I've had ample raw material for this essay: I was in a relationship
that was ending. To be clear, it was a relationship I didn't want to be
ending. Yet ending it was,
slipping
away, slowly further and further out of my reach. And there wasn't much
I could do about it. The rapids were
inexorably
sweeping me over the falls. There's the adage about relationship which
is apropos here, asserting "It takes two to make a great relationship
but only one to end one.". I struggled with that, powerless over its
dictatorial
gravity.
It should not have been that way. I did not want it to be
that way. But it's true / c'est vrai: it was that way.
Make no error. I've also ended relationships which my (then soon to be
ex) partners didn't want me to. It's just that the raw material for
this essay did not come from times when I was the end-er. It
came from a time when I was the end-ee, when the relationship
was ending, when I didn't want it to be ending. When a relationship
ends and you are the unwilling end-ee, you are stuck with it if you
do not
complete
it. Don't ask me why it is that way. It just is that way. It was
ending, and I didn't want it to be ending. Yet even with that said, I
knew I had to somehow
get complete
with it ending, or I'd be stuck with it.
This was my first shot at
being complete
with it ending: I compiled a list of ways I was better off
without it. That's childish, you may say. Even puerile. Yes, in
retrospect I would agree with you. But that's what I did. At the time
it was the best I could muster, a kind of "I'm better off without you
anyway, so you ending our relationship is really a plus.". And it did
give me some relief. There was just one teeny little problem with it:
it gave me no
freedom
(it may have even made things worse). My first shot at it was to make
her wrong. She yelled at her staff a lot. So I made that wrong. She was
a party hound where I was a home-body. So I made that wrong. She wasn't
a relaxed person. I made that wrong too. With that said, she had great
qualities also. But the ones I made wrong were the other ones I
wouldn't be around any more, so I used them to cast her ending our
relationship as good for me ... at least that was the idea.
But like I said,
the trouble
with the "make her wrong so ending is a plus" approach was it gave me
no
freedom.
It actually had the exact opposite effect. It stuck me deeper, nailed
me to the wall. The more I made her wrong to
complete
our relationship ending, the more I got buried, the worse it got, the
less
complete
I was. I was struggling. It took me a while (a long while)
but I finally figured it out: if I made her wrong, it would be hard to
let her go. No, it was worse than that. It was: if I made her wrong, I
couldn't let her go. Sometimes we struggle to make things
work the way we want them to work. Sometimes the best way to make
things work is to surrender to them being the way they are. What a fool
fights to be right about, the wise one surrenders graciously.
Look: I've no moral statement to make. It wasn't because it was the
right thing to do or a good thing to do, but
because (I started noticing) if I made her wrong, it became hard(er) to
let her go. I noticed that's just the way it works. This isn't a
debate. It's a
purely positive
proposition.
So when the relationship ended, I could let it go. I didn't make her
wrong - or at least I stopped making her wrong. And when I stopped, it
wasn't hard to let her go. I could even experience
love
for her, a
love
that was out of my reach as the relationship was ending yet was always
there from the get-go. And that's the raw material for this essay: if I
made her wrong, I couldn't let her go (the specific) from where I
distinguished "if you make it wrong, it's hard to let it
go" (the generalized).
