Whatever we do, vile or amazing, it seems to me that it is in an attempt to make our lives mean something. We like to see a manifestation of the impact we have on the world. Your impact is felt when you interact with others, when you see the consequences of your actions on other people. An artist creates out of their own passion, but the result — in the best cases — is to produce a work of true emotional power. A writer writes as a medium of self-expression, but also to convey to others, in the strongest terms, the lives of other people. It’s how we feel life — and how we feel that life has meaning. We feel that life has meaning when we do the things that make us feel most alive.
So in perpetuating the existence of your quad, I think what you were doing was creating a situation that had a bigger impact for you all. Being with Morten and Elena made you feel alive. All that drama: in the beginning you conflated it with passion, aliveness and meaning. After years of remaining in a comfortable but lifeless state, living according to society’s expectations, both you and Gilles desired a life with more meaning.
Have you got a life with meaning now? Yes. But you no longer try to obtain meaning through drama. Lucky for you, passion and meaning can exist without drama. Indeed, I would say now that drama acts in direct opposition to finding a life with meaning. Drama reduces your life experience. Your life has meaning without you having to inject drama into it, and you realised this when you had children. Meaning without the drama. But one doesn’t have to have children to feel alive. The expression of life in all its manifestations makes us feel alive, more so when it’s constructive. So now — against all your parents’ aspirations for your career — you’re a writer. When you write, you express life, and it makes you feel alive.
You will have a meaningful life when you let go of society’s expectations and you do those things that make you feel the most alive.
27
The First Breakup
You skipped it in the memoir, didn’t you? Still afraid of people’s judgement — because if you wrote it, it would be more real. They took you to Accident & Emergency the day after you struggled out of bed, thinking So this is how it feels to go insane.
Your marriage was ending, your relationship with your boyfriend was ending, your job was ending…your life as you knew it was over. And you thought you were having a breakdown. Worse still, people you loved and trusted told you that you’d brought it on yourself. You saw it in their eyes and heard it in their words: Blame. Accusation. Scorn. They turned their backs on you, until the only place left to go was the hospital. Because when everyone believed you were crazy, you started to believe it too.
It is in your nature to question everything, even now. Of course, seven years on, you do it from a more stable base. But the very thing that drove you to challenge convention in the first place was what you mistook for insanity. Your mother, among others, showed you her own prison of pain and fear, and because you loved her, trusted her, you wondered whether she was right and you were wrong. But it wasn’t just her. Everyone thought you were insane. And it hurt. Because when everyone around you believes that you are doing something wrong, it takes an awful lot of courage and an awful lot of self-confidence to step out and say, “No: You are wrong. This is right, for me.”
As you didn’t have that self-confidence then, you had to build it amid constant opposition. But like trying to build a house in the middle of a raging tornado, it was almost impossible.
So you sat in the surreal surroundings of the hospital, looking at your new companions: the bleeding, the drunk, the miserable. For a time, you were one of them — at least until they told you to go home and stop wasting their time with your relationship issues.
But the experience made you think. Opening your relationship is never, ever the cause of a breakup. Opening up can be (but is not always) the act of two people in a relationship that isn’t working. Like you and Gilles. Many relationships don’t work because people are drawn to one another to heal unconscious childhood wounds. Eventually those wounds drive them apart, either by healing (leading to the realization that the wounds were the only things holding the two people together), or by reinforcing the pain. If only we had the relationship skills to solve the problems that arise and cope with the healing process.
But no one is trained in relationship skills, communication skills or psychology.
When you found yourself at the bottom, existing only in a world were nothing was true, you also found Nietzsche. Philosophy and insanity are good bedfellows.
“One’s belief in truth begins with doubt of all truths one has believed hitherto.”
You credited Nietzsche for a while with saving you. Of course that’s not true. You saved you. Over the years, you have built yourself back up from the ground. You know now that the only person you can ever trust to know what is right for you is you. When people call you insane, it’s simply a measure of how differently they are trying to achieve their goals compared with the strategy that you choose to achieve your goals. It’s only the struggle of living beliefs that are at odds with the establishment’s urge to conform.
You must believe in your insanity, because it is the only thing that will keep you from going mad.
28
The Bombshell
This is hard to write. Even now. Because books only tell one side of the story. It’s not untrue…but there’s more here than meets the eye.
Gilles forwarded this message to you — you shared everything. And when you finished reading it, you felt a grim satisfaction: satisfaction that Elena had said exactly what you wanted to say. Why hadn’t you done the same as Elena, and forced your partners to choose? It wasn’t because you were some wise, enlightened being, that’s for sure. I know you believed in freedom of choice. But back then, you hadn’t realised that in order to be a true proponent of freedom of choice, words and even actions weren’t enough. So you hadn’t said the words. But that didn’t mean you hadn’t participated in creating the situation.
