupped in their hands like a sick puppy, telling me incredible stories of misery, disappointment, and disaster, giving me every reason to believe the relationship could not survive without life support, that they didn’t even want it to survive.

“It sounds like you know what’s best for you,” I say. The balance scale seems totally tilted toward leaving.

And then they reach into their hearts and take out the love that’s left and place it on the other side of the balance scale, and that hunk of love has for them a weight as heavy as gold on Jupiter and tilts everything the other way. For people in this situation, love indeed seems to conquer all, even in some cases the putrefying realities of a dead relationship.

But is it dead? Doesn’t any amount of love heavy enough to register in our hearts have the power to keep a relationship alive? Aren’t you obligated to stay in any relationship where you feel you love the other person?

Or can our feelings sometimes be illusions? Is the love that feels so real and hefty sometimes merely the ghost of dead hopes and dreams?

Yet we feel our love. And haven’t therapists like me spent our professional lives helping people learn to trust their feelings? Can I ever say don’t trust your feelings to anyone?

So let’s talk about those relationships where it feels as though only your saying “But I love him [or her]” prevents the relationship from clearly being too bad to stay in. Let’s see if we can find a way to decide how real and strong that love is, to determine how much of a difference it really makes.

Too Jung to Be in Love

You’re not alone in being confused by love. Most therapists are so confused by it they just throw up their hands. In one of the most influential textbooks on marital therapy-Helping Couples Change —the author’s bibliography refers to almost 100,000 pages of material that went into his book, and yet the word love barely appears in the text or in any of the references. In the invaluable Handbook of Family Therapy, love is mentioned once and then as only one of forty-two components of marriage. Love is one forty-secondth of marriage!

Other therapists take a stab at it and then throw up their hands. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung says, quoting the New Testament, that, “Love ‘bears all things’ and ‘endures all things.’ ” Jung feels these words “say all there is to be said” about love. But then he has the honesty to admit, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is.”

Jung and other therapists are responsible enough to admit that they’re thrown by the word love. Other people just throw the word around. All I know is that whatever this thing called love is, it can be terribly confusing, particularly for people on whom it weighs most heavily.

Nothing More Than Feelings

Let’s sort this all out, so you can see what to do with the love you feel, so you can decide if your relationship is too good to leave or too bad to stay in.

Earlier we talked about the preconditions for love, because most people are not happy staying in a relationship with someone they couldn’t possibly fall in love with now. What we’ll do now is test for whether your feelings have a foundation of personal truth. You can always trust that you feel what you feel, but you have to be extremely careful to check out what’s really making you feel the way you do.