David St. Lawrence has a couple of posts on the subject of living with someone else’s lies. The only situations where I have been involved in the lies of others have been where I had unchecked loyalty to the liar. This is most notably true for the various infidelities my best friend had while in a specific, problematic, relationship. While the most “honorable” thing to do might have been to give voice to the lies, my sense was that the relationship was the source of the problem and so I tried to guide him out of the relationship. It worked to the extent that, as far as I know, he’s not had a faithfulness problem since.
But while I didn’t have a problem living with someone else’s lie, I did have a problem living with someone else’s secret.
My good friend Tony had been in a funk and it showed. It started when he told his girlfriend Julie that he did not intend to get married again. This was not a popular decision with anybody. I should have recognized at that point that the real problem wasn’t the lack of marriage, but the amibivalence that seemed to come with it. In a nutshell: “I won’t get married, Julie. Whether we stay together or not is up to you.” Had I recognized that, I wouldn’t have been trapped in a conversation that took place shortly thereafter.
I did say that while I was disappointed that they wouldn’t get married, I was more concerned as to why. I was trying to get him to think about how much he cared for her and to realize that it might be worth humoring her on this issue. Instead, I inadvertantly got to the heart of the matter.
“The truth is that I’m not happy, and I think Julie has something to do with it.”
Instead of using his love for her to get him to reconsider the marriage decision, I’d gotten him to reconsider his love for her by way of his marriage decision. Well not just me, but everyone that he had been butting heads with on this particular decision. In any case, it all came out.
He wasn’t happy. There were these sort of problems with Julie that couldn’t be defined. The relationship had a sort of “plastic” feel. It may have been well-sculpted, but it simply wasn’t alive. In fact, sometimes it felt like after being with her for almost four years, he didn’t really know who she was when she wasn’t trying to please somebody else.
It was devestating in its familiarity. Even more than he did, I knew that their relationship was doomed. He was asking all the same questions that I was — two months before I left.
It felt like I was in the eye of a hurricane. The first wind was the marriage. Right then was the calm of the false agreement. The second, coming wind was going to take the whole house down. Julie was gearing up for Marriage Discussion II when the next discussion was going to be Justify This Relationship. And every bit of discontent she uses to try to get him to change his mind of the piece of paper was going to be hurled back at her as a reason they should part ways.
For the next couple weeks I talked to Julie as she strategized on the marriage issue. I listened to her wonder aloud if there were problems that she wasn’t grasping and then listened to her dismiss those thoughts as paranoid.
Then the hammer fell. I had to feign a supportive tone and pretend not to know what I knew. I couldn’t even tell her everything was going to be alright because I knew that for the first time in a decade, she was going to be without somebody (Tony came right after me and I came right after someone else). And making it even harder, it was going to be for the exact same reasons that I left. I couldn’t even go on the offensive against Tony.
All I could do was sit there and listen to her heart break, listen to her try to assess the situation with a positive spin, listen to her search for one reason after another why everything could still turn out okay. The whole time the song “I know something you don’t know” garbling in the back of my head.
The first most difficult mini-secret was when I had to have a two-hour conversation with Julie, during which I couldn’t tell her that when she got home from work, Tony and all of his things would be gone. The second most difficult was when she was still trying to find a reason to hope and I couldn’t tell her that he had moved back in with his ex.
The situation was most difficult, of course, for Julie and Tony. But I tend to think that I took the bronze.
-{See Also: The Voluntary Villain}-
It’s always hard being in the middle of a couple that breaks up and knowing more than the other. I always think it’s interesting how one party will use the “I don’t want to get married at all” excuse, instead of just saying that they don’t see how they’re a fit on the long-term. Much more honest and allows the other person to move on.
Comment by Becky — October 10, 2005 @ 10:14 pm
I don’t think Tony realized that it was more about not wanting to marry Julie than it was about not wanting to marry at all. He went through a pretty ugly divorce and had said, prior to meeting Julie, that he wasn’t big on marriage anymore. I thought it was a mistake for Julie to move in with him with that up in the air. He later changed his mind and would marry her “later” (always later). After three years or so, particularly when Julie was starting to think family, his reticence became more an issue. I think once he started asking why he was so reluctant to marry Julie, he started taking note of all the problems that had been hovering below the surface.
I may be projecting on some of that, though. It was only when I was gearing up to propose to Julie that I started taking stock of the problems that didn’t seem so big when we weren’t looking at the rest of our lives, if that makes sense.
To add insult to injury on all this, though, Tony’s now re-engaged to the ex-wife that jaded him.
Comment by trumwill — October 11, 2005 @ 11:06 am
All this angst would’ve been moot if they’d simply talked to each other a lot earlier, when he was beginning to feel she was moving toward marriage and he was moving toward not really wanting to be with her anymore.
I mean, what was his point in staying with her at all and prolonging her hopes, if was uncertain whether he still wanted to be with her at all? Was it more important that he have a girlfriend and risk hurting her down the road?
That doesn’t make sense..
Comment by Barry — October 13, 2005 @ 9:36 am
Communication was one of the biggest problems in their relationship. Julie and I had the same problem before that.
I don’t know, I believe in transition periods. Or rather I believe that the jilted party gets to declare the timeline. When I have been dumped, it’s generally was my policy to cut off all contact so that I could “re-calibrate” myself without that person (or the hope of that person). I prefer things to be clearly over with the chance to try again some day rather than trying to hang on to what we have against long odds.
Julie, on the other hand, prefers a short term of self-deception. When I left her, she begged me to give it a couple weeks. After about 10 days or so, she took down my pictures from her wall. She wasn’t “over it” yet (she wouldn’t be until she and Tony coupled up), but she was willing to accept reality. Not before that, though. For a couple reasons she didn’t give up so easily on him. Even when he moved out, for instance, she hung on. It wasn’t until she found out that he moved back in with his ex (his own little self-delusion, a subject for another time) that she proverbially took his picture down off the wall.
Comment by trumwill — October 13, 2005 @ 9:53 am