The End of Love?

As if I don’t get enough of the demise of love at work, we are reading a book about divorce for my book club. It is bringing up all kinds of stuff for me...

How much I see people trust their partner and get totally fucked over;

How insidious narcissistic abuse is and how long lasting the effects;

How women have such a hard time changing their perspective from being a partner to considering their Husband an adversary and how much this delay fucks them over;

How trust and love and adoration are not valued in our most sacred and intimate relationships;

How much we, as a species, have no idea what makes us truly happy, so we grasp and plot and scheme and reach for other things, it is always other things that we think will fill the God shaped hole in us;

How much it hurts when someone loves you, or you think they do, and then they just leave with a cold callousness that should be reserved for someone other than the person they pledged to love and adore for their whole lives;

How love goes so horribly wrong, in the same exact ways, over and over and over again and we cannot seem to figure it out and save ourselves, our kids and our hearts.

My list could go on, but it is depressing me writing it so I am going to stop for today...

Divorce really only has a couple of variations:

1. Cheating and betrayal

2. Growing apart

3. Abusive (mentally, physically and spiritually)

4. The blind side (which is the trifecta of all of the above)

And all of them start with a disconnection from ourselves, or perhaps an inability to connect to ourselves authentically in the first place.  We marry the person our family and friends want us to marry.  We marry when we don’t want to.  We marry the good guy or girl when what we want is not ever going to be found in that person.  We lie to ourselves about ourselves and that is the beginning of the end of everything that comes after.  It is always self betrayal first that sets the stage for the later shitshow.  Always.

I really do need to write a book about it...let me get the first book out and published then I will start on the next one!  Stay tuned, the first one will be out in the fall...

The book I am reading is on the New York Times’ Best Seller list.  Why?  Because the story is horrific and commonplace.  The typical story of the woman who trusts and loves her husband and life, builds a family and a future and then he just blows it all to smithereens and she didn’t see it coming at all.  Their life of privilege and wealth, precariously balanced until she wakes up and realizes that he maneuvered himself into the pull position years before she ever had any inkling there was ever going to be an issue.  It is a rich people divorce.  And that doesn’t make it any less tragic and awful.  Having walked the path with many affluent people, the having of money and wealth doesn’t make the process better or easier, in fact, it provides an almost an endless supply of funds to fight about everything and nothing.

This woman is not the first woman to attempt to find vindication in legal accountability.  I mean, I bet it is pretty expensively futile, but I won’t spoil the book for others.  As an attorney, I keep finding myself issue spotting from the book’s inception and praying that she not do what she does next.  I am like, “OMG!  DON’T DO THAT, DON’T MAKE THAT CHANGE!  DON’T GET LOVE BOMBED INTO MARRIAGE!  DON’T GIVE UP YOUR CAREER!”  But she just keeps doing the absolute worst thing for herself all the while thinking she is in love and leading this magical wonderful fairytale...which later on, she realizes was just a nightmare disguised as a daydream...leaving her reeling to find that she can not really believe that any of it was real.  Ever.

I have walked so many women through this particular horror story. I have counseled them to not do things that I know they totally will do and watched the attendant aftermath.  I have seen how emotional carnage plays out in court rooms and the expensive bills, emotional wreckage and personal crisis that makes the whole endeavor absurd and disgusting.  But I also know that there really isn’t another path...you have to go forward and you think that justice will prevail, except it doesn’t a lot of the time.  That is an outdated concept in divorce court.  People do not get what they deserve...more often than they do. And that acts as a multiplier of trauma and grief and pain and loss and hardship...that puts the person already buried alive, gasping for air and desperate to find another way out.

I have seen so many women believe (and a few men - I will write about the man’s horror story another day) that the Judge will see what has happened to them and grant solace and justice.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen a lot of the time.  Smart, well connected men have an inside track to money and power and all the channels that protect it.  Women are frequently left out in the cold by the very same person they pledged their lives to...it shouldn’t be this way but it is.  I could tell you horror stories...and I will, but you are gonna have to wait for the book.

I am left wondering if the cold steeliness of man’s abrupt, painful and solemn departure from their wives and families is just a baseline male trait.  I mean it is so common it is hard not to believe this.  I see it mostly with the super wealthy.  That cold callousness that makes them amazing at acquisitions and mergers does something to their psyche that blottos their compassion, reason and empathy for the very people they are supposed to love most in this world.  Winning is the only goal they know...and the dissociative mechanisms they have to deploy on the daily to succeed and progress in business, becomes who they are.  All the things that get them rich become the very same traits that cause them to decimate their families and wives.

Again, women do it too...but it is different.  And remains a topic for another day.

My heart breaks for the heroine of this story.  She loved so much that she didn’t see that she was co-creating her own demise the entire time.  She believed, she trusted, she gave, she sacrificed and in so doing outsourced her safety to a man that valued none of it.  And instead used her own behavior as a vehicle for control guised as protection.

Can we trust anyone anymore?  If our most intimate relationships are so often the proving ground for betrayal, loss and horrific behavior, where the fuck are we supposed to go now?  If the place that promises sanctity and safety is the very same place where your own well being is obliterated, where the fuck are we supposed to go?  What are we supposed to do?

I have a few ideas (again you are going to have to wait for the book) but I have no idea whether or not they are possible in the world we live in currently.  The one where truth is anything you want it to be, with no regard whatsoever for veracity or reality.  If we treat our most intimate partners with such loathsome and awful behavior, what is going to happen to the people who matter less to us?

The proliferation of narcissists and their attendant awful behavior is only going to get worse because our society rewards this very same behavior.  If you look at the moguls and titans of industry, hell if you look at the person holding the highest office of our country, you will see that the stuff that makes them rich is absolutely the thing that makes them horrific people, husbands, fathers and friends.  I think, as a society, we have to make a decision, do we want to worship and service wealth or do we want to commit to relationships that are based on mutual respect and trust.  I feel like we have crossed streams here and the result is an ever climbing divorce, addiction and depression rate in our country.

We have become the public enemy we feared.  We don’t need an outside invader to kill us, we are doing it in our living rooms to the people we profess to love most in this world...and it is getting worse not better...

Is our society moving rapidly towards one that love and trust and faithfulness and truth just doesn’t exist?  I want to think no, but I know that me saying that just makes me guilty of all that I indicted others about above.  The first lie is always to ourselves.  Always.

It is hard to speak the truth when you want desperately to believe in something, someone else.  We fear and that becomes the way we love.  Terrified to say the wrong thing, terrified to lose the commitment and so our fear becomes the bars that keep us stuck in a cage with someone who will eventually maim us.  We call it a home, we call it so many things...mostly we call it love.

I don’t know what we are doing.  But I know that I see patterns and indicators and the signs are not good.  Our moral fabric is being worn away, cheapened and a throw away for sexier stuff that only sates the savagery within us for short bursts.  Our society is the most civilized it has ever been but the carnage hasn’t stopped, it has just gone underground and now plays itself out in our living rooms, our most intimate places of alleged safety and security...until it all blows up and love ends.

Again, still...