Every reader begins a story in good faith, suspending disbelief and accepting the narrator’s portrayal of events at face value. The reader’s understanding is limited to what the narrator chooses to disclose and the narrator’s subjective feelings about the story’s characters and their encounters. There’s no reason for the reader to doubt what the narrator is saying because in most fiction, narrators are reliable. They reward the reader’s good faith with an accurate and trustworthy account of everything that happens in the story.
But not all narrators are reliable. Some narrators mislead the reader, on purpose or unintentionally, due to the narrator’s inherent flaws–a psychological condition for example–which are not disclosed to the reader at the outset of the story. These flaws cause the narrator to withhold critical information from, or intentionally lie to the reader until the end of the story when the full truth is revealed. Unreliable narrators take different forms. They can be deliberately unreliable, like Amy Dunne in Gone Girl; psychologically unreliable, like sadistic maniac Patrick Bateman in American Psycho; oblivious to his surroundings, like Forrest Gump; or simply naive, like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. All unreliable narrators are untrustworthy. You’re forced to view the world through their blurry eyes until the end of the story when they put on a pair of glasses and everything sharpens. Some of my favorite stories are told by unreliable narrators. The shock and surprise in discovering that a narrator has been misleading me the entire time can make a story’s conclusion really pop in a way that a story told by a reliable narrator can’t. I live for a ‘Holy Fuck, I did NOT see that coming!‘ kind of ending. Did that really happen the way I think it happened? Did I understand this story at all? Such is the power of the unreliable narrator.
Meet Leonard Shelby
One of my favorite unreliable narrators is Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento, which came out in 2000. Leonard has amnesia, which causes him to suffer short-term memory loss and prevents him from forming any new memories. He spends the entire movie trying to figure out who killed his wife in the same attack that caused his amnesia. Since he can’t remember anything for longer than five minutes, he writes clues to himself using an elaborate system of Polaroid photographs, handwritten notes, and cryptic tattoos on his body. The story is told in a non-linear way (backwards in time) that’s totally disorienting. Even though you see the ending first (sort of), you still don’t know how or why it happened. You’re stuck in Leonard’s forgetful world, thinking his thoughts–much of the movie is narrated in his mental voice–as you try to decipher his weird tattoos and the scrawled notes he wrote to himself. The problem is Leonard keeps forgetting what these messages mean, so he has to rely on other characters to explain them. This injects even more confusion into the story because you don’t know if any of those characters are reliable or not. They could be lying to poor Leonard, or they could be telling him the truth. You just don’t know.
The mind-bending way Memento is told is so fucking good that I still remember it vividly all these years later. You and Leonard are one. You know only what he knows, and you don’t know what he doesn’t know until the end of the movie when the camera pulls back and you’re finally shown everything. It’s an awesome film, but also the kind of film you can only watch once with the same kind of thrill. I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it, but Leonard is the classic example of an unreliable narrator.
Our Unconscious Puppet-Masters
I’ve been thinking of Leonard and unreliable narrators as I make my way through a book called Subliminal – How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow, which discusses how our brains process information and how human behavior is driven by our unconscious mind. Before reading this book, I thought our brains were like supercomputers that record everything we experience with our five senses from the time we’re first able to perceive our world until the day we die, and if we can’t remember something, it’s only because time, age, physical decline, or psychological trauma prevent us from accessing the right “file” or “folder” in our memory. The file is there, but through circumstances not of our own making, we simply can’t locate it when we’re trying to recall it. After reading this book, I now understand that this isn’t how it works at all. In fact, the way memory and human behavior really work is quite troubling.
The human body sends the brain approximately eleven million bits of information EACH SECOND. This is an insane amount of sensory information. But our brains actually can only process between sixteen and fifty bits per second. That’s 16-50 bits/second of processing power versus 11,000,000 bits of information entering our brains each second, a massive disparity. If our conscious mind had to process all this incoming information, our brains would freeze. They’d turn into blue screens. The reason our brains don’t freeze is because we store a ton of that incoming information in our unconscious mind and throw unimportant shit away. Our brains don’t even record what our unconscious deems unimportant. We rely on our conscious mind for basic awareness and function, and we rely on our unconscious mind for everything else. Our unconscious mind digests everything we see, hear, taste, and touch, and then produces a condensed report of compressed information for our conscious mind to act on in any given moment.
