Objectivity
Monday, November 30th, 2009
As time marches on and I find more and more support on the blog and in real life, I find that it becomes harder and harder to be objective about everything. Not that anyone is ever 100% objective about anything, but I have always tried very hard to see both sides of a battle and not mask my own flaws. Sometimes, it’s really easy to forget that I’m writing about what really happened, and not what I imagine happened. Memory is a tricky thing. Objectivity is the one thing that made me incredibly good in the counseling profession as I am actually not very good at listening to people for 45 minutes straight. I am finding that ability to step outside myself and see my own downfall more difficult lately now that I no longer feel alone in what I write, and how most people who comment on here militantly defend my every action, while making Bob out to be the bad guy. The truth is, he isn’t all bad. Not everything is black and white, and I am not all good and Bob is not all bad.
A trick to help see how not everything was bad and how you contribute to the mess is often to figure out what attracted you to that person in the first place. To remember the things you used to do and the way you used to feel. Except I never really felt that way. I chose Bob because he was a minister and I felt called to the ministry. He was interested in me, seemed like a good man, and had my parents’ approval. I loved him, but there were many times where I honestly didn’t like him. So I kind of loved him the way you might love a distant relative. While we were dating, I remember sitting around watching Bob play pool with Steve one day and thinking, “This isn’t what I want.” I didn’t really want to be with him, but couldn’t think of a good reason to break up with him, either. (Because, for whatever reason, not wanting to be with the person wasn’t reason enough.) I actually told him this one day, though why I would do that, I don’t know. He told me he felt kind of the same way. The summer before we split, we went on a hike where we tried to convince ourselves we were in love with each other. In college, most people didn’t really seem to like him. I understood why, but dismissed those flaws as his own insecurity.
Why, then, did I marry him? I had been taught for many years that feelings didn’t matter, that’s why. That feelings fade over time anyways, so why choose based on feelings in the first place? Marriage is hard work, even if you liked the person to begin with, so choose character qualities over how you feel. Now, I realize feelings are very important! They should not be the only thing–your relationship should not lack depth! But it should not lack feelings, either. The qualities that drew me to him included a good sense of humor, his desire for the ministry, and an ability to learn from his and others’ mistakes. We did have a lot of fun together in the beginning.
Lessons aside, it is hard to step outside and see what attracted me to him in the first place. The truth is: I wasn’t really. I liked him, and I loved him, but it was liking like a friend and loving like a cousin. So now what? How do I say he has his good points, too, when right now I can’t see them in real life, and it is incredibly easy to fall into the trap of complete demonization on this blog? (And in real life, too.) Maybe by just remembering my own flaws?
Tags: divorce
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November 30th, 2009 at 1:56 am
focus on your daughter. She is half him, so remember some of what you love about her came from him.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:30 am
In college, most people didn’t really seem to like him. I understood why, but dismissed those flaws as his own insecurity.
Perhaps there is more to this. Have you asked anybody from your college days about this? Maybe they just knew things that you didn’t.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:52 am
I think most are attracted to things in others that remind them of their parents in some way. I think we all settle for the known over the unknown so when we see something in another that reminds us of the past, we have a tendency to be drawn to it.
Love is not really dependent on feelings as they come and go. Before I got married, I talk to numerous couples that had been together for 30 to 40 years to find out their secret. I found they made the choice to love their mate no matter what. Generally, it was one mate (the man) who made that choice (which made sense in my mind based on what the Bible said).
It seems that everyone I talked to that thought love was just a feeling ended in divorce. I came to realize that if my marriage was to be successful that I would have to make the choice to love, respect and honor my wife no matter what she did, said or thought about me.
Based on your story, it sounds like you just lost respect for your husband over time due to his godless actions in your marriage. Every couple when they get married usually knows nothing about love so the first few years of marriage are the most difficult. You simply never made it out of the woods since the love bond that eventually comes over time never had time to materialized.
Also, I am curious, do you write the post and your man write the comments? I am amazed at the difference textually between the post which appear to come from the heart and the comments which seem like you are more on the attack… I don’t put much into textual criticism but the difference between your post and comments is a classic case as to why I don’t take higher criticism seriously. so I was curious?
