A Chain of Broken Events (Part 3 of 4)

In the end, whether you decide to jump into a relationship or not, you are inevitably risking the same thing. Whether you allow someone to enter into your life (with the potential to hurt and disappoint you) or decide against a relationship (risking a great relationship, and perhaps marriage), the heart is always in play. It’s just two sides of the same coin. Try as we may, shielding it from the daily rigors of real life is impossible. And there are only so many times that you can say, “I don’t know.”

My past relationships left me with a maddening sense of regret that I had spent too much time analyzing, and not enough time feeling. Like withholding water from a thirsty plant, my lack of ability to move forward had slowly and painfully choked the life out of them. Truthfully, I think I had too many questions in my head, and all of the uncertainty paralyzed me. And I couldn’t lead by standing still. I determined to let feelings take more of a role in my life. To take more chances. As they say…carpe diem.

So I did. I went out with more people, under the guise of extending myself and moving in faith. I moved in the direction of my feelings. But strangely, the result of this was an even more unstable, drama-filled life. A life with more questions, not less. And confronted with my own selfishness, my life became bipolar, and my relationships unworkable. There were days of complete glee marred by evenings of doubt and fear. Fear that we would grow apart as the years went by. Fear that our differences would turn into unbridgeable chasms. Fear that we would grow to hate each other. Fears that ultimately led me down well-worn paths of self-doubt and self-preservation. And once on a familiar bent, it was almost impossible to find another way. I knew where we were going. I knew what was going to happen, even if I didn't want it to. Habits are funny that way.

At heart, I am a risk-averse person. I prefer slow and steady to extreme highs and lows. I am the proverbial turtle to the jackrabbits of this world, sure to turn over every stone and look behind every tree. And as much as I wish I were not, I am a man of formulas. Given enough time, my compulsion drives me to pulverize and deconstruct any situation into indivisible, sub-atomic particles. Each grain a circumstance. Each atom a possibility. So it comes as no surprise that I weigh relationships with the precision of a scientist, careful not to taint the process and controlling for each variable. Questions like, “Will this person still be with me if…” and “What will happen if…” became my test tubes and Bunsen burners. Each relationship was inevitably driven into a centrifuge, attempting…hoping to extract doubt with dizzying quickness and effectiveness.

In the end, what I found is that examination only yielded more uncertainty. There was always more information to gather. There was always another choice. I think one of the greatest fantasies that people have is that a relationship, if it’s the right relationship, won’t be hard. Or at least, not as hard as the one that you’re in right now. But what I’ve found is that it is impossible to compare an existing relationship to the possibility of perfection. And that you can’t have a healthy relationship with one foot constantly out the window, waiting for the roof to collapse.

Attempting to find the seams of my life has only shown me how imperfect my fabric really is. And how great of a role faith must play in any relationship. Just as a boat must be built on land, and then cast to the ocean to test its seaworthiness, so must a relationship be, at some point, tested and ultimately, trusted. It’s not a blind trust, as evidenced by the wreckage of so many of those “I knew when we first met that we’d be together forever” marriages. Every captain has life preservers in the boat, and tools to fix the leaks and holes just in case a storm hits. But if we always worried about our own weaknesses and differences, we would spend our entire lives on the shore. And I can’t imagine anyone who truly wants to be there, among the driftwood and cast-off shells of all the things that could have been.

A Chain of Broken Events (Part 2 of 4)

I knew it was coming. Or at least I should have known. We were 6 weeks into a class at our church that was supposed to prepare us for marriage. Though we weren’t engaged yet, we had decided to take it anyway. I suppose she thought that after two years of dating, it was about time. I thought that it seemed like the next logical thing to do. I was always logical like that. The class was supposed to teach you how to communicate better and deal with conflict. It wasn't syrupy-sweet, and that was just fine with me. After all, the last thing I wanted was a class telling me that hearts and roses were all you needed to make a happy marriage.

In the class, each couple was appointed a mentor couple...a couple who had already traveled several miles down the long, ashen road of marriage and had come out on the sweet side of things – past the clouds of dust and soot – no worse for the wear. Our mentors were an old and kind-hearted couple in their seventies. Anachronistic. Simple. They were warm. The kind of people that even after 40 years of marriage, wore their love for each other like something still fresh and brand new. It was refreshing just to see.

