Failure.
Boo!
There. I've said it, it's out in the open, now deal with it. I do daily. My marriage failed. Did I fail it? Did MyWife?
Yes.
And no.
I blame David Eggers.
Why? He wrote a book, You Shall Know Our Velocity. You may know his other work, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. If not go read that. No need to read Velocity, it's not as good. Sorry David, it's true; I asked my mom, she agrees. Cheer up, I'm not going by MyWife's review, she didn't like Velocity at all. She did like Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. I'll let you work through the hidden meaning of the titles while I continue with my story.
May I?
Why thank you.
Why blame a book? Because it explains the problem. Eggers creates 3 characters, all friends, one of them is dead. The thing is, that the third friend never existed. He represents the relationship between the 2 childhood friends, now adults, now no longer the friends they were. What they were is now dead.
Beginning to see a pattern here?
Every significant relationship becomes a person unto itself. It does things you might never do as individuals. It flicks straw wrappers in Denny's at three AM, it watches the sun set from a new perspective. It dares to change, and cowers when it happens. You may blame the other person for these things, but it's not. It's the both of you. Take some credit, because you do the same for them. Without that third person, there is no inspiration.
There is no blame.
There is no failure.
I had a friend who was fun and friendly, but in his marriage he became violent and introverted. They divorced. Later, he remarried, but was not the same married person. He and his wife created a new third person, a better third person.
Some relationships are destined for failure. We don't see it, but at the end, there it is.
MyWife and I? We both have some good individual qualities. We even had some great qualities as a couple. At least they looked good on the box. Unfortunately, there are other qualities, Darker qualities, Qualities that became more obvious than your neighbors lawn Santa that's still sitting there in July. (Yeah, go ahead and look. It's still there.) Qualities in me I didn't even know existed. And yeah, I failed.
And if it comes right down to it, I blame her for her failure as well. I blame her for giving up way too easily. I thought she was tougher.
"Get back out there Rock."
But all the blame and failure doesn't change the fact that we both beat our third person to death.
Thanks David.
And know that in any dead relationship, it doesn't matter if you’re the leaver or the leavee (yeah it's a word. Look it up. No, use my dictionary…), both feel failure. There's no exclusivity on guilt. "Should I have tried something different? Should I have tried one more time?" are questions only the three of you can answer, because only 2 of you will live with the results.
So sure, let's lay it out there: We failed. Now what?
We move on. Divorce is a scar; it doesn't have to bleed forever. We learn what we can, and move on. But moving on is more than just stepping out of the rubble. It's accepting the scar as a part of who we are.
"I got this one from my first wife."
"Wow, pretty deep…"
We need to forgive our partners, but we also need to forgive ourselves. I'm trying to become more forgiving over all. I'm going to let "I'm Sorry" carry more weight in my life, because a grudge is too heavy to carry. And I need to forgive myself for my failure. It's done. I'll have plenty more time to screw up other aspects of my life, so why should I carry this forever? And yeah, forgiving others is much easier than forgiving ourselves, yet we fail to do that either.
I had a dream a while back, actually 2. I was dealing with some issues of feeling betrayed by a friend. The first dream, I was at home when somebody broke in and started taking my stuff. I managed to escape, and when I got outside, there was my friend, guarding the house for the thieves.
Yeah, it doesn't take a therapist to see what was going through my mind there. The next one came a few weeks later. In my dream, my friend was a woman. Gender doesn't seem to mean anything in my dreams, and please don't analyze that, thank you very much.
Anyway, I was half awake and saw like three rows of six of her hung and executed. I have no idea, so don't even ask me. In my dream, it made sense. Then as I fell deeper into sleep, I was in a room with a mirrored closet door. I noticed a balding spot on the back of my head. Kind of a yamika bald spot. I remember thinking in my dream. "This won't happen. I won't go bald there, neither of my families have a history of baldness, and especially not there. I'll lose it from the front first if I lose it at all." I'm glad I so logical in my sleep when it comes to hair loss. But put in a fuzzy monster chasing in stilettos, and I'm all like "Ok, that makes sense."
Anyway, after I observe myself, my friend entered the room, they look like the girl from Numbers (Charlie's GF). I asked her how she was, and she said, "Frustrated."
I'm sitting on a bed, "Why are you frustrated."
There's a moment of silence as she sits in front of a chest of drawers rifling through a furniture catalogue, looking at anything but me. I want to say something, but wait the silence out.
Finally she puts the catalogue down in her lap and looks up to me. Her eyes are wet with tears. She's not crying, but it's coming soon. My heart drops as she says "Please forgive me. I've forgiven you." I want to say "Forgiven me for what?" but I don't. I've already forgiven her, so it doesn't matter. I don't say anything, and the dream ends.
It was weird and vivid. But it was all about letting go of the blame, the failure, and the wondering "why?"
The closer people are, the harder it is to let it go. That third person is so real, such a good friend, with millions of memories, but letting them go is what we need to do. It's how we continue, it's how we thrive. It's how we create better third people the next time.
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