There’s this thing we do, those of us who are taught to suppress our own voices and communicate passively. Because communicating passively isn’t understood by those who haven’t been brought up in the same way, it doesn’t always get the results we want. And you wanted to be out of the relationship with Elena. From the beginning, she had brought up all your issues. You felt threatened, exposed and insecure. Nevertheless, you were accommodating to a fault, at least in the beginning. You compromised and pretended, until in silent but screaming agony, your pretence turned to hostility. I really sympathize. You were in terrible pain. But in your own way, you had created a situation where her ultimatum was almost inevitable to break the deadlock.
After all, you couldn’t stand to have Elena in your home. You couldn’t stand to interact with her. And knowing how she was, you could have foreseen that it would be she who would take action first. She was the go-getter.
I know that’s painful to hear. And once more, with all your conflicting personalities and issues, I don’t believe it could have been any other way. Have you learned anything? Or would you still let the situation escalate out of control, until your only recourse is breakdown?
Giving too much at your own expense, pretending that everything was OK when it wasn’t, relinquishing your dreams, compromising your integrity — in short, being dishonest about your own fears, desires and needs — led you to this point. And just like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, a situation of your own making drove you to drinking and madness.
Being the martyr and capitulating to a situation that’s hurting you doesn’t help anyone in the long run. You must care for yourself and set your boundaries; otherwise, you risk destroying yourself and hurting everyone else in the process.
29
I Do
I’m thinking of writing an article. It will be called “Why you shouldn’t be your partner’s therapis
t.” But you didn’t really learn this one here. You learned this one over the last six months. Polyamory is really tricky where this is concerned. You’re going to be an intimate part of your partner’s breakups — and worse, you’re going to have to not take sides.
“But why?” you ask. “Gilles needed me. And I knew who I supported.”
Yes, you did. And it bounced you around the drama triangle like a Ping-Pong ball. There you were, his rescuer. He was the victim, Elena the persecutor. You fed your old pattern of treating him like a child. But as soon as they got back together, it was your turn to be the victim.
I’d like to say stay out of it, but I know that’s hard. It feels like it’s in your own best interest to play the therapist, to help those you love. Yet you will always get caught in the cross fire. Worse still, you are not attracted to victims. All that therapy you did for your husband disempowered him even more, until you burned out the little passion that was left.
How was he to get the support he needed, then? Not from you. He was a big boy; he could have sorted it out by himself — though you’d never let him learn how. Of course, the risk was that he would resent you for not giving him the counselling you always had.
So the bottom line is this: at some point, you have to stop trying to fulfil your partner’s needs, because there is a line between support and desperation. You’d crossed that line awhile back. You’d created the expectation that you would always be there to pick up the pieces. You couldn’t make him stay with you by doing this. In fact, all you were doing was killing the relationship.
And here’s another thing: earlier on in this chapter, you’d had sex. But sex in a dead relationship totally isn’t worth it. And by the way: planning a baby to mend a relationship? Really? You of all people know how damaging such a thing is. Thank goodness that didn’t pan out.
Playing therapist to your partner disempowers them, eliminates attraction and risks bouncing you round the drama triangle. There’s a reason we have professional therapists. If you or your partners need therapy, use them.
30
The Great Escape
There’s a point of no return in many relationships at which things become so toxic that absence, at least for a time, is the kindest solution for yourself (and others). Knowing that point, knowing when it’s time to leave, is something we spend our whole life trying to learn. Because actually, it’s a measure of how much you know and value yourself. When you left Elena, it also meant leaving the two men you loved. It is a measure of how much you valued yourself and your own sanity to have made such a huge decision.
Truly, that was the first time that you’d been forced to put yourself before others. And for that alone, you should be grateful for the experience. Until it happened, you had an amazing capacity to tolerate intolerable behaviour, so much so that you let yourself be trampled on again and again. Had you expressed your boundaries? Naturally not: you didn’t even know them, let alone how to express them.
Many people, those with better self-esteem, wouldn’t have let it get this far. But because your self-esteem was so low, it took an enormous amount of mistreatment for you to leave. Nevertheless, I can safely say that this was your turning point. Without this, you would have remained in your state of feeling worthless…maybe for your entire life. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the shift needed to overcome it. Leaving two men you loved hurt almost worse than anything you’d ever known.
