The value of unsuitable partners

I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that almost everyone who has ever had a relationship has had an unsuitable one. In fact, it’s quite likely that if they believe they haven’t, they are either still in it, or they are very slow learners.

As humans, we don’t really like making mistakes, and we don’t like admitting them. It dents our reputation. 

I’ve made a driving mistake before, with no consequences, but it was embarrassing (if you live in Milton Keynes and I tell you what it was, you’ll stop speaking to me). After a bit of defensiveness I realised it was in fact my mistake, and I laughed at my stupidity.

When we make mistakes of the heart, it dents much more than our reputation. It makes us question who we are. If the time spent was significant, that makes it very hard to admit the mistake even to ourselves, because in some sense we feel it makes a mockery of our lives. All that potential happiness in my time on earth. And I spent it with the “wrong guy”.

But is it as simple as that? If nearly everyone does this, how is it that we are all picking the wrong person? What even is the wrong person? There are few agreed yardsticks of what makes a bad partner, and many opinions coloured by gender expectations. Despite the difference in how the characteristics are described, a controlling personality is agreed upon as a so-called red flag. Of course we reach for movie clichés, and describe these people as “bunny boilers”, or “sleeping with the enemy”. This framing is quite pernicious, because it sweeps up all nuance and complexity into the most extreme consequences. Both those characters are violent, unhinged murderers. Most relationships which one party describes as controlling (and the other probably describes as “I can’t help wanting straight lines”) have no such transgressions. They’re just a mismatch in a large chain of minor, everyday preferences about how to organise life. This can be much more significant if combined with a grandiose personality and insecurity, because that is what makes the preferences into aggressive prescriptions.

I was thinking about all this on my run to the station because I am married, and my identical twin is not. I often wonder why that is, and my conclusion is that although we both dated the wrong person, I think that my “mistake”was the right kind of wrong. It resulted in me both being a much better partner to other people, and being much more assertive in shaping the dynamic.  I didn’t need to spend five years to learn these skills, but the sheer amount of time invested may have helped.

So what did I learn, and why did I change? I learnt that there are no straight lines. Most of us want good outcomes for other people, but those good intentions go wrong, often because our vulnerability reduces our empathy. My ex partner loved me beyond measure. But I also made him feel inadequate. So although he wanted me to be happy, he struggled with jealousy so much that he did not make me happy at all. He wasn’t just jealous of other men. He was jealous of me. I think he wanted to simply admire me (yeah, I’m great aren’t I), but in the end, he had to put me down all the time and criticise me in order to feel he was equal. He once told me I was stupid because I didn’t win my game of Solitaire on my laptop. I hadn’t counted the cards and calculated the probabilities – indeed, because  my goal was alleviating some hungover boredom, not really winning.

At the time, all this really affected me negatively, so why is it a positive? I think the way the relationship ended made it easy for me, because social and moral norms of who was in the wrong were very clear. That removed all lingering questions of compatibility or negotiation of what mattered, and so I take away only what everything leading up to that point changed for me.

I realised over time that my priorities in life were my responsibility to implement. There was no “he makes it hard for me to go running because we always drink so much”; I simply stopped drinking so much one day, and I went running in the morning. I realised I was hiding behind decisions he was making for himself, and which were convenient for me to hang my own shortcomings off. He insisted for years that we could not replace the broken fridge. So we were always buying one meal at a time, and mostly ate out. I eventually realised there was in fact nothing stopping me from booking waste collection for the fridge, and ordering a new one. His adamant insistence was just shame and inertia at not having sorted it out. He was delighted about it being fixed. Similarly, I reorganised all sorts of other things that annoyed me, and although it didn’t really help with the underlying issues, it made me realise that there is so much more to negotiate by doing. It’s quite possible that this has resulted in me having what could be described as uncollaborative approaches to decisions, but I’m certainly never sitting around waiting for the other guy to do something.

I don’t feel disloyal saying I sometimes miss that level of crazy rollercoaster, but it was really hard, so the other thing it does is make me profoundly grateful for what I have. I also do quite a lot more thinking out loud than I used to – if you don’t like something, you sort of have to say so. If you still don’t like it, change it, and if you can’t change it and you really don’t like it and the passing of time won’t make it go away, then you can only change yourself.