unHappy Anniversary !!!
(May 2004 – May 2009...)
[initial, unedited]
Five years ago today (June 30, 2004) I was preparing to travel to Estonia, to be with Eva for a month, amid her family and friends there. But that's not the anniversary we're commemorating here; this posting is about seven weeks late.
Five years and seven weeks ago, in early-mid May of 2004, I began to try to start a conversation on certain issues in my relationship with Eva: issues that had long been obviously important, and long neglected. These issues had not been apparently urgent before May, 2004. So when I had broached them before that date, and Eva had deflected them one way or another, I had let them drop, to be picked up another day.
[these dialogues: rough, from memory, paraphrased except where in “quotes”]
| Mal: Do you think that, maybe, your overwhelmingly intense love for me might be grounded in ideas about me that are incomplete or partially wrong, that the basis for your Love might be partially unreal? |
I knew that those Issues would eventually become unavoidable, and our relationship would have to adjust to take account of them; but as long as things continued to seem more-or-less fine (or extraordinarily wonderful), and as long as Eva was reluctant to think together along the paths down which those Issues lay, they could wait -- to fall like ripe fruit, perhaps, in the unhurried course of our shared development. No need to push; I wasn't worried.
| Eva: I really want to have someone local, to help me with the kids, to maintain the house, to be there physically, every day. It's frustrating, that you're so far away. |
Somewhat suddenly, between the end of April and the middle of May, 2004, the tone of Eva’s emails, and her instant messages, and her voice, began to change – as when a timeless, bright day's sun dips behind low clouds, beshadowing everything with a chilly warning that the day is getting old.
There were certain understandings which we had reached, explicitly, in the earliest months of our relationship. I had always remembered them, and honored them (albeit somewhat imperfectly). But it had seemed to me that Eva had either long-since disregarded them as relics belonging to an ancient era, or (more likely) that she had simply forgotten them, possibly very soon after we had settled on them. ["More likely": in light of her tendency, throughout our relationship, to evince no memory of some agreements from shortly after we made them.] More than merely forgetting our agreements, she was increasingly behaving as if we had reached different agreements that contrasted with (or even contradicted) our actual agreements – reached them somehow, implicitly, without ever having discussed them. The main ways she revealed that she had tacitly changed the rules of our relationship typically involved complaints or accusations, directed toward me.
I was not the author of our initial understandings; we reached those together, mostly on the phone, as a practical way of ordering our relationship around our then-current complex of desires, imagined possibilities and practical limitations, both individual and shared. I would have been happy to change our shared understandings; but it wouldn't have been healthy (or fair to me) to simply drop the old ones without so much as acknowledging that they had been a factor (for the very reason that we had agreed to them and I, at least, had remembered them). Nor did it seem right that we should embrace different understandings under the pretense that they had always been in play: that my observance, and Eva's violation, of the old agreements should be retrospectively understood, upside-downly, as her observance, and my violation, of contrary understandings that we had never discussed.
Change was never unwelcome, and I always expected it. But I've always thought that it would be possible talk our way through our changes, no matter how far-reaching – including differences, and even sharp disagreements. Quarrelling would never be necessary, never more than superficial or transitory. Whatever the changes, we could enter them without setting up rigid emotional blocks against our listening to each other as to ourselves, and our hearing accordingly; and we could always come out somehow better.
Five years ago last month the sun-scape of our relationship suddenly came under a shadow, and I knew I would soon have to stop allowing Eva to defer or deflect certain conversations. The ongoing misunderstandings and miscommunications in our relationship would no longer hover benignly in the background, but would come seriously into play in the center. We would have to talk about them; if we didn't, they would only become exacerbated, aggravated, and possibly grow cancerous. Good thing, I thought then, that I can trust us to work through this potentially difficult period with seriousness so that, however we come out of it, everything will be fine.