This all happens without our awareness, allowing us to function in our daily lives without our conscious mind having to break down and understand minutiae, like processing the operation of each rod and cone in our eyes before we take a step forward, for example. Thanks to our unconscious mind, we can relax, read, write, sleep, fuck, lift weights, drive our kid to school, flirt with a stranger, and enjoy life without the blue screen constantly breaking us down. We literally could not function without our unconscious mind. It runs in the background like a massive, offsite computer server, doing all the heavy lifting that allows us to function and grow, but to us, it’s like it’s not even there at all.
Now here’s the interesting part. When it comes to our memory, our brains are not computers with trillion GB hard drives that retain events exactly as they happened, in files that we can pull whenever we want. No, our brains are like computers with compressed files that reduce our memories from Gigabytes to kilobytes, except on a much larger scale. This compression process creates artifacts and missing details in our memory.
As Mlodinow analogizes in his book:
When the image is viewed, the computer predicts, from the limited information in the compressed file, what the original image looked like. If we view a small ‘thumbnail’-sized image made from a highly compressed data file, it usually looks very much like the original. But if we blow the image up, if we look closely at the details, we see many errors–blocks and bands of solid color where the software guessed wrong and the missing details were incorrectly filled in. (p. 66)
Those “errors” he’s talking about in his analogy are lost memories. The “missing details . . . incorrectly filled in” are false memories. Yes, false. Shit that never happened, but which the unconscious mind believes actually did happen. Again, our brains can’t register most of what our senses experience in any given moment. So we miss a lot of details in our encounters with other people, places, and things. We have a lot blind spots. Missing information. We remember some things that happened–things that we (or our unconscious mind) deemed important at the time, maybe something that turned us on, or triggered us negatively the most–and we disregard the rest. This is one reason why two people who were present for a conversation may remember it totally differently.
False memories are created for a variety of reasons, including “when our expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge are at odds with the actual events.” (Mlodinow, p. 61). If we have an experience with someone that conflicts with our bias, beliefs, and prior experience, our unconscious mind may create a false memory to make what actually happened consistent with our pre-existing bias, belief, and prior experience with that person. In other words, our unconscious mind intentionally reinforces our pre-existing biases and beliefs whenever it deems it necessary. Then, when we replay a false memory in our head that false memory becomes even more ‘true’ to us. The more we remember the false memory, the more we believe it happened, even though it didn’t happen at all, or it didn’t happen exactly the way we remember it.
What all this means is that our unconscious mind makes each of us an unreliable narrator, not only of our own story, but also the stories of the people in our lives–friends, lovers, partners, parents, siblings, work colleagues, everyone.
We’re all Leonard.
Fuuuccck.
My Own Personal Leonard – Reach Out and Touch Faith
Given the dynamics described above, what happens when we get into a relationship and we’re dealing with TWO unreliable narrators? Two Leonards? Actually, four, not two: the two narrators who are unreliably narrating their own stories, and the two narrators who create flawed and unreliable narratives about the other person in the relationship. That’s a shitload of unconscious bias collecting in one place.
What fuckery ensues then? A great deal of fuckery, I submit.
It’s readily apparent that we make decisions in relationships based on unconscious factors that we’re not fully aware of at the time. Understanding ourselves, and in particular, the unconscious thoughts and biases that influence us as we make these decisions might help us make better choices and improve our lives. This has been quite an abstract discussion until now, so let me try to bring it to earth using an important crossroads from my own life: my decision to propose to my ex-wife (“Ex.” for newcomers) after two years of dating fourteen years ago. It isn’t an overstatement to say that this one decision dictated the rest of my life, literally from the moment I made that decision until now. I can’t say the same for many other life choices that I’ve made, so this is a good example to show how the unconscious mind works, and how it can lead one to make a questionable decision that has a lasting impact on one’s life.
With the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight and the passage of fourteen years, I now understand some of the unconscious influences that led me to propose to Ex. These five were the most prominent. I’m sure there were more that I’m still not aware of.
