That’s my dad—the best model for adulthood I’ve ever had and the best argument for leaving my stupid, selfish youth behind without lamentation. He just turned sixty-six, and he makes sixty-six look like the wisest, most fulfilling, most exciting, most purely joyful age to be. He made sixty-five look like that, too, and every other age for as long as I can remember.
People assume you become envious of youth the older you get, and maybe that’s true for most, but my envy is for the age of sixty-six. The old man makes it look so fun!
Okay, you’ve got a cool dad. I get it. But how does that make it any easier to break up with someone, dear author?
Glad you asked, actually. Of the many invaluable nuggets of wisdom my dad has given me, his views on breakups have always struck me as particularly level-headed and insightful, even comforting. He has always thought that every breakup is purposeful, even the ones that hurt like hell—sometimes especially the ones that hurt like hell.
We’ve all been hurt in relationships at some point. If you’ve never been dumped by someone, most people would consider you very lucky. I happen to believe everyone needs this lesson in humility once in his or her life. Getting dumped forces us to reevaluate ourselves and whom we choose to be with. If handled constructively, it can even be cathartic.
Someone is giving you a wake-up call. Someone you really care about is telling you something is missing or needs repair. Maybe you’re skittish about commitment. Maybe you’re possessive or needy. Maybe you suffer from irrational jealousy. Maybe you aren’t willing to put in the hard work it takes for relationships to thrive. There’s a reason you’ve been dumped, and rather than ignoring or flatly denying certain issues, use the sudden infusion of unpleasant truth for its creative potential.
Not every breakup means the same thing. Sometimes the truth it imparts isn’t what your ex would have you believe. Breakups aren’t a spectator sport. There are no winners, and even in the most one-sided relationships, both parties have a hand in the outcome. Evaluated through the objectivity of distance (which hopefully comes someday after the initial hurt), you can find plenty of fault on both sides for the relationship failure. Anyone who claims utter blamelessness after a breakup (except those involving abuse, which is always and unequivocally the abuser’s fault) is either lying or deluded.
If you encounter someone who insists that none of his past breakups were his fault, proceed at your own peril. He has a lot to learn, and he may be too old to teach. Besides, it isn’t your job to make a man out of him. That failure lies with his parents, and just because they shirked their responsibility doesn’t mean you should take up the cause. Some guys never grow up, and some never want to.
Couples in marriages or long-term relationships often talk about the importance of arguing constructively. Fights are going to happen.
First and foremost, avoid speaking out of anger.
Anything you wouldn’t say with a cool head is best not said at all. Anger is like alcohol. It not only loosens the tongue, it also leads you to say things you would be mortified to have repeated back to you later. A cool head may not always resolve arguments in your favor, but it will minimize damage.
Lose the battle; win the war.
This popular adage is often applied to relationships. If the goal is to sustain healthy partnerships, then no single argument is more important than the goal of preserving harmony between you and your mate. Anger is the enemy of long term survival. Like any mind-altering drug, it obliterates perspective and amplifies the moment. It’s impossible not to get angry in a relationship unless both parties are heavily sedated, and who wants to spend a lifetime under the influence of horse tranquilizers just to prevent the occasional spat? Battles happen, but they don’t have to lead to mutually assured destruction.
The adage applies not only to individual relationships but also to the whole of your relationships. Your past couplings can be viewed together as one meta-relationship and assessed in the same way. As with any single relationship, you can trace the ups and downs in your past as a series of phases in your romantic development. Mistakes are made and hopefully learned from. You get better at certain things through trial and error. You get hurt and learn to avoid those behaviors (or types of people) that caused it. Losing the battle and winning the war means minimizing the emotional casualties of bad relationships so you can keep fighting for the ultimate goal: finding true love.
There are romantic battles you just can’t win, and when that happens, you have to know how and when to retreat. The most famous boxer of all time, Mohammed Ali, was once asked about the key to winning an upcoming championship fight against an opponent who was known as a brutally dangerous puncher.
“You can’t hit what you can’t see,” he said.
There are men who’ll hurt you, but even the worst among them is harmless if you aren’t there to hurt. Let them apply their cruelty elsewhere.
You’ve got a war to win.
In the next chapter, we’ll talk about a wicked little virus that exists in all of us and for which modern medicine has never found an antidote—jealousy.
Chapter Seventeen
The Disease That Isn’t
How do you cure a disease that isn’t a disease?
Look at the textbook definition for “disease” from the ever-helpful Dictionary.com:
“A disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors.”[l]
Jealousy fits that definition like a glove, really. Even though it’s never been isolated in a lab, jealousy is a disorder that potently affects two organs: the brain and the heart. Like a disease, if left unchecked, it can be absolutely debilitating. And like a disease, jealousy is the product of genetic or developmental errors.
Come on, I can buy that jealousy is a learned trait, but it isn’t genetic in nature.
