I cried during my wedding.
Big, fat, snotty tears.
I never told my ex-husband, but the whole time we were standing up there being married, the words “Don’t f*** this up!” kept looping through my head non-stop.
It became a prayer. “Please God, don’t let me f*** this up.” The tears started dripping because I felt sure that somehow, some way, I was going to f*** this up, especially since I was using the f-word in a prayer.
I believed in that man. I believed in his goodness. I believed I was marrying the right man for all the right reasons, and all I could think of was how scared I was that I would jack it up.
Sure enough, I mucked it up in less than a year.
…
If we love someone so dang much, and we want so bad to keep them in our lives, how do we screw that up?
How does the fear of losing a relationship cause us to lose the relationship?
You’d think someone who is extra afraid of messing up would be extra careful to not mess it up, but that’s not how it works.
Being that afraid makes you become so attentive to every single detail. You’re constantly scanning to see if something bad is approaching.
Every little thing becomes a big deal. Every little thing becomes something to worry about, worrying that it’s going to destroy the relationship you want so badly with the man you love so d*** much.
Every little thing becomes a source of such stress, such anxiety, such worry…every little thing becomes so heavy.
He doesn’t like something you said or did. Crap. Does that mean he’ll lose interest? Does that mean he’s on his way out?
He disapproves of a decision you made. You defend it to the millionth degree, not backing down, because you want to make sure he agrees with you, that he sees that you weren’t ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’.
Because if he saw you as wrong or bad, he wouldn’t think you’re wonderful and he’d want to leave you. So you become incredibly aggressive in defending yourself to any remark he makes that seems even mildly critical of you.
Every little thing becomes a long conversation, an overnight rift, ‘something to be worked through’, but then…after a while…there are so very many things to work through.
The ratio of things-to-work-through to things-that-make-us laugh-together gets horribly lopsided.
And strangely, it starts seeming logical to start believing the relationship isn’t so great after all. I mean, if it makes you so miserable, so scared, so worried, so defensive all the time, then surely it’s no good.
And then…you stop being scared. After all, you’re not scared to lose something that is pretty crappy.
You had to kill the relationship just to get relief from all the tension and stress and pressure you’ve been feeling.
…
No way am I going to leave you with this big downer. If you see yourself in this cycle, if you recognize that your fear of messing up is messing you up, here are four steps you can take to break this cycle.
Step 1: Recognize what you’re doing.
READ about relationships. And here’s the key: Read EVERYTHING about relationships, even if you don’t think it applies to you. Let me show you why.
Years later…after years of reading everything I could to help me understand relationships, to help me crack the code of how-to-have-a-healthy-relationship, I was in a relationship with another great guy.
I felt like the universe was finally willing to give me another chance after so badly bungling my marriage. I so badly wanted to not mess up again.
One day, we were struggling to work through an issue. He was upset with me because, according to him, when he walked into my office, I looked up from what I was working on and gave him the stink eye.
He told me it made him feel unwelcome, like I didn’t want him there, like how dare he bother me, as if he was less important than my work.
Oh dear gawd. Didn’t he know that wasn’t true? Didn’t he see I was doing everything I could to make him happy so he was happy with me? Didn’t he realize I’d never do anything to purposely upset him?!
I was quick to correct him. “No! That’s not it at all. I was just deeply focused on what I was working on. When I looked up, I didn’t even register that it was you. It’s just a rough transition for me sometimes, to rip my attention from one thing to re-focus on another.”
Sounds legitimate, right? Sounds like he was really making too big of a deal of something, like he was completely mis-interpreting me, blowing it out of proportion, and if he understood what I was really thinking and what was really going on, then…
And then, suddenly, I recognized what I was doing. I was being a textbook case for defensive behaviors. Big time.
Because I had read so much over the years, I was even able to instantly recognize what type of defensive behavior I was using: I was overexplaining.
Any time that poor man brought up a concern or tried to express something I did that bothered him, I’d immediately counter with an in-depth explanation of why I did what I did.
And I was completely right. You better believe I was. I had great explanations for everything I did.
Surely…if he knew why I did it, he would see it made sense that I did what I did.
Surely if he knew the details, he wouldn’t be upset with me.
Surely if he knew I was justified, he wouldn’t punish me for what I did by withdrawing his affection, his respect, his…love.
Oh boy. I was a full-blown case of defensiveness. And of course I was being defensive because I so badly wanted to keep him.
I was a good woman. He was a good man. We loved each other. But neither of us knew or understood anything about why we were doing any of the things we were doing that hurt each other.
The only reason I was able to finally recognize what I was doing was because I’d read everything about relationships. I was finally able to discover how I drove relationships into the ground. Every time I whipped out my overexplaining to defend myself, I was doing my part to ruin us.
That relationship didn’t last, but it helped me move on to the next step.
Step 2. Learn what to do instead.
Recognizing my pattern — what I tended to do when I feared losing someone I loved — was just a start. From there, I had to read a ton about how to make myself stop doing this whole defensive thing.
The cool thing was that there was plenty of stuff out there to help me learn what to do about it.
I learned that when I got amped up, ready to launch a mega-over-explanation, I needed to say, “I really badly need to go for a walk right now. Can we talk some more when I get back?”
