And I can't be holdin' on to what you gotWhen all you got is hurt
I recently very briefly touched on how much this song helped me sort my crap. It was almost like a Buddhist koan for me and that piece probably barely scratches the surface.
A koan (公案) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement from Zen Buddhist lore that is used as a meditation tool. The primary purpose of a koan is to transcend conventional thinking and provoke a deeper understanding of reality. Koans often contain elements that are inaccessible to rational thought, encouraging practitioners to explore their intuition and experience.
I think I dumped my so-called boyfriend and within a month the future ex's girlfriend kicked him to the curb in the bitchiest, most backstabbing way possible. He and I soon ended up together.
We were good friends and had been for some months already. We probably both habitually said "Penny for your thoughts." and this habit led to me uncomfortable admitting to thinking in terms of marriage very early in the relationship while he still hurting and not over what his previous girlfriend did to his heart.
I expected him to object and loudly protest that he wasn't ready for that. When he didn't, I idiotically began telling all our friends "We're getting married!!!"
Being the sharpest bulb in the box -- the BROKEN one -- it took me six months to realize I was the only one saying it and he probably didn't feel the same. I had already given up a spiffy scholarship to a prestigious university in part because I expected to marry him and when i confronted him, his lame answer was "I didn't want to hurt your feelings."
Because I had been molested as a child and he knew that and he saw me as fragile in ways that I was not, giving him a cheap excuse for his dysfunctional behavior rooted in him having problems he wanted to pretend didn't exist.
Blockquote
The issue is that if you get hit by a car, the entire world doesn't spend the rest of your life pitying you and hanging their car-related baggage on you and refusing to acknowledge they are doing so. If you get raped, every bit of sexual baggage of everyone you know will be dumped in your lap in the name of "sympathy" while people actively refuse to allow you to move on.
/Blockquote
My husband was actively keeping my hurt alive, actively keeping my negative identity alive.
I don't actually know why. He was extremely introverted and I spent 22 years of marriage getting laid two to three times a week and feeling like it was unrequited love.
I never really knew the man. I never felt loved by him. He certainly didn't support my dreams of being part of a modern two-career couple.
Like our children and me, he's twice exceptional. He has big strengths and big weaknesses and I think he didn't know how to make his life work without forcing me to be his personal servant in a 1950s style marriage and like other men I have loved, probably didn't feel lovable and couldn't imagine I would stay if I had a way out, like a well-paid career of my own.
So he didn't really want me to get over my hurt.
But at the same time my hurt was destroying me and our marriage both. I was clear that we couldn't stay together if we both continued actively breathing life into this zombie instead of letting it die a natural death and burying it.
One life but we're not the sameWe get to carry each other, carry each otherIn practical terms, having married him and accidentally had a kid before figuring out this relationship was a debacle, I needed his financial support.
Historically, marriage was a practical matter with a goal of material survival and stability. It was often arranged by the parents rather than a partner chosen freely.
Over time, I gradually did less and less for my husband. I stopped lovingly doting on him because he didn't lovingly dote on me.
I began treating it as a practical matter that I needed to cook to feed the family on one income and I needed to make sure he got up and went to work on time because I and the children were dependent on his paycheck.
I stopped making homemade pudding from scratch for dessert. It was a lot work for me with zero payoff for me.
Because of my blood sugar issues, I didn't even eat it. It was made solely for him and he treated me like a slave, knowing I couldn't really up and leave now that my scholarship was gone, I had dropped out of college and had a baby seven years ahead of schedule.
I began putting his alarm clock on the coffee table when he fell asleep on the couch rather than lug his half asleep body to bed before I retired for the night.
Literature I have read about the concept of codependency seems to be theoretical garbage oblivious to actual reality of how married couples live and the fact that they are, in actual fact, dependent on each other.
I needed his paycheck but he needed me to do all the women's work in order to keep that paycheck and it's not merely asshole behavior on his part. It's how the system is designed.
Jobs worthy of being "Real Careers" are designed with an implicit assumption that it will be filled by a man with a wife and kids.
Codependency literature often talks like it's a realistic option to LET your alcoholic or drug addicted husband sleep in his vomit until he wakes up and expect him to then clean it up.
Reality: If you do that, the smell of vomit impacts everyone in the household until it's cleaned up, he may lose his job because he overslept and he probably won't clean it up anyway.
My dad drank heavily for years. No one ever called him an alcoholic.
My mother didn't care because they had an old-fashioned marriage and, in her words, "There was always enough money and he was never a mean drunk."
It was her job to do the housework and his job to earn an income. He did that, even while drinking so heavily that he sometimes ran out of beer midweek and then idiotically accused her of drinking it, unwilling to believe he had drunk an entire case by himself in three or four nights.
It was idiotic because my mother didn't drink due to alcohol making her violently ill.
My husband didn't drink or drug. My parents had a vastly healthier relationship than we had.
That helped me think some things through and not assume "package deal" about a long list of things.