Jealousy itself isn’t (or at least the gene for it hasn’t been isolated yet), but it’s indelibly associated with something that is absolutely rooted in our DNA: infidelity, or at least the fear of infidelity.
Consider this study of sixteen hundred identical and non-identical female twins by the Twin Research Unit at St. Thomas Hospital in London, where researchers concluded the following: “We found that around 40 percent of the influence on the number of sexual partners and infidelity were due to genetic factors.”[li]
Forty percent of your future sexual history was determined before you were even cut free from the umbilical cord. The cliché says that when a girl tells you her number of sexual partners, multiply it by two to get the real number. It turns out that roughly half of our sexual history isn’t under our control, anyway. So, if you want to go with only mentioning half, the science says you’re entirely justified in doing so.
Science has even begun to isolate the exact genetic strain that pushes men to cheat. It’s called the allele gene, and it is present in about 40 percent of men. A study by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm showed that men who had the allele gene were twice as likely to express dissatisfaction with their marriage,[lii] and we all know where that can lead. The study doesn’t say so, but we can reasonably assume that these men were also more likely to take a lot more “business trips” and to smell faintly of their secretaries’ favorite perfume.
Like I said, only two in five men even have the allele gene, but there’s clearly a greater predisposition for marital discord with those that do. The gene is so powerful in this regard that men in the study with two copies (one is more common) of the allele were more than twice as likely to divorce as men who had none. Not only did the study show that men with this gene were far more likely to be unhappy in their marriages, it also showed similar results for their wives. A behavioral geneticist named Hasse Walum led the study, and in his findings, he said:
“Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no co
pies.”
It isn’t farfetched to imagine we’ll be able to access tests for this gene easily someday, perhaps even in the near future. Imagine being able to discover which guys are good candidates for marriage with a simple test.
You would be at least a little curious, wouldn’t you?
This doesn’t mean that every man with this gene will cheat or end up in divorce court. It just means that some men are more likely, and the predisposition goes DNA-level deep. As discouraging as this fact might be to some, there’s reason for optimism within the study also. In addition to a possible test for the presence of this gene someday, it’s likely that an “antidote” can be developed to suppress the production of the hormone linked to conjugal discord.
A cure for cheating in our lifetime? That’s a cause that anyone can get behind.
The study demonstrates that infidelity isn’t necessarily a failure of morals, or even factors within the primary relationship. Some guys are more likely to cheat than others, and their decision to do so is a result of the complex cohabitation of nature and nurture. I’m in no way excusing infidelity by people of either sex. I’m showing that the decision to be unfaithful can be the result of influences not easily attributed to known factors.
Some guys were literally born to cheat. Many don’t even know why they do it. In those cases, there’s little you could’ve done to prevent it. This fact may not provide much consolation to anyone who has suffered a cheating mate, but it should relieve the self-doubt that can plague you later. Sometimes the old chestnut, “it’s not you, it’s me,” means exactly that.
It’s not you. It’s them.
Until the science becomes available to normal people like us, we’ll have to use a combination of observation and common sense to weed out the cheaters.
It helps to listen to the birds too.
An ornithologist at the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen, Germany, observed mating patterns in more than fifteen hundred captive zebra finches from five consecutive generations. He found that some birds were far more likely to have multiple sexual partners, even when it posed no benefit within the group and had clear costs such as the potential for sexually transmitted disease.[liii]
Yes, there is bird VD.
When even the birds are willing to risk air herpes to get off, it’s pretty clear that infidelity is an intrinsic part of our animal nature. Anything that can be attributed to our genes is therefore hereditary. Thus the sons and daughters of cheating parents are naturally more likely to cheat themselves.
Only the most stringently honest among us will self-report on the subject of past infidelity. Doing so potentially cripples trust as the relationship progresses. Admitting to a history of infidelity is relationship seppuku (a nasty form of ritual suicide once observed by Japanese samurai), or it a passive-aggressive signal that your company won’t be needed much longer. If a guy admits he a serial cheater (whether due to inebriation or your own investigative prowess), he’s all but admitting that he’ll cheat on you, if he hasn’t already.
Do yourself a favor and run, don’t walk.
But like I said, most guys won’t tell you if they’ve had a problem with cheating in their romantic past. They may, however, be comfortable discussing their parents in this regard. Ask about his parents. Are they still together? If not, when did they divorce and for what reason? The latter question is obviously a delicate one, depending on how forthcoming the guy is and how sore a subject it is for him. Be sensitive and respectful in your inquiry.
Most men today are comfortable opening up over time. If a guy remains forever guarded, it means that he incapable of trust, intimacy, and/or expressing his feelings. None of these reasons bode well for your future with him. Other more daunting potential reasons for secrecy involve things like the CIA Watch List or that crawl space full of dead hookers I mentioned earlier.
(I admit those were extreme examples. Please note that most men, even the secretive ones, aren’t involved in global terrorism or serial murder.)