God Bless…
November 30th, 2009 at 7:02 am
no, I think Steve has commented once. Usually, he talks to me directly about what I post.
I write my posts from my heart, but if someone makes assumptions or says something rude in the comments section, I have no problem calling them out on it and standing up for myself. Like how you assume in your comment that I married based on feelings, when I just stated in my post that I did not. I chose to love him based on a few characteristics I had been taught from my godly mentors were important.
And if by “godless actions” you mean a total lack of respect for me as a person, then yes, you are definitely right on that.
November 30th, 2009 at 7:10 am
I don’t talk to many people from my college anymore, but I do know that his personality rubbed many people the wrong way. Not everybody disliked him, but probably more didn’t than did. The same way he treated me, he treated everybody: lack of regard for others’ thoughts, an extreme need to be right, a know-it-all in class; generally, an attitude problem. It’s why I never saw it as abusive, but rather his personality. He made just about everyone mad with his arrogance, even his dad got mad at him at a family dinner one day. I had to live with it 24/7, and it eventually wore me down. According to his mom, he’s always been that way. Once, he got into trouble at school when he thought his teacher wrote something down wrong on the chalkboard. When she disagreed, he marched up there, grabbed the chalk, and corrected it himself. Most people don’t appreciate that kind of disregard for their intelligence.
November 30th, 2009 at 7:13 am
(I had the same problem with his dad one time over the same family gathering. His dad wasn’t usually like that, but they didn’t agree with the way I fed Julieanne. ?! I did it the way my pediatrician told me to do it, and the way that kept her happy and from starving. His dad fed her just the way he decided was best right in front of me and despite her screaming. Pissed me off so badly. That family reunion did not end well, and was the last time I saw them.)
November 30th, 2009 at 7:19 am
I think you misunderstood me. I didn’t state that you married based on feelings. I think most marry someone like their father or mother based on shared characteristics. I was making a generalization and not making a case for your particular situation.
I honestly never try to be rude as that is not me. I simply enjoy your blog. There is enough pain and hurt in the world and I certainly don’t want to add to that mountain…
I only hope people find restoration…I personally believe everyone is looking for the love that my wife and I have. However, I can tell you that our love is clearly not based on feelings. Feelings are constantly changing as all things in our experience change.
The secret to our success is that our love for each other comes from knowing the love of God ourselves which then flows out and blesses the other. In fact, all the people I met who were “happily married” for a long period of time were Christians. The non-Christians I spoke with all had a co-dependency there that killed the life in their marriage.
I said to my wife the other day, “We have been married all these years and I still can’t get enough of you. I just love being with you.”
I wake up everyday knowing that I have to sacrifice my selfish interest which strangely enough results in happiness for both me and my wife. My example came from Christ Himself who gave us His life for me out of His love for me.
God Bless and thanks for your response…
November 30th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Ah, okay. Of course, we’ve had that comment conversation before, too. Bob was very talkative, open, and arrogant. My dad is very quiet and withdrawn. My mother is more like me if you take religion away from it: a little awkward, but fun and crazy. Bob didn’t really match either of my parents, and I thought that is what I wanted at the time, and that is one of the main reasons I married him: he was nothing like my dad.
Steve is a bit more like my dad, though not really like either one of my parents, either. He is more quiet, but he also knows how to have fun. Maybe it’s what my dad would be like if he wasn’t religious. Idk.
I am glad you love your wife. Just remember that the rest of us love our spouses, too!
November 30th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Laura,
If your love is based on feelings, then it is only a matter of time before you no longer love your spouse. I hope you understand what I am saying and don’t take it the wrong way.
The love that is eternal, unchanging, unfailing and always will be is God and has to be.
You see, everything in our experience is changing…I mean everything…You are getting older, all your cells will be replaced many times over your life. Your spouse is changing and will continue to change all of his life. Change is what is expected in this life
Love on the other hand if it is real does not change. If I know the Lord, then His love in me never changes.
I hope you can see what I am saying without taking offense or seeing it as rude. I am only trying to show how your feelings are based on chemicals which are changing and love is based on God who never changes.