I learned to take the break I needed to compose myself, and I learned what to do when I returned, ready —
— ready to shut myself up and listen, to let him express how he felt instead of rushing to tell him he was wrong.
— ready to care more about he felt than my self-defense, to let him know that I hated that he felt unwelcome, that he felt unimportant.
— ready to own the parts I needed to own, that I needed to understand that he felt bad, whether I intended it or not.
— ready to be creative about preventative steps. If I was poor at handling interruptions, then I needed to put up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign when I was going to be concentrating heavily.
(And if right now, you’re rolling your eyes at all this, if you’re sticking, as I once did, to thinking that guy was clearly in the wrong, well, you’re not ready.)
After tons of reading about the way I ruined my relationships that I didn’t want to ruin, I thought I was ready for the next relationship. I was so sure that if I ever again found a great guy again, I wouldn’t mess it up. I was well-informed. I knew what to do. I knew what not to do.
But then I became Exhibit A for research that shows bibliotherapy, on its own, isn’t terribly effective.
Step 3. Monitor yourself.
A couple more destroyed relationships later taught me this:
Just because you know what you should do doesn’t mean you’ll do it.
This immense fear we have of losing important relationships…it’s a mess. It’s sometimes embedded during our childhood. Here we are, thinking we’re grown-ups who escaped those s***y childhoods. Yet here our childhoods are, haunting us.
Crappy childhoods or other trauma can rule over our unconscious, getting us to make decisions and engage in behaviors that aren’t healthy for relationships. But we don’t even realize our decisions and behaviors are unhealthy until after the relationship has already crashed and burned.
We can’t just read about relationship stuff and think we’re good to go. We have to do way extra to combat the invisible, relationship-destroying tendencies that were planted in us in our childhood. We have to be very conscious of what we’re doing, when we’re doing it.
We have to constantly monitor ourselves.
We have to do a ton to be very aware of what we’re doing.
We have to journal. We have to journal, “Here’s what I did when that problem cropped up in my relationship today.”
Sometimes we get to journal things we can be proud of, realizing we’ve made progress.
Sometimes we have to confess to our journal that we ran amuck again.
We have to write out
- what happened so we can look for the things that seemed to lead up to the downfall, the so-called ‘triggers’.
- the things we’ll do differently next time those triggers show up again.
- the steps we’re going to take to repair the damage we’ve done.
We also have to rely on people in our lives who know what we’re trying to do, who know the big changes we’re trying to make, to be an objective eye to help us see when we’re reverting back to our tendencies, to call us out on it.
And this is why you’re going to need step 4.
Step 4. Tell your person.
It may take years to learn what you need to learn so you can see yourself clearly. It may take even more years to learn what you can do differently.
During those years, you may have failed when the universe gave you good opportunities for great relationships. You may start wondering if you’ve used up your share of opportunities and won’t get any more.
You may think that at some point the universe…gives up on you. Maybe the universe will stop giving you more chances since you ruined the ones it sent you.
I’m a science-y person, so I’m not into this universe thing. But…I sort of think…maybe the universe will give you some allowance for the fact that you were given a crappy childhood through no fault of your own.
Maybe the universe, understanding that you needed more time to learn and grow and figure things out, maybe…the universe won’t fault you too harshly for all the stupid things you ignorantly did before you knew better.
Maybe the universe will reward you for the hard work you’ve put into learning.
Maybe the universe sends you a chance to try again, a person that you sense is…good for you, right for you.
And when that happens, it’s time to take the final step of your evolution from relationship-blower-upper to…less blow-uppy.
It’s time to tell this person about…you.
You teach this person everything you’ve learned about your fear of losing the person, and how that can play out if you’re not ever-mindful.
You ask this person to be patient with you because, every now and then, you’ll relapse.
Despite everything you’ve learned, every effort you’ve made, you will start doing those same old things to ruin the very relationship you’re afraid of ruining. You definitely will.
But this time, it’s different. This time, your person is with you, helping you manage it. If this person is good for you, this person will gently help you recognize when you’re falling into those stupid, old patterns.
Then all that practice and training you’ve done will kick in, and you will be able to keep yourself in check.
You’ll be gentle with yourself. You WON’T scold yourself in a harsh fashion for messing up again. You’ll remind yourself it’s quite ok to mess up occasionally.
You won’t freak out wondering if your person hates you now because of how poorly you handled a situation or how defensive you got. You now truly know and believe that a person who cares about you will stay with you despite your occasional f***-up while you repair and grow.
You’ll go back to journaling, monitoring, learning more, trying again.
One day…you’ll realize you don’t have to do that much anymore. You’ll have been in a healthy, mostly happy relationship so long that you don’t live in constant fear of losing it.
…
For years, I mourned my marriage. I had the chance to be the wife of a very good man, and I thought I blew it. But it’s not ‘game over’.
I learned. I grew. My stupid childhood doesn’t get to win.
Neither does yours.
I will get the chance to have a happy, healthy relationship with a good man again, but this time he won’t just be a ‘good’ man. He’ll be the right man.
He’ll be the man who will learn and grow with me. He’ll be the man I won’t be afraid of losing because we’ll be too busy doing the healthy things we need to do so that we don’t lose each other.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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