1. Self-imposed pressure to get married. When I proposed to Ex., I was 42 years-old and had never been married. This felt like failure to me. It felt like I’d missed an important train I needed to catch that might never pass my way again. After two decades of (mostly) fun-filled bachelorhood, I was finally ready to get married, start a family, have a child of my own, and become a father. When I hit 40, I began to wonder if I’d ever have a chance to do that, to create the future I wanted for myself. This was two years later. My thought process and self-directed pressure to create my own future with my bare hands made me put Ex. on a pedestal and view her as the best person to turn my dreams into reality. This isn’t to say I didn’t love her. I absolutely did. I saw promise in her and believed we could have a great life together. But if I had met her when I was 32 years old instead of 42, my mentality would have been totally different. I would have been more patient with myself and more focused on our red flags. We probably wouldn’t have lasted two years together.
2. Trying to prove to myself that I could make an intelligent relationship choice for once. Before I met Ex., I’d had a series of 1-2 year relationships that I intuited early on were dead-ends. I pursued them anyway, unthinkingly and for superficial reasons that ranged from physical attraction and extreme horniness to curing my loneliness and desire for human connection. When I ended the last one, I went to therapy for the first time in my life to figure out why I kept pursuing people who I knew deep down I didn’t want to be with long-term. I became smitten with and began dating Ex. when I was still in therapy. I even discussed her with my therapist, which gave me a false sense of confidence that I had my shit figured out when I really didn’t. Getting engaged made me double down on this false sense of wisdom, turning it into a delusional self-fulling prophecy. In fact, after several positive years of therapy that really benefited me, I ended therapy shortly after getting engaged to Ex. This was another mistake. Magical thinking will get you killed.
3. Trying to prove to myself that I could compromise on big things that really mattered to me. Three months before I proposed, Ex. and I had a big argument because she wanted to leave Williamsburg, where we were living together, and buy a house in the suburbs. I didn’t want to do that. I loved Williamsburg. I moved there four years before we met and felt really at home and happy there. For days, I went back and forth over this choice in my mind: break up and stay in Williamsburg by myself, or leave Williamsburg and go all in with Ex. I remember asking myself:
‘How long do you want to keep doing this relationship do-si-do, being selfish, not compromising, breaking up with someone, then trying to find someone new, someone ‘better,’ the next ‘perfect person’ to replace her and the things she lacks, only to discover new shit you don’t like about this new person in two or three years (or less)? Just so you can break up again and repeat this fucked up process over and over, until you’re slurping your dinner through a straw in a nursing home alone? How long do you want to keep doing this ‘me first’ shit?‘
I listened to that voice because it sounded like the voice of reason, the voice of fairness and personal growth. (I stupidly confused it with my intuition.) That internal voice, along with my false sense of confidence from therapy, made me minimize red flags about Ex. and our relationship–red flags that involved serious and fundamental things like basic communication, conflict resolution, and validating each other’s feelings when we disagreed on something. Far too often it felt like we were speaking a different language. We kept triggering each other inadvertently. I’d never encountered this before with anyone else, and these problems never went away. They plagued our relationship from soup to nuts.
I buried my red flag concerns and went with what was behind Door No. 2. I told her I was fine with moving if that’s what she wanted, that I was committed to her and the life we were going to build together, that this was more important to me than geography and where I lived. She was happy, but I wasn’t. I’d compromised on something really important to me because she’d basically given me an ultimatum: move to the suburbs or we’re done. So I was proud of myself in one sense because I’d given in on something big that mattered, but I subconsciously resented her for it. She hadn’t compromised on anything. She got exactly what she wanted. Two years later, she wanted to sell the house we ended up buying and downsize to something smaller because she didn’t want to work any more, and we couldn’t afford the house on one income. No joke.
4. Turning a blind eye to her history. This is a mistake that I keep making. There are two, critical biographical factors when it comes to vetting a person for a relationship: (i) the parental/familial dynamics of their childhood, and (ii) their recent relationship history. The first carries a lot of weight because most of our unconscious beliefs, unmet needs, and behaviors in a relationship are formed in childhood. As discussed in more detail below, that shit is embedded in our DNA, and it’s very hard to change.