God Bless
November 30th, 2009 at 8:33 am
About the love being based on feelings, there was a time I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you on that. And I think to an extent, I still do. The thing is, in the past when I heard “love isn’t based on feelings”, all I heard was the feelings part, so I de-emphasized them to a point where I didn’t trust my feelings at ALL. I don’t think love should be BASED on feelings, but at the same time, you don’t want your love to be void of them, either, or you run into similar situations as I did.
I like Sternberg’s triarchic theory of love. I knew about it when I got married, I just mistook the passion in his theory for sexual urges. I know now there is a difference, and a rather large one at that.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:50 am
I disagree with zdenny, a relationship based on the perceived whims of an imaginary sky god is the most fluid and shaky type of relationship, It requires that both couples be deceived equally.
In truth, team work interwoven with respect and thoughtfulness is the best basis for a marriage.
November 30th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Laura,
I don’t think you need to be objective in your posts. This blog is clearly a way for you to reconcile a whole different time in your life as you open a new chapter.
It is YOUR time to tell YOUR story.
Your story should be steeped in your own subjectivities, your musings about why something unfolded the way it did. I don’t know that you would have the readers you do if you blog were an objective (and dare I say, boring) account reporting just the facts with no comment on how they affected you.
It is a skill to be objective when listening to one or both sides of a story, but impossible (and futile) to narrate objectively when you are the subject of the story.
That is why they call the opposite of objective…SUBJECTive.
I, for one, have read every post knowing full well that an objective observer would likely see things somewhere between your side and Bob’s side. But unless Bob has a blog where he is countering each of your posts I can only hear it with one voice. Furthermore, I don’t hate Bob because I don’t know him, and perhaps their is more to his story than I know. But I, like most of the other posters here, need to comment on how you perceived those moments and address them in a context that is relevant to your perception of the events. We could, as an aside, change to whole context of how you saw something and then address how we subjectively interpret it (I won’t name any names), but that would be both arrogant and useless to you.
I think if there is any way in which I or anyone can assign blame to Bob it would be in him not addressing your perception of events. I know that I am not a model husband, and I screw up on a fairly regular basis; I do try to see how my wife perceived what I did, and address her from where she is. It’s not just about the intention of the actions it is the interpretation of them. To ignore that and just justify them in my own context is at best not helpful, at least damaging to our relationship, and at worst utterly arrogant.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
You know, if my kid did that blackboard thing? He would get in trouble.
Lots of people are naturally arrogant and bossy. Almost all kids start out self-centered and not concerned with people’s feelings. And we do our damnedest to train that out of them.
This is also my partner’s explanation why I have to be nice to his brother even when his brother is rude to me: I’m a good person with good manners and his brother acts like that to everyone, so he must not be able to help it. WTF? That’s some crazy family disfunction talking.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
If you do feel like you need to be objective, in order to figure stuff out, I think the easiest way is to assume good motives, but go ahead and judge his actions.
For me (and I spent YEARS trying to figure out an ex of mine), I think it’s easiest to assume everyone has good motives. You can’t see inside their heads, after all, so you never really know what they’re thinking for sure.
But you can see their actions, and you can know their effect. So it doesn’t matter if he MEANT to hurt you, if he knew how you felt and was manipulating you or if he really just can’t grasp his effect on others, or whatever. You know what the effects were on you, and you can certainly judge that.
And you don’t have to write off the good parts, either, or figure out which person was to blame; you’re not trying to fix that relationship so learning how to do well in it isn’t a problem anymore.
November 30th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
You could always let Bob post! (only half-kidding)
November 30th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Oh, dear! I am dreading the day my blog is discovered by him or by a member of his family! :S
November 30th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I am pretty sure he DID get into some major trouble! I think you are right, too, though, that a lot of what he did was also written off as “oh, that’s just Bobby!” His family is pretty dysfunctional, but in the nice sort of middle class way that you can’t see very well on the outside.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Zdenny. Please. Pretty please. With sugar on top. Stop saying things like this:
“Based on your story, it sounds like you just lost respect for your husband over time due to his godless actions in your marriage”
You use “Godless” in the same way that other people use words like “immoral”, “evil” and “bad”.