Inquiring about a guy’s parents is useful for a number of reasons. Even if he isn’t genetically disposed to cheat, we all tend to parrot the models our parents provided when we were kids. If we see our parents being unfaithful, it’s likely that we will be more accepting of infidelity as we grow older because it’s our primary model. This holds true for most of our parents’ behaviors. If they were loving, kind, and generous to one another, that will be our model of marriage. We may not always replicate that model well, but at least we’ve been shown how to build it.
Okay, cheating is hereditary. But when, rambling narrator, are we going to talk about jealousy?
First off, there’s no need to be sarcastic. Second, once we understand that the root causes of infidelity are no fault of our own, it becomes easier to deal with our hurt and move on. Does understanding mean acceptance, however?
That up to you to decide.
For most women, it isn’t really about the mechanics of your man penetrating some random skank behind your back. An exhaustive study conducted by psychological scientists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly of Pennsylvania State University found that the prevailing gender stereotypes about jealousy—men are more hurt by sexual infidelity, whereas women are more hurt by emotional infidelity—held true.[liv] Yet the study also discovered something more important: this difference isn’t a mere question of gender, as previously thought. The way we experience jealousy is a matter of personality.
The study found that people who value independence over commitment are far more likely to rate sexual infidelity as hurtful. Those with the opposite personality (i.e., a preference for commitment) are far more likely to rate emotional infidelity as the source of their hurt. In each case, personality, not gender, is the prevailing factor.
So, what does this study tell us about jealousy? It tells us that not all jealousy is equal. This isn’t to say that one kind of jealousy is better than any other. It only means that the reasons for jealousy are often different and, therefore, the potential coping mechanisms will be different too.
If, as the study suggests, independent-minded people are more likely to cite the actual sex act as the source of hurt, this reaction reflects an anxiety that is firmly based in ego. There is nothing inherent in the physical act of sex that makes it an exalted taboo. You get more intimate physical contact in a good, long, professional massage than you do during sex. You sweat more playing two sets of tennis outside on a hot day. But people don’t divorce over backrubs and backhands.
They divorce over sex.
So, if emotional betrayal isn’t the problem, why is the sexual betrayal so hurtful? It’s obviously ego-related, isn’t it? You don’t like the idea that your partner desires anyone else or requires someone else to fulfill his sexual needs. There isn’t anything wrong with that. We all experience fears of inadequacy to some degree, especially when we feel strongly about our partners. As psychologist Boris Sokoloff noted in his 1947 book, Jealousy: A Psychological Study:
“Jealousy is not only inbred in human nature, but it’s the most basic, all-pervasive emotion which touches man in all aspects of every human relationship.”[lv]
The key to dealing with jealousy is to ask yourself: What is at the root of it? Since we’ve established that the physical act is meaningless in and of itself, why does it bother you so much? Where do these fears of romantic inadequacy come from? What is the basis of your insecurity? Is it only because of your looks? Is there some part of your body you’ve never liked? Try to strip away all the extraneous bullshit and consider this question in earnest.
What is the real problem?
I’m reminded of a recent conversation with my friend, Holly. Due to a congenital birth defect, Holly was born with a malformed right hand. Despite being beautiful, brilliant, and immensely creative, Holly has always harbored deep insecurity because of her hand. After a recent blind date, she resignedly reported:
“It went great at first, but I could tell that, as the night went on, he was try
ing not to stare. Over dinner, I could tell it was making him uncomfortable. Things just never seemed to recover after that. He said he wanted to see me again, but I know he won’t call.”
I’ve heard variations of this story many times in my nearly decade-long friendship with Holly, and after hearing it again, I told her what I should’ve said the first time:
“You have two options. You can accept who you are, or you can continue to hate something you can never change. I bet this guy never gave more than a passing thought to this thing that you find all-consuming. And if he did, what did you lose? A shallow asshole who would never recognize what makes you special, anyway? Celebrate his departure and welcome the next guy.”
I don’t know if my words made any difference. I certainly didn’t say anything new, but that didn’t alter their essential truth. One of the hardest things in life is bridging the gap between what we know to be true and what we do when it matters. Holly agreed with me, but time will tell if she views her disability differently. There is undoubtedly someone out there who’ll embrace and love Holly completely for the rest of her life. I just hope she lets him do so when he finds her.
There is another great quote about jealousy, stated by the famed novelist, Robert Heinlein:
“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy—in fact, they’re almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”[lvi]
Jealousy, especially chronic jealousy (i.e., jealousy that exists regardless of circumstance), is a cannibalizing sickness. It eats at your relationships, but it’s merely a symptom of the illness. The cause is that essential, lifelong struggle between love and hate for the one constant: you. Jealousy is a crisis of faith. To overcome it, you must have faith in yourself first and your partner second. No relationship can survive if you don’t.
Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This Page 11