The second factor is also important because unconscious baggage from a prior relationship, especially if it was recent, always infects the new one. A-L-W-A-Y-S. You don’t always know what you’re getting in a new person, not completely, and not for a long time. In many ways, you can never completely know a person. But especially in the beginning, it’s easy to overlook things because you’ve got yourself a hot new body with that new car smell, and you’re on a dopamine high. Your new person may be emotionally drained from a prior relationship because they were mistreated or because they still have unresolved feelings for the person they left behind. They may still be grieving the loss of that person, the history they shared together, and the future they envisioned for themselves. From personal experience, these thought loops can border on obsessive, and they take time–sometimes months or even years–to work themselves out. People in this situation have no emotional bandwidth for a new person, even though they may show signs of it from time to time. This is a mirage. In reality, these people are drowning in grief and regret and searching for a life-raft. Some of them have kids or jobs that drain every last drop of available obligation out of them. Or it may not be as intense as this. It may be as simple as they’re not ready to feel for you (or anyone else) what they felt for their prior partner because the timeline is too compressed and their heart is still broken. The last thing these people want is another emotional obligation to throw on top of everything they’re dealing with inside. They just want to have fun and forget their pain for a while. The hard truth is no matter how compelling these people are, they have nothing to offer in a relationship except companionship and physical intimacy. Not until they heal. Ignore red flags and believe their sugary words at your own peril.
I discovered too late that Ex. was like this, a relationship hopper who couldn’t be alone for very long. She was Pitfall Harry, swinging from relationship to relationship until she fell into a lake of alligators. Whenever that happened, she’d just hit the reset button on the Atari and start over. No muss, no fuss. When we met, she was only 2-3 years out of an earlier marriage that had ended acrimoniously, and only a few months out of a relationship. I also discovered too late that she carried a lot of unresolved grief and anger from her prior marriage into our marriage. I don’t believe she ever fully processed that loss, and I think it unconsciously made her expect the worst from me in our marriage. I never felt like I had much of a leash with her, and at some point, our marital failure became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I seriously underestimated the impact of her romantic history on our relationship. Then, like an idiot, I made this same mistake four years ago with someone else. With both of these people, my unconscious desire for human connection eclipsed my intuition and common sense.
5. My father was sick with dementia and only had a few years left to live. This seems like a pretty dumb reason to get married, but it absolutely was on my mind at the time. I felt this inexorable pull to make a powerful memory for both of us while he was still alive and functioning, to make him my best man and share a meaningful experience with him before his disease got worse. I didn’t want to wait until after he died to get married. This unconscious desire caused me to rush things. Ex. and I got married only four months after we got engaged, which is insanely quick. My father did end up being my best man, and we had a great fucking party at my wedding. I still remember the smile on his face, and it was one of the last times I saw him have fun like that. But this wasn’t worth the cost of fast-tracking such an important decision or the years of misery that came later.
My Unconscious Origin Story
I understand these unconscious factors now. I didn’t when it actually mattered, when I could change the course of my future. Back then, I was an unreliable narrator, misleading myself, embracing what I wanted to see, and ignoring what I didn’t want to see. To some extent, I’m still doing this. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear to me that I’m unconsciously attracted to emotionally needy women because the emotional support role I end up playing for them makes me feel loved and valued as a person. It’s not necessarily what they feel about me that gives me this feeling. In fact, my guess is the only thing that the two women in my most recent relationships felt for me was gratitude, appreciation, and emotional attachment, which they misinterpreted as love, creating confusion on all fronts and extending our relationships based on a mutual delusion. And to some extent, it’s not even them that I fell in love with, not completely. It’s the deep intimacy, trust, and mutual reliance that we created in the relationship that I loved, valued, and missed after the relationships changed or ended. Take those away in the course of an existing relationship, as happened last year, and I really have no use for the person because they’ve deprived me of what I value most and what makes me feel the most valued by another person.
