When People Take Love Too Far

Fascinating post by the ever thoughtful Eve, which I recommend you all read.
Eve, I guess has more reason than most to think about these sorts of things.

But a whole wider series of issues ARE raised by the post.
People turning what is supposed to be a beautiful thing, ie romance, and turning it into something thoroughly unpleasant.

Because it truly can be.
And usually, it is because people attach too much significance to it.

What do I mean by that?
Well, quite simply it is supposed to be a beautiful thing, but people turn into a bargain, a contract, a chain.
There is a very nasty edge to it.

And I think Eve's post highlighted very well why sometimes, people's expectations themselves are the problem. This is one of my main gripes with the monogamy ideal. It's not so much the sexual possession (though I must admit I'm not entirely sold on that idea), it's bigger, it's the desire to possess another's person's life.

It's the desire to control who the other party has access to, the desire to monopolise their time, the desire to always be watching over them, the wish to ensure that they have no life that doesn't involve you, indeed, no PEOPLE that aren't yourself, no relationships that aren't somehow under your supervision.

Why should anyone have to live like that?

I think Eve raised some very good points about blogs and what people get up to blogging, and how many people 'cheat' online, and how we should regard it, but I think in many ways, the real questions come earlier.

Which is people's attitudes to the other people in their partner's lives.
To me, this really has to be crunch question.
To me, it doesn't matter how wonderful someone is, the real question is, how do they fit into your life?
Do they slot in nicely, or do they cause disruption?

Will they fit in perfectly with the arrangements you already have, or are they going to force you to rearrange the furniture?
Because in my view, if they REALLY are the one, then no furniture needs to be rearranged.

Just over a year ago I started seeing this girl who, for various reasons was a little clingy. She fell very quick, I suppose. And I suppose I fell for her neediness, in a sense. She'd had a hard life, some bad things had happened to her as a student and they had affected her views on men. To be fair, she hadn't had a lot of luck with men. She'd been 'wham, bam, thank you mam' ed a fair bit, I think, by various sub-human Neanderthals. She was lonely. Her closest friend, indeed her only real friend- as opposed to an acquaintance- was someone she had met at work in the previous twelve months.
Now if you're 29- as she was- and that is the best example of a friend you have, life hasn't been good to you. So I guess I pitied her. I wanted to give her a try and show her that not all men are bastards.

My mistake.

An issue from the start, was time. She had plenty. I had somewhat less. Quite a bit more than I do now, I had a less demanding job, and I didn't post everyday or visit many blogs. But I had things to do, people to see. Because she wasn't really a people person, she couldn't quite see why it was that I couldn't devote huge amounts of time to her.

Anyway.

One day, test time came.
Oestrebunny often reprimands me for my use of test procedures to judge people. My view is, I don't create the tests. Life does. You just observe how people behave when these situations arise. You let events run their course, you let people show their true colours, and on that basis, you judge them once you have all the information you need.

I had agreed that we would spend a whole evening in her flat, without going out, without me using the PC, without me phoning my mates, or taking phone calls.
We would just have a meal, have a herbal bath, she would give me a massage and we would go to bed.
Just as she was about to serve up, I received a text message.

Crushed: Hon, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to go out as soon as we've eaten. We're going to have to cancel that herbal bath. Maybe another night.

She: Why, where do you have to go?

Crushed: A friend needs to talk to me about something. It's quite important really. They need me right now.

She: Do you really have to? You said just this one night!

Crushed: I know, I know. But I can't help these things can I? I don't decide when people decide they're going to split up from their partner and move out. They may need some money by the looks of it. Or help. I can't let a friend down, not when they need me. I'm not like that.

She: So you going to theirs?

Crushed: God, no! Her boyfriend would think I was the reason they were splitting up. No, I'll meet her in the Hop Pole.

She: HER??? You're leaving me to go meet another woman?

Crushed: She's a friend. Her sex is immaterial. I stand by my friends.
(Pause)
Crushed: I would say come, but it would be a bit inappropriate.

She: All right then, I guess you have to go.

And I went. And me and D (Yes, it was D), got very drunk and I agreed to loan her money to help her get set up somewhere. Before going back.
But the lack of grace from my other friend (I won't say girlfriend, because in my book, she wasn't, I have criteria by which I acknowledge a relationship, and she hadn't yet met it, in fact, she was busily determining unbeknownst to herself that she'd NEVER meet it).
When I returned I got 'So how was that bitch then?'

Crushed: You what? You don't even know her! Don't speak about my friends like that, or you'll be the one walking!

She: Well, I hate her. I was supposed to have you tonight.

Yes, I guess it's endearing, in a sense. But it's also been noted by me as cause for concern. Unwillingness to get on with close female friends of mine. Inability to accept close platonic friendship between me and other women, potential threat to those friendships if the relationship got more serious.

One black mark.

