Published: Good Men Project (May 30, 2015)
Matthew Rozsa identifies 3 things to stop doing if you want to give your relationship—romantic, platonic, familiar, et cetera—a chance.
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Roughly four weeks ago, an ex-girlfriend of mine (with whom I had maintained a close friendship for the year-and-a-half since our break up) texted me that she wished I wasn’t always analyzing her. Considering that she knew full well that this tendency is a direct result of having Asperger’s Syndrome — after all, a condition which makes it impossible to naturally read unspoken social cues requires those afflicted with it to intellectualize the human behavior they encounter — I responded as if her remarks were a deliberate insult, and as such immediately went on the attack.
While I wasn’t wrong for being insulted at what she said (there was only one rational way to interpret them), my confrontational tone was absolutely out of line. As soon as she pointed this out, I apologized.
She didn’t accept my apology, and instead proceeded to freeze me out for more than a week. Finally, after receiving a text in which she admitted to missing our conversations, I decided that our ugly argument was part of the past and we could both move on. Unfortunately, when I made the mistake of calling her intoxicated a couple days later, she denounced my state of mind as an act of “disrespect” (even though by her own admission I hadn’t said anything confrontational or hostile during that conversation) and again decided to call off our friendship-on-the-verge-of-a-relationship, this time permanently.
Which brings us to our lesson of the day.
In an ideal world, the people with whom we fall in love will be paragons of virtue – smart, funny, kind, hard working, physically attractive, socioeconomically successful, etc. The reality, of course, is much different: Most of us are neither all good nor all bad, and our ability to find love depends entirely on meeting sexually compatible partners who can cherish what is right about us and accept (while simultaneously working to improve) what is wrong.
In an ideal world, the people with whom we fall in love will be paragons of virtue – smart, funny, kind, hard working, physically attractive, socioeconomically successful, etc. The reality, of course, is much different: Most of us are neither all good nor all bad, and our ability to find love depends entirely on meeting sexually compatible partners who can cherish what is right about us and accept (while simultaneously working to improve) what is wrong.
That doesn’t mean that lines shouldn’t be drawn. If someone is physically or emotionally abusing you, or refusing to respect your personal boundaries, than by all means the relationship needs to end. In this case, however, even the girl in question (who I will refer to here as “T”) reluctantly admitted that none of my transgressions crossed those lines. It was simply a situation in which she expected absolute perfection, and anything other than that constituted grounds for not only calling things off, but for doing so with some of the most hurtful language she could conjure up (which, after calmly dealing with it for several days, I finally decided to repay in kind).
There are three valuable lessons to be learned here:
1. For any relationship to work—romantic, platonic, or otherwise—both parties need to have a margin for error. No one is perfect, and if you’re going to zoom from 100 (i.e., thinking the moon and stars of a loved one) to 0 (i.e., thinking only the worst about that loved one) over relatively minor mistakes (on this specific occasion, lashing out when my Asperger’s Syndrome was attacked or acting overly-giddy during a drunk phone call), then the chances are that the real problem isn’t with your significant other – it is with yourself. By holding people to that standard, you are demanding a level of perfection that no one – not even yourself – could ever be realistically expected to reach. The worst part isn’t even that you doom your specific relationships to failure; it is that, through your actions, you become the kind of emotional abuser who leaves a trail of scarred psyches in your wake.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that the generation raised by the Internet age tend to pass moral judgments based only on extremes – you are either an unimpeachable role model or the absolute scum of the earth. It’s why we see ongoing debates over questions like whether we should admire Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon: Even though it is undeniably true that Lincoln was both a racist and the Great Emancipator, or that John Lennon was an influential advocate of world peace who regularly abused his wife and children, people online tend to assume that either their virtues entirely negate their flaws or that their flaws render their virtues irrelevant.
2. You need to be able to look at life as more than a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that the generation raised by the Internet age tend to pass moral judgments based only on extremes – you are either an unimpeachable role model or the absolute scum of the earth. It’s why we see ongoing debates over questions like whether we should admire Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon: Even though it is undeniably true that Lincoln was both a racist and the Great Emancipator, or that John Lennon was an influential advocate of world peace who regularly abused his wife and children, people online tend to assume that either their virtues entirely negate their flaws or that their flaws render their virtues irrelevant. In fact, human beings are far more complex than the reductive mindset of digital culture would have one believe: Lincoln and Lennon were great men with terrible flaws and terribly flawed men who did great things. Acknowledging this isn’t a paradox but, rather, the essence of the human condition.
3. When you meet people who apply a 0 to 100 attitude in your own life, your best bet is to cut them out entirely. In the case of T, I deleted our text messages (after using them as the basis for this article, of course) and blocked both her phone number and Facebook profile. Obviously I do not expect this to eliminate the pain that she caused me through her actions, at least not right away – but, if there is one good thing about having a diverse range of dating experiences, it’s that you realize even the most emotionally abusive ordeals will eventually fade from your memory as new (and hopefully more rewarding) ones arise to take their place.
It is lamentable that my ex-girlfriend, who is otherwise a very intelligent woman, seems stubbornly unwilling to recognize this fact (and, indeed, openly acknowledged that she enjoyed knowing she had the power to really hurt someone if she felt like it). That said, all painful experiences yield valuable lessons, and the one gleaned from this is too important to overlook:
We need to stop being a 0 to 100 society. We need to stop assuming that the Lincolns and the Lennons and, yes, the Rozsas can be defined solely by either what is best in them or what is worst in them. If we don’t stop doing this, at some point we will reach one of those periodic moralizing crazes that have occasions swept through our country – see the Salem Witch Trials, the five Great Awakenings, McCarthyism, or political correctness (at least when taken to #CancelColbert level extremes) – in which human lives are ruined because certain individuals dare not be perfect. Indeed, it is hardly a coincidence that T herself used to frequently engage in heated debates with me about whether good people could have bad qualities and vice versa – and every time, of course, she came down in favor of saying that if you do one bad thing, it devalues you entirely.
America is better than this, and as the Internet continues to exacerbate the 0-to-100 phenomenon I’m talking about, I can only hope that this unhealthy trend will change.