James Rigdon looks back on twenty years of relationships and hopes it won’t take you as long to learn the lessons he did.
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I recently read an article from this very site—Beautiful Disaster: 7 Reasons Why We’re Drawn to The Damaged Person—and I began to reflect on my own history, and the psychological consistencies that I found from those relationships.
First, being a problem-solver myself, I’ve often heard the usual accusations of “You want to save someone,” or “You want to be a hero.” These are at once true and misleading. I do want to help people, and, for decades had a terrible habit of falling for women who were in that usual rebound sphere of, “Why did he leave me I wasn’t good enough I just wish a nice guy would find me and treat me right,” and I could never understand—
WHY?
Why, when these women were so incredible, did these guys treat them so poorly? And why, when they’d been down that road time and time again, did they go once more for this guy who obviously was so like the ones who came before? And I’d swoop in, be my usual sweet and charming self, be romantic, encouraging, let them repair and find their wings again …
And they’d fly off.
And I would again be transported to the world of “Why?” All these women who told me, time and time again, that I was so great, the women I’d been with who told me how fantastic it was to be with a guy like me, and then gone on to a guy so not like me that we shouldn’t even be in the same area code. All the female friends who constantly said they wished they could have someone care for them like I did for these women, and yet they kept going back and back and back some more, to their usual types.
So I became hostile for a long time—I decided that women were stupid, and, if I wanted to be happy, I’d just have to look for the smarter sort, avoid ones who constantly found their way to the bad guys, get a better view on things. And you know what?
That didn’t work, either.
Nope, I was now so centered on the prospect of finding a woman without a history of major trauma that I over-analyzed and looked for all the bad things in the past, looked for residues from back then, the prices I’d have to pay for someone else’s blundering. I became hostile to most of the male species, because they were making life tough on the few good guys who were left, because we were being painted with the same brush as everyone else.
And yet, all around me, my friends were managing to get married, settle down, start families, and I couldn’t figure out why I was still single and just floating around.
Then it finally hit me.
I moved to a small town in rural Nebraska, where I knew NOBODY, I had no social connections, I started a new job, and spent a lot of time by myself. And a lot of that time was spent thinking, reflecting, on past relationships, both had and attempted. As of the end of January, I have spent twenty years of my life constantly either being in or trying for relationships. TWENTY YEARS. That’s over half my life.
And the majority of that time, especially the time spent being single?
I thought it was all about the problem(s) with them. They wanted to date trash, those guys were making the rest of us look bad, and so forth. I never stopped to think that maybe the problem was with me.
And so, with the new year, I started a new path to viewing the situation. Lessons learned from the past.
1. You can be a partner or a repairman, but you cannot be both.
When I met all those women with all those problems, they were looking for someone to make them feel better, to be there for them when they needed, but come on- when you have to call the guy to come and fix your internet, you don’t keep him around after the job’s done! You get back on the web and go about your business. Same score on them. You fixed the problem they had, good for you, but the problem they had was preventing them from being able to move on – pat on the back and hugs all around and she’s done with you. Maybe she’ll call if the problem comes up again, but, in the meantime …
2. Garbage in, garbage out.
It’s simple – if you’re working with bad equipment, you’re going to get bad results. While I don’t condone the idea that no one can change, the general reality is that people are going to be what they always were. Most people, especially the older they get, become fairly set in their ways. Odds are, you’re not going to be that amazing savior to turn their lives around and make them into a better person. If that’s your goal, you’re in for a rough ride. When people have been working the same way for years or even decades, the change is either going to be incredibly slow and gradual (as in, over many more years), or the result of some kind of ultimate paradigm shift- a near-death experience, act of God, something of that magnitude.
3. It’s not them—it’s you.
Yep. Most of us have heard the old stand-by, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Well, get ready for the big one—it’s not them—it’s you. If you’ve been treated a consistent way by the women you’ve dated, especially if they’re from different places, of different ages and backgrounds, different personalities, you’re going to have to come to accept that the problem might not be them. Now, this isn’t to say you’re a bad person, or that you need to change who you are—you need to change how you are. And that leads to the final point …
4. It’s not about them—it’s about you.
Your dating life cannot be focused on the other party. Take it from one who knows—I’ve been there too many times to count. When you make the whole relationship about them, whether it’s about helping them get over that guy from their past, or getting them through a rough time in their lives, or trying to be the guy of their dreams, guess what—the whole relationship is going to be centered on that, and, worse, that may skew their view of relationships in the future (if it’s not already there). You romantic existence cannot be based on focusing on those other people—look to finding what will satisfy you.
Think about it like this—in the beginning of any performance, be it a movie, or play, or television show, the scene is set, the outline of what will be happening is sketched out, and things build from there. Would you expect that opening scene to have absolutely nothing to do with anything that occurs onward?
Now look at how things are (or will be) at the start of the relationship. Think of things being exactly like that, a few months down the line. Or a few years. If you can see yourself being truly happy under those circumstances, then it’s worth looking forward. If you’re just hoping that things will get better, well, you’re setting yourself up for a serious fall.
Reflections on the past and lessons for any guy going forward.
I hope it won’t take you twenty years to figure them out.
Photo: Hartwig HKD/Flickr
The post It’s Not Them, It’s You: 20 Years of Hard Relationship Lessons appeared first on The Good Men Project.