Where does this fucked up dynamic come from? My childhood of course. I think it derives from the therapist role I played for my mother at a young age. She was deeply unhappy in her marriage to my father (definitely a two-way street) because they got married too young, didn’t know each other well, and had almost nothing in common. They got carried away by physical attraction and got married after only seven months of dating (and an extremely limited dating history before that). They married the wrong person, it’s really that simple. Then, after committing this original sin, they compounded their mistake by failing to hide their mutual misery from my sisters and I. Almost every day we got to see their blatant disrespect and contempt for each other up close and personal, at the dinner table, downstairs, upstairs, on long car rides, in restaurants, and in front of other family and friends. My parents had zero self-regulation skills and gave no fucks who was in the audience for their boxing matches (Ironically, this quality may have been the one thing they DID have in common.) So growing up, my sisters and I witnessed every fight and every angry insult. It was really fucking damaging. We loved them both, so of course it was upsetting for us to watch the two people whom we loved the most, who were our only source of security and love in the world, throw verbal grenades at each other day after day. It was a shitty model for a relationship, much less a marriage.
I was the oldest, so I suppose on some level I feared rejection and abandonment in this matrimonial nuthouse. Even though their shit had nothing to do with me, I took it upon myself to save them from each other. At one point, when I was around 9 or 10, my mother began to vent her complaints about my father to me (and only to me) in confidence. This made me feel special and important. After a while it became a normal thing for both of us. In retrospect, I would have been happier and better adjusted if she had vented to one of her friends instead, but friends aren’t always available, right? Kids are. And my mother is a private person who likes to keep her dirty laundry in house, so I totally fit the bill. In time, I subconsciously came to associate her love for me with the emotional support I provided her. I became her therapist and sounding board, martyring myself emotionally, forgetting my own needs and wants and absorbing all of her negative emotions instead–anger, depression, frustration, existential malaise. I soaked that shit up like a sponge, taking it in until she got it all out and started feeling better. Of course, I was left feeling stressed and miserable, like I was perpetually trying to catch falling dishes before they hit the ground. But perversely, I also felt valued, important, and mature.
In later years, I did the same for my father, listening to him vent as well, while trying to serve as a marital mediator between the two of them, probably out of a fear that they would get divorced. Once I got to high school and wasn’t home as much, I stopped giving a shit and told them they should just fucking get divorced because they were making my sisters and I miserable. (This angry resentment also manifests in my relationships. Once I get tired of serving as an emotional support animal for someone with no reciprocation, I can become impatient, reactive, and cutting with my partner. I didn’t always know where it came from, but I do now.)
Sidenote: let me say here that I really love my parents, and overall, I had a good childhood, far better than most people. My parents had their own unconscious shit going on. My father was born in Italy at the beginning of WWII and had no childhood of his own. Due to the circumstances of the war, he didn’t meet his own father until he was 11, and they had a lousy and abusive relationship. My mother was born in Italy at the end of the war and didn’t have the best childhood either. She tells me the story of how she had fainting episodes as a kid because there wasn’t enough food to go around after the war. They did their best with us. No parent is perfect, and it’s important to view people in their full context before judging them.
My parents’ misery has subconsciously distorted my understanding of how love and relationships are supposed to work, and how my own needs are supposed to be met in a relationship. I’m 55 years old, and I’m still figuring this out. It’s become obvious that I have more blind spots than I previously thought, and I’m unconsciously trying to reprise the therapist role that I used to play for my mother by pursuing women who need the same things she needed, but who, unlike her, discard me once they get what they need from me and discover that I’m a flawed person with negative traits just like everyone else (including them). Extrapolating a bit, I may be unconsciously choosing women who will help me live out my greatest childhood fear: rejection and abandonment because no matter what I do for them, it’s not good enough, they’re going to leave me eventually. And to ensure that happens, I have plenty of my own unconscious behaviors to manifest whenever I need them to, in a classic form of unconscious self-sabotage.
Totally fucked up, but that’s what the unconscious mind does–it returns to what it knows best and where it’s most comfortable. It’s up to me to break that fucked-up pattern by understanding myself better, and I will.
We Can Run, But We Can’t Hide From Our Unconscious Mind
The word ‘love’ is just a word. It means different things to different people, and there are different kinds of love. In retrospect, I feel that what Ex. and Ex. No. 2 (let’s call her ‘XX’ from now on), really “loved” about me was the seemingly bottomless emotional empathy I provided them at the beginning of our relationships. How I showed up for them, built them back up, filled their cup, and gave them a healthy dose of male attention, affection, and dopamine. How I initially demanded little or nothing from them emotionally in return. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. But even the biggest empath, even the most devoted emotional support dog, can’t do it forever. At some point, even they need their love reciprocated in a similar way.