In the month-and-a-half before Estonia, Eva didn't want to talk about "those things" because she was "too stressed out" with the demands of her life in Polson, and with preparations for Estonia. OK, I thought, it will be easier anyway when we're together, face-to-face, in Estonia. But my attempts in Estonia also were rewarded with deflections and deferments [later...another time...I can't deal with those things now...] and seemed always to result in tense conflict, intensely frustrating for both of us, without any meaningful points of mutual contact from which to even start the necessary conversation.
OK, then, I thought. After we've returned to our respective homes in August...and after a few weeks, or months, for Eva to wind down, during which time our relationship might languish in below-the-surface conflict and misunderstanding - then, at last, we might dig in to our Issues, and deal with them head-on.
That Fall Eva informed me that she "needed a break" from our relationship – some time to work it out for herself in her own time. I said, OK, but before you do, let's talk over some issues about which we have some serious miscommunications and misunderstandings. She evinced no hint of awareness that I had been waiting for half a year already, with a major department of my life in tumultuous suspension: til then, she seemed to think, I’d had everything I might reasonably expect, and now it was awfully selfish of me not to obligingly wait just a bit while she worked out, for herself and by herself, issues related to her relationship (apparently not equally my relationship).
I didn't tell her at the time (though I did mention much later) that I made my request with this understanding: if she took it up seriously, we could finish in about two hours. The reason I didn't mention this at the time was the thought: If she takes it that I'm simply asking for two hours, then she might dither, delay and distract for two hours, consistent with her behavior since May, and then require that I be satisfied with that -- and if I'm not, then take that as proof that my request is actually open-ended, or that I don't really know what I'm asking.
Why did I think she might do such a thing, even if I had explicitly linked "two hours" to the condition that she enter fully into the process and take it seriously? Because this was entirely consistent with the pattern of her relationship toward me, as it had been developing, gradually, since the previous May: it hadn't been only the avoidance of a serious, substantive conversation about our relationship, but also incipient patterns of control, manipulation and what I would eventually call (months later, and thereafter) "abuse".
Another thought that I spoke to myself at the time, without mentioning it to Eva, was this: if she won't do it now, she probably never will. The intuition was simple: in justifying her avoidance, she had been portraying me increasingly in over-simple and/or wholly-inaccurate negative terms, while dismissing or ignoring anything I might have to say for myself. She was clearly trying to engineer a separation on her own terms, having long-since signaled (at least since mid-July) that she was taking possession of our relationship, and that I would not be allowed any role not pre-assigned (or at least pre-approved) by her. So if she didn't have any live input from me, she would be unrestrained from making me out to be whatever might justify her treatment of me. She could recognize the injustice she had been systematically doing to me, and dig herself out of the hole; but it seemed far more likely (given my sense of her tendencies) that she would dig herself deeper in. Thus my slogan-of-that-moment: if she won't do [a serious conversation] now, she probably never will.
And now, five years and 7 weeks after I decided that long-delayed problems finally needed to be addressed – 4½ years after I asked for a conversation simply to clarify what we needed to discuss and why (not mentioning that I thought we could do it in two hours on the phone) we have not had five minutes of serious conversation over our very serious issues.
Instead (considering that the first instances of Eva's behavior that I took to be clearly abusive occurred in mid-July, 2004) I have endured five years of horrendous verbal and emotional abuse (3 active, 2 passive) as my assigned role in an intensely desperate – and totally unnecessary – battle which (unlike our relationship) belongs entirely to herself.
These pages will detail (and, alas, detail...and detail...and detail...) many of Eva's abuses. Many of them...but far from all. Many others will remain forever unmentioned, since not all have been documented, the documentation of others has been lost, and memory is a sieve with big holes.
But that's ok. It's not important that all abuses be detailed, only that enough be documented in sufficient contextual detail so that, if Eva ever finds it within herself to explore the possibility that seeking forgiveness is a real and serious moral urgency, she will be well-equipped to start with apologies that are not, in their total emptiness and intolerance for any mention of specifics, further crimes and insults requiring further apology . . . .
