Saturday, November 7, 2015

Dancing With Myself



Q: If you had to summarize this whole marriage dissolution situation in one word, one word that would encompass all the heartache, anger, emotional and financial loss, image management, relationships management and all other material and immaterial consequences of this proces, which word would that be?

A: Educational. The word would be educational. Like not having something valuble in the beginning and then later - having it! It is a powerful word and a powerful concept that is deceptively difficult to grasp in all its simplicity.

Q: Have you ever regretted not staying in that relationship considering all the personal and social specifics of this dissolution, single parenting included?

A: No, I have not. Not because I was not thinking of it or because of the emotional load. I am not angry now and haven't been for a very long time. Anger was acute emotion, in use while there were still things to resolve and agreements to respect. After anger was spent and disappointment took center stage there was nothing more that could be done. Regret was prevented by thousand and one action I tried to make the relationship work while still in it. At one point losses were acknowledged and defeat accepted and the whole affair lost all of its value in one fell swoop.

Q: WTF? What you're saying feels a lot like wisdom distilled by thousands of rationalizations and lot less like true closure. It just takes once to hear you speak about some current crap he did or about some issue your opinions substantially differ to see that there's still fire in that furnace. What about that?

A: They are not truly dead when we divorce them even if they are dead to us as partners, LOL. Not everything about him was matter of dispute then nor is it now. I'm acknowledging that during the years following the dissolution I have seen also the things that made him appealing in the first place, but in the large scheme of things they are not enough to sway my opinion based on experience at hand, not only during the marriage itself but during the whole period we know each other.

Q: Let's speculate that he would be interested in getting back together. Are you afraid you could like him again? Or are you actively trying not to be in the situation to have to think about that?

A: Being afraid of that would imply that liking someone is a condition like contagious disease, one we cannot predict or avoid. To like someone you need some common ground and some trust that things which are not openly common have possibility to be common. Here that is not the case. We already know that our common ground is too small for comfort. I am not afraid of liking him. I'm not avoiding the issue. With the information I already have I can make better than educated guess that even if we both consciously worked on getting along that would not work. And there is ridiculously small chance of us both consciously working at anything, be it pizza pie or relationship.


Q: Why are you talking about this so much then? Writing posts? Re-visiting experiences?

A: Just like I already mentioned in the beginning of this topic exploration  there were open case studies that made this experience, my experience, more accessible and I chose to revisit it to see how it's holding up. I'm a experience connoisseur and would like to keep this one nice and fresh for reference. 

Q: Fresh for reference?! Meaning that you will inspect other relationships through the prism of relationship demise??

A: That is an interesting assumption but I do not think I will do that. At least not in a doomsayer's kind of way. I love relationships. I love their ups and downs, getting-to-knows, opening one's heart in trust to embrace the possibility of success. I also love learning about myself in those situations and I think I would like to keep having opportunities to keep learning. Experiences school us, that is true, but people are not so predictable that they would not be awesome and wonderful packages of characteristics, skills and mores - bringing surprise and joy just as often as bringing some less desirable content. 

Q: Big talk from someone with so prominent proclivity to non-belonging.

A: Yeah, well. Nobody's perfect :-P But there's still hope that there is some belong-worthy material out there.