One cloudy afternoon, we drove to our mentor couple's house to meet with them and talk more about what it took to get (and stay) married. They talked about conflict and how they dealt with it. They talked about how different people were, and what to expect. I knew all that. I ate it up like hot fudge sauce on an ice cream sundae. I was ready for it. I had read books and every authority that I could find on relationships. I made my home in the self-improvement section of Barnes & Noble. I thought I had found a formula for success, and had distilled it down to its most basic elements. Earth. Fire. Water. Love. Communication was everything. Feelings were deceptive. It was a gospel tailor-made for me, and I bought into it like it was religion.

I'm not sure how it happened, but in the midst of our mentor couple explaining how different they were, she brought up something that had happened months before. Something she was apparently still upset about. In her mind, a trust had been broken. In mine, I was being unjustly accused. She saw feeling. I saw logic. Accusations were heaped upon assumptions and uncommunicated, pre-conceived notions, creating a giant and unstable, Jenga-like tower of misunderstanding. We tried, almost helplessly, to pull each precariously situated fiction out of the pile. But as we did, the tower began to teeter. And we were both too stubborn to budge an inch to bear its weight any longer.

After what felt like a two-hour counseling session, we slowly made our way back to the car. I was stunned at what had just occurred, and she was in tears. We got in, and neither of us said anything. I don’t think I even started the car. We sat in silence outside our mentor couple's house for what seemed like hours as the rain lightly fell onto the roof of the car. And in the dim light of the cloudy afternoon, she broke the silence...

"Are we going to make it?"

It sounded eerily familiar, and I began to think back to all of the other broken points of decision in my life. That night in college. That night on the train back from New Orleans. That lazy afternoon on the jungle gym. But wilting in the white-hot stress of the moment, I couldn't piece anything together. I sat in thought for what felt like a good two or three minutes before I could muster out the best and most honest answer I could think of.

"I don't know."

It's not as if I wanted to break up. I wanted to say "yes". I really did. I wanted to give her all the comfort that she deserved. But this was different than before. This wasn’t Dragon Park. The answer was intentional...not a product of a lack of words to say. No, this was borne out of long and hard thought. The silence was me searching for an answer that I could make sense of. I had felt like a failure in the relationship. But more than that, she had thought the same. And that I was responsible, which, when it came down to it, was far worse. I had reached a breaking point. It was the truest answer I could give – I simply didn't know if I could go on. If we could go on. I was never good at pretending something was fine when it wasn’t. It was the weakest we had ever felt, and under the intense strain of that day, the seam holding us together ripped and tore open a gaping hole of doubt.

Our relationship melted quickly after that, like cotton candy in a child's mouth – delicious at first, but ultimately sticky and insubstantial, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Over two years of work had ended with more suffering, and that was hard to swallow. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to feel like a failure. I guess upon reflection, I was worried about how different we really were. That we would fight a lot, and that during our lives together, she would come to resent me. Her opinions were so strong, that I believed they would eventually consume my own. Her differing viewpoints and desires began to feel like criticisms of mine. And my pulling back caused a disconnect, which, under the dim light of non-communication, looked a lot like indifference.

At the time, though, I think I still wanted to be with her, disagreements and all. Perhaps it was for the best. Or maybe in God's providence, our marriage would have produced better communication, and not so many fights and disagreements. But in the end, like most things, those questions vanished into the ether when the relationship came to an end. We tried reconciling a couple of times after that. We hung out “as friends”. But it never stuck. You can’t be friends after knowing someone that well for that long. Everything afterwards becomes a slap in the face. A perpetual reminder of what went wrong.

In the end, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was always one step behind in the relationship, and one deed away from being accepted. I wanted to give her everything she wanted. I wanted to be the hero. But I always left her wanting. It was the hardest, most humbling experience I had ever been a part of. And for better or worse, something I determined never to be a part of again.

I think I remember more about that cloudy day in the car than I do the actual breakup, because in my mind, it marked the moment we stopped trying. After that day, a breakup was only a formality. The fight had been taken from both of us, and we were left with nothing but the heavy yoke of our own selfishness. That, and the aching that came with trying to push a square peg into a round hole.