Those terms are not interchangeable.
I have been an atheist for most of my adult life, and all of my childhood (with a short stint of theism in the middle), and I’m probably the most honest, moral person I know. I’m not saying that to be arrogant – it’s true.
I’m a first-year student nurse, and I spend my days helping people. That’s what I do. I’ve been in a loving, monogamous relationship for four years. We’re both happy and we treat each other with love and respect. Hell, I just let the neighbour’s kitten into my house because he’s out and it’s cold outside! I am NOT a bad person, but I AM without God.
Please, please, please stop being so damned offensive to atheists by using “Godless” to mean “bad person”.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Absolutely. The lynch-pin of love is trust, and without honesty there is no trust. Who can base a relationship on a fantasy and expect it to work? Life just isn’t like that.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I hope that his father beats twelve shades of righteous crap out of him when he reads the “Losing my religion” posts. That bastard raped you, and his friend did the same.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Unfortunately, they are pathologically fused. They call it “loyalty,” but those in the counseling field have numerous other words for it. When their 16-year old son knocked up his girlfriend, they blamed the whole thing on HER. When I said, “It takes two!” they said, “Oh, but she SEDUCED him!” Um, okay. So I am sure that somehow it is my fault, I deserved it (or I’m lying) and good for him for dumping me!
December 1st, 2009 at 6:27 am
Speaking as a man who was once a horny sixteen year old boy, I can pretty much guarantee that he didn’t trip, fall and land with his penis in her vagina! Perhaps if they’d looked at the proof of how ineffective abstinence is they might have given him some condoms, but oh well!
December 1st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
@ Rosa:
If I had a kid who did that blackboard thing, I suspect I’d have given him a hiding myself!
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Pardon my late comment – found your blog this morning and have been pretty much poring over it since. I have to say, I admire you tremendously for leaving an abusive marriage and then rebuilding your life. I’m sure you would make an excellent physician, with your intelligence, empathy, and inner strength.
Relating to this topic, I recently stumbled upon a statistic listing athiests as one of the groups with the lowest divorce rates (@ 21%). Baptists, interestingly, have one of the highest rates (@ 29% – 34%). Supporting those stats was a 20-year study of traditional marriages vs. egalitarian ones, with egalitarian values cited as the greatest indicator of marital happiness and satisfaction. Newsflash of the century, huh? And here I was thinking that tyrannized, browbeaten, and overworked women were the happiest! Hah. So much for the patriarchal “happily-ever-after.”
On final note (and I hope this doesn’t come off as giving unwanted advice), I highly recommend checking out the book Ask and It Is Given, by Esther and Jerry Hicks. It’s not Christian or religious in the least – in fact, the very opposite. Its central thesis is that people should live in a way that makes *them* happy (ie. not your parents, not some invisible god, ect). Essentially, the book is a how-to guide for being, doing, or having anything you want. Random recommendation, I know. But, as a fellow twentysomething (who’d also gone through a period of self-doubt in the pursuit of an advanced degree) that book helped me immeasurably. In fact, I don’t think that I would’ve been able to finish graduate school without it. Just a thought, given some of your comments that you might have difficulty getting into med school.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your experiences. As hard as some of your posts must have been to write, your insight really has benefited many people, myself included. Best wishes!
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Leslie, thanks for the book recommendation! I’ll stick it on my reading list. I pretty much abide by that philosophy myself, so I bet I would like it.
Thanks for the comment! I’m glad it helps–it’s the main reason I write what I do and share it publicly, so it’s good to know that someone is getting something out of it anyways!
December 24th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Cool.
Though, regarding the book, I should probably mention that it’s written from kind of a spiritual perspective (ie. the author’s claim to receive their information via a spiritual source). As an ex-Catholic myself, I approached that with a healthy degree of skepticism. However, since there were no agendas or conversion attempts (the authors don’t ascribe to any religion), I was okay with it. Especially considering that the book pretty much reshaped my life.
Just thought I’d throw that out there, in case you opened the book and, idk, fell out of your chair or something. ^_^;