And the next came a couple of weekends afterwards, when I went to stay with the Baker in Manchester.
As far as I am concerned, when a man says he is with friends and will be with them all weekend- he'll call before he returns- that means 'Don't call me.'

Once is pardonable, twice is obsessional. Three times and we're in bunnyboiler country.

Two black marks.

The third black mark came when she began texting me at work about something remarkably petty. I texted back telling her not to text me at work, whatever it was could wait, but I must have had a mysterious translate function I didn't know about which sent my texts in Japanese, because she carried on.

I called her that day at five o'clock to tell her never to contact me again.

Now all this may seem harsh. But it isn't really. I had had enough proof to be sure that she could not be trusted to observe boundaries. If she was trying to push boundaries at this stage, before there was even a relationship, what would she be like once she thought she had some kind of rights over me?

The bottom line is, during your working day, your mind should be free to focus on work. It's hard enough as it is to earn a crust and keep a roof over your head, without being stressed out by what is, by comparison, trivia.

People haven't a right to expect exclusive access to someone's time and energy, just because the relationship is a romantic one.

It's not harsh, because the right person would never find themselves in such a test situation.



And your personal friendships- every one of them- should be kept sacrosanct. If a prospective partner shows a desire to interfere in any of your other relationships with other people, male OR female, then they need to be removed from the prospective partner list.
Again, that might sound harsh. But the point is, if you let them get away with it once, it sets a precedent. You can't allow that. They are showing that ultimately their agenda is to reduce you to dependency on them, to make themselves your sole support, to remove all your other best friends and supplant them, to take the trust that you vest in your friends, and get you to transfer the whole lot to them.

If they can't accept that maybe they may be an important person in your life, but so are many other people, that every relationship you have has some value to you, then they aren't really a good dynamic in your life.

Because ultimately, however you slice it, they are still just one person, no matter how amazing they might be. And life is better the more people you have in it.

I think I have come to the conclusion, avoid women who don't have fairly active social lives of their own, with plenty of friends of both sexes. If they have close male friends, they probably won't bother too much about you having close female friends. If they go out a lot with their mates, they won't mind you going out with yours.
Because as long as they have as active and people filled a life as you do, there's no real danger of possessiveness creeping in, no desire to keep the other party under their supervision.

There's no more unpleasant feeling, than feeling you can never get away from a partner, that aside from work, they're always around, cramping you, stifling you, wanting to know everything, wanting a full view of your life.

We need space. We need areas of our lives that we keep separate. There will always be things between me and my mates, which will be ours alone, it is a circle of trust no one else can enter. It doesn't mean we don't trust other people in different ways, just that there are things which belong to us.
There will always be things I will talk to them about, but would never talk to a partner about. It wouldn't mean I didn't love her, just that was an area from which she would always be excluded. And that's normal.

After all, your close mates are lifelong friends. It's like the relationship between siblings.

And I think, as Eve intimates, when we come online, we DO enter a strange private world. It isn't private, because WE'RE all here, but it IS private, to RL people. We say things here, we wouldn't in RL. There is huge satisfaction in keeping our two lives separate. By definition, to allow a partner in, would destroy part of the magic.
You can know us in RL, you can know us in the blogosphere, but to allow someone access to both faces?
Do we really want to be that exposed?

And I suppose my answer to Eve's point is this. There are some people online, who will always be valuable to me. At least one, will I hope, be a lifelong friend. And yes, the question DOES arise, were I to find someone serious in RL, would I maintain contact with her the way I do?

Yes, is the honest answer. Nothing would change on that front. Would I tell my real life partner that I exchanged emails with her? No, I wouldn't. It would be none of her business. And you might find that appalling, because yes, I would almost certainly be telling her details about this hypothetical partner.
But part of the point is, I've discussed things with her that I never have, and never will, with a real life partner. Things I'd be very uncomfortable talking about in the flesh.

I think the deeper significance of Eve's post, is that relationships generally are often haunted by people's inability to realise that everyone has many more needs, in terms of personal satisfaction, than can ever be satisfied by one person and it is this overwhelming arrogance that is a vicious by product of our ideas of exclusivity that scuppers true love so often.

Because when you try to interfere in people's other connections, when you demand that your 'Love' takes precedence over all the other meaningful things in their life, you render your so-called love, valueless. Because it no longer has the long term happiness of the other as it's base, merely your obsession in making the relationship what YOU think it should be, as in, one where you are the sole focus of their existence.



And if that's your attitude, then it isn't your partner that's at fault for valuing every connection out there to be made, it's you for not taking full advantage of YOUR opportunity to do the same.

People should accept that everybody has needs that one person alone can never fulfill, that you can indeed have too much of one particular person, in fact, you can overdose on someone if they don't give you space and allow you freedom to share and emote with all the other wonderful people that are out there.

Ask yourself this; would you make the demands of your best friend, that you make of your loved one?
Because if the answer is no, you are demanding too much.

With Love, like a lot of things, very often Less is More.