Apparently my time limit before resentment kicks in is about three years. Around that time I begin to begrudge my one-sided emotional role and a “love” from them that I perceive to be (fairly or not) selfish, inadequate, and limited when mine isn’t (in my head at least). I begin to resent that when I express my needs and wants, or show a part of my personality that they may not like, they view all of this as a catastrophic deal-breaker instead of navigating it with love and care like I try to do with them. Rather than view me in the full context of my life and love me for who I am in my entirety, not just the things they like about me, their Narrative about me morphs from one that idealized me too much in the beginning of our relationship, giving me the benefit of every doubt, even when I didn’t deserve it, into a Narrative that damns me for every mistake that I make, assumes the worst about me, and begins to justify their search for greener grass.
This isn’t love. I know couples who experienced infidelity, addiction, psychological issues, and conflicts over big life decisions, and they’re still together. Real love sees past negative qualities to the whole person and works out problems unless something or someone is truly unsalvageable. When a person doesn’t do that, it means that they don’t really love you, at least not in the way we all need and deserve. It’s hard to accept that someone doesn’t love you the way you loved them, or the way you initially thought they did, but I’m a big believer in facing undeniable truths. And maybe this is my problem too: maybe I give my love away too easily and to the wrong people. Maybe I don’t make them earn it the way I should, the way they make me earn theirs. Maybe I’m the idiot. Maybe my unconscious mind will keep making me repeat my childhood role with my mother until I wake the fuck up.
When Two Narratives Go to War, One is All That You Can Score
Yes, I appreciate the irony (and arguable hypocrisy) that I’m also an unreliable narrator, and this is my Narrative. Both of these women likely would disagree with much (all) of what I’m saying. (It’s you, Tim, you’re the problem, it’s YOU. At tea time, everybody agrees.) One of our Narratives is full of shit, right? They can’t both be right. All of our narratives, mine included, derive from the dirty and distorted lens through which we view the world, ourselves, other people, and our experiences. Whose lens is cleaner? Does it ultimately matter?
No, it doesn’t. But when a relationship ends, sometimes painfully, I think it’s important to understand the fallibility of a former partner’s Narrative about you and view it in its proper context. This is not easy to do when you’re feeling like rejected meatloaf and imagining them eating a 32 oz. Porterhouse in the Maldives without you, but you need to remember that this person didn’t reject you in your purest, realest, and most accurate form, your true self. No, they rejected the fogged up, muddy, and distorted version of you that they saw through their dirty lens, the warped idea of you they formed in their head based on unconscious factors you will never know about, much less understand: their worst experience with you, whatever their friends and therapist have said about you, their childhood relationships with their parents, their prior experiences in life, the temporary impact of a new infatuation/dopamine host, and the trauma from an unprocessed past relationship. It’s not your fault that this Unconscious Poop Melange formed a black cloud over your head, muddied their lens beyond repair, and limited the possibilities of what you could achieve together. It’s not their fault either. It just is.
But no, ultimately it doesn’t matter whose Narrative is right and whose is wrong. It’s a moot point because the decisions we make in life are all about how we feel in any given moment based on the unconscious influences that drive us. Humans are gonna human. People are going to do what they want regardless of the source motivation, whether conscious or unconscious, accurate or inaccurate, or whether it’s healthy or not. I’ve done this myself. None of us will ever be able to fully understand, much less change or influence the unconscious bias, trauma, or beliefs in another person. We can barely do this for ourselves! Someone else may not understand who they are or why they’re doing what they’re doing. And they may not be very interested in finding out either, especially if it means questioning a choice that’s making them happy for now or cutting off a reliable dopamine supply. Ignorance can be bliss. Pleasure is popular. Pain and deprivation are to be avoided.