This was the first time in this entire story that you’d done the right thing for yourself. The adult thing. So it’s not really surprising that you not only started to feel better, but also inspired the events that followed. Morten left Elena, while Gilles committed to her. You all started to work your way to a brighter future. All your mistakes, all your lessons brought you here. You did this. You finally found the key to shift your paradigm.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: after breakdown comes breakthrough.
Love and accept yourself with all your humanity. It is the key to everything.
31
Somewhere down the River
Just because you’d made the first step doesn’t mean that you always did the best thing. You were still not actively creating your experience of life, but you’d realised that you could at least be responsible for it. It was difficult. Because knowing this, you still thought you could resolve your difficulties with Elena. You still hadn’t accepted that you didn’t have to include certain people in your life…for your own good.
You made plenty of the same mistakes. But you managed to admit them, and what’s more, repair them. One of them was trying again at the relationship with Elena. But even as friends, that wasn’t possible. And so you made the second adult decision of your life, which was to exclude Elena from it. No, it didn’t seem like an adult decision at the time. You were told you had problems. That was, of course, the truth. But the one problem you were starting to resolve was your need to give yourself the freedom to choose which relationships you kept and which you let go.
In a couple of years, you will read a great book by Mira Kirshenbaum called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. In it is essentially a diagnostic yes/no test for whether to stay in or leave a relationship. The test has thirty-six questions, and if the answer to even one question is “yes,” she recommends that you leave. The point of the book is to help you towards long-term happiness. It’s designed for couples (of course!) but you’ve used it many times for other relationships at all levels. In polyamory terms, your relationship with a metamour doesn’t have to be close. But in the configuration you all chose, Elena was like a wife. Even when you’d transitioned the relationship to “friends,” you lived seven minutes apart, and you saw each other on an almost-daily basis in the beginning. You threw dinner parties together.
Your relationships should enhance your life, not drain it. At the very least, you should be happier inside them than out of them. And that wasn’t the case for either you or Elena. When you read Kirshenbaum’s question, “If God or some divine being told you it was OK to leave your relationship, would you feel relieved that you could finally leave?” you finally knew that you’d done the right thing. Because the answer was a resounding yes. So you left, despite your guilt and despite your doubts. Good for you.
Your relationships should enhance your life, not drain it. If they don’t, you should consider leaving. Now.
32
The Last Breakup
Everything changes. Of course, this particular thing hadn’t yet, because it only changed after you and Gilles stopped being in each other’s lives, and by then, the book was finished. But even when the book is finished, the story still continues.
It took you years to finally be at peace with the decision not to see Elena, though. Years of questioning and puzzling. A lot of your questions arose because you couldn’t be at peace with dropping people from your life. You thought that was a sign of weakness. If you were emotionally grown enough, you thought, you could accept anyone.
That’s not true, by the way. Not because it’s impossible, just that sometimes there are huge, clashing differences. There are so many lessons, but sometimes the best lesson we can take from them is that we are better off with different people. Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes, letting those people go is a sign that we are finally improving our self-esteem. Sometimes it’s a sign of strength.
Of course, the problem wasn’t Elena; the problem was Gilles. You loved him. You wanted him in your life, even if it was just as friends. And it hurt not to see him.
But beyond wanting him in your life, you fought tooth and nail for freedom of choice. Remember lesson 16? Freedom of choice, real freedom of choice, isn’t only for you; it’s for everyone else as well.
When you finally combined all your lessons, you saw that your relationship with Gilles had been life-changing. Your relationship with Elena w
as also life-changing. And when all those lessons were learned, there was nothing else for you to give one another. Feeling hurt about it was futile. The lesson was over, and it was time for you to learn something else. But living in the past and choosing to continue to feel pain had prevented you from moving on.
There are always new lessons to be learned, new adventures to be had, and new miracles around the corner. But clinging to the past will stop you from finding them.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
A wise man once said, “You teach best what you most need to learn.” If you’d have listened to that wise man (Richard Bach, in Illusions), it would have come as no surprise to you that your career is no longer in financial analysis, but in helping others identify, reframe and release their pain.
After all, if there’s one thing you’re an expert in, it’s not Excel spreadsheets — although yes, they’re still pretty cool. It’s how to deal constructively with immense pain.
“Could we have stayed in the quad?” you ask. “Could we all be living happily together the way we first imagined it?”
“No,” I reply.
“Why not?” you ask. “If you’ve learned all of this stuff, and it can’t prevent breakups, why learn it at all?”
“It can prevent get-togethers, and sometimes that’s better,” I say. In my mind, you and I are sitting together outside that pub in Richmond looking at the swans floating by. “But it’s nice that you think I know. You forget that I’m you, only about seven years later. You could have handled it better, of course. But then you wouldn’t have any of these lessons.”
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