Clearly, I’m not one of those people. Or maybe I’ve had my nose bloodied one too many times. What I want for myself is to become more aware of the unconscious factors that are driving MY behavior. I want to understand myself better and make better choices in the women I pursue and the friends I make. I want to learn to self-regulate better by understanding the source of my emotions whenever I’m triggered by something and overreact. I won’t be able to accomplish any of this without engaging in this kind of analysis and self-reflection. I’m not big on repeating the same mistakes in life. It wastes my time, impedes my growth, and invites unhappiness into my life. I’ve had enough.
I’ll end this long-winded post with this. Sometimes, if you wait long enough, the unreliability of a former partner’s Narrative about you (and yours about them) will come to light in a way you didn’t expect. This is a true gift indeed. Seven years after we separated, Ex. and I now have an amicable coparenting relationship, and we’ve even become pseudo-friends again. I spent Thanksgiving at her house last November for the first time since we separated, and I almost fell off my chair when she texted me asking if I wanted to join her and our daughter in St. Lucia this summer. (I respectfully and carefully declined.) When I had to travel to Utah and Chicago for work a few weeks ago, she stayed at my place with her dogs so it would be easier for her to take my daughter to and from play rehearsal (she lives 25 miles away from my daughter’s school).
If you had told me that any of this would happen two years ago, much less seven years ago, I would have told you to stop sniffing glue.
Did I suddenly become Mr. Awesome in her eyes? Am I now a Self-Regulating Ninja, the master of my domain like some kind of Buddhist monk? Fuck no. I’ve evolved since we were married, but I haven’t changed that much. My guess is that her Narrative about me has softened with time because she can now see me in a broader, less judgmental context. I’ve (finally) learned how to communicate with her in a tone that doesn’t automatically trigger her (i.e., pause, take a deep breath, wrap every word in cotton candy, then bubble wrap, then surround it with styrofoam peanuts, then think three times before speaking and re-read three times before hitting send.) I think she sees that I’m a good father to our daughter, and maybe this resonates with her on an unconscious level because she never had a real father to support her. But most importantly, I think she acquired a different perspective on me after having been in a serious, three-year relationship with someone else after our divorce. Their relationship started out blissfully, as most do, and progressed to the point where they bought a house and moved in together (the house she’s in now). Even though I’m not interested in ever getting back together with her again, I felt a twinge of jealousy when their relationship started. I also felt like they rushed into it, and she was still chasing the relationship dragon. I normally wouldn’t have cared, but I was pissed about the impact of her seemingly thoughtless decision on our daughter, who was six at the time. But I said nothing. Of course, over time, as usually happens, she discovered things about him that she didn’t like. We discussed it after they broke up–her confiding in me about this was another surprise–so I know some of what went wrong and what he did and didn’t do that she deemed to be deal-breakers. To her credit, they tried couples therapy way sooner than we did in our marriage, but it didn’t take. Then things went badly sideways at the end, and she had a hard time getting him to leave the house. The stress of forcing him to move out gave her shingles.
I’m proud to say that I never gave her shingles.
I think that relationship changed her opinion about me in a way that nothing else could have. Yes, he’s an overreactive dick sometimes, but maybe he’s not as big a dick as I thought. We’ve now known each other for 15 years, so we have a better reference point for each other, we communicate better, and we get less triggered by each other than we used to. Of course, this is easier when we have nothing invested in each other except our daughter, and we don’t have to be around each other 24/7. I also know that part of her new familiarity with me is driven by the fact that she hasn’t had a man in her life for over a year now, so I’m not going to read into this too much. But for a woman like her who historically craved male attention and validation and couldn’t be alone for long, being single for a year is impressive to me. It’s a sign of growth. If she ends up meeting someone, things may shift again, but I don’t think we’ll ever get back to the miserable place we once were. I’m good with the status quo and hope it continues because it benefits our daughter, who is my priority in life.
My changed dynamic with Ex. belies the distorted and over-the-top Narratives we formed about each other after we separated. Those Narratives, like all narratives, contained a kernel of truth, but those kernels were covered in layers upon layers of bias and distorted memories acquired through our dirty lenses. But here’s the thing about Narratives: they can and should change when they encounter new and irrefutable facts. We don’t have to be as blind as Leonard. Sometimes being as blind as Leonard is a choice we make and continue to make for ourselves throughout our lives. Choice and destiny are two different things.
Reliable or not, this is my Narrative for now, and I’m sticking to it.
