Dear Sugar,
I’m seeing a woman I love and I believe she loves me, but she’s very insecure. This manifests in several ways, but the most disconcerting for me is that whenever we go anywhere in public, without fail, she accuses me of checking out some girl. It’s not a generalized accusation; she will hone in on one specific person wherever we are. I know I am not doing this, if I am looking at anyone it is certainly not consciously. A few times I’ve gotten her to show me who specifically I am apparently checking out, and almost without fail, I’ve never even laid eyes on the woman she points to.
I wish I could learn to let this roll off my back, but the fallout is that every time we enter any social setting, the evening ends with my girlfriend sad and withdrawn, and me feeling angry because I view this as a trust issue. I truly, really, from the bottom of my heart don’t feel I have a wandering eye or am doing anything to bring this on. I wish I was, because then I could do something to fix it. But now I feel trapped and helpless, and I am at the point where I don’t think I can handle social settings with my partner anymore. This is the person I want to spend my life with, literally every other facet of our relationship is wonderful, but I am out of ideas. Sugar, you name it and I’ll try it.
Signed,
Dead Ahead
Dear Dead Ahead,
This is one of those seems-like-a-small-thing-but-is-actually-a-huge-thing things, sweet pea. You say that “every other facet” of your relationship with your girlfriend is wonderful, but I’d say the inability to be in a social setting with her without it devolving into a psychodrama is a pretty key facet. You’re right that this is a trust issue, but it’s also a partner-who-can’t-take-responsibility-for-her-problems-so-she-makes-them-yours issue. And I’m guessing both things spill over into other parts of your relationship that may seem acceptable to you now, but won’t over time.
It might be a comfort for you to know you aren’t alone in having a lover who doubles as a jailer. Here’s a small sampling from my “He/she is perfect except for…” backlog:
He goes ballistic if certain male friends comment on my Facebook page, even though I have zero sexual interest in anyone but him. Yesterday, he said he wants me to “unfriend” a few particular men and when I said I didn’t want to he used this as “proof” that these male friends held some interest for me.
She’s become obsessively jealous of my so-called “hot” co-worker, even though I like this woman only as a colleague/friend. It’s impacting my job because I’m constantly trying to avoid situations at work that involve her (simple things, like declining offers to join groups for lunch if the “hot” co-worker is going) because it would provoke my girlfriend and we’d have a big fight.
My new girlfriend insists I have nothing but extremely minimal contact with my ex, even though she knew from the start that my ex and I have been like family for years (and our friendship is entirely non-romantic).
He suspects I’m cheating on him whenever I go out with my friends or want to do something by myself because his former lover was unfaithful. It’s like clockwork: I go out and when I return home we have a big fight about it. Sometimes I don’t go when friends invite me out just to keep the peace.
My husband can’t come to my high school reunion with me because of a commitment he can’t get out of, but he’s furious that I want to go alone because he thinks I’ll hook up with someone, which is absurd.
We are all jealous sometimes. It’s normal to occasionally worry that your partner is interested in someone other than you. The airing and sharing of those doubts and insecurities is both natural and good for a relationship. Such honesty allows a couple to make accommodations and agreements that nurture rather than deteriorate a romantic bond. But that’s not what’s going on with you, Dead Ahead, and that’s not what’s going on with any of these letter writers either. What you all have in common is that your partners have opted to use their jealousies and insecurities to punish and control you. I’ll be mad at you if you…maintain a meaningful friendship or go out with friends without me or have lunch with a co-worker who others find attractive or interact with certain people on Facebook or attend your high school reunion or glance around the room where other women might be.
This is called emotional blackmail. This is what your girlfriend is doing to you, darling. I’m sure she’s a lovely person. I’m sure she suffers miserably over her insecurities. I’m sure she has no intention of hurting you when she makes her accusations. And I’ll bet she feels crushed inside when she spots the woman she imagines you want more than you want her and even more crushed when she accuses you of such. But that doesn’t make it okay.
So let’s talk about how you can make it stop.
There are times when it’s reasonable to be jealous and suspicious of our lovers. When they’ve lied to us or are currently lying to us, when they’ve recently proven themselves to be untrustworthy, when a sexual or emotional betrayal has been revealed and trust has yet to be regained. Jealousy and suspicion in these cases are rational responses to real betrayals. They are not emotions that one hopes will define the relationship forevermore, but rather a temporary state of affairs to be grappled with until trust is re-established or the relationship ends.
There are times when it’s unreasonable to be jealous and suspicious of our lovers. When they have not lied to us, when they’ve proven themselves to be trustworthy or re-built a broken trust, when there is transparency regarding their relationships and intentions with friends, coworkers, exes, Facebook pals, and women who happen to be sitting on the other side of the room.
As I’ve previously noted, it’s quite clear that your girlfriend falls in the unreasonable camp. This doesn’t make her a terrible person. It just makes her a difficult person to have a sustainable and healthy romantic relationship with right now, as is true of all the other partners in the letters I quoted above. Noticing the presence of other human beings when one is out and about with one’s lover is normal. So is conducting meaningful friendships, chatty Facebook interactions, and warm conversations at high school reunions with sexually viable people. None of those things is worthy of condemnation. Repeatedly doubting the intentions of those we trust is.
When people allow dark crazy thoughts to rule their actions and emotions they like to drag other people into that dark crazy space, too. That’s the reason your girlfriend refuses to believe you when you say you don’t know what she’s talking about when she claims you’re looking at other women. She wants you to live in the dark crazy space with her, perhaps because having you there makes her feel safe. I don’t know what’s causing her to behave as she does, but it seems apparent that she has issues with self-esteem. Instead of owning up to that and confiding in you that for no reason whatsoever she feels like a jealous and insecure maniac whenever you’re together in the presence of a woman she finds sexually threatening, she’s opted to cast you as a lying, woman-leering cad.
Her decision to do this is her problem. Your willingness to go along with it is yours.
It’s time you stopped being willing. You do this by setting boundaries. I suggest you tell your girlfriend in the most lovingly direct terms that she has problems that you are neither responsible for nor capable of solving and that, while you are there for her if she should endeavor to honestly confront them herself, you will no longer appease her delusions by tolerating her disrespectful behavior regarding your nonexistent interest in other women. Tell her you love her and you believe you may want to spend your life with her but for this one thing and you really aren’t looking at other women with sexual interest and the fact that she won’t believe you is both hurtful and nuts and you won’t put up with it anymore.
And then don’t. Really don’t. Be as patient and understanding as you can be if your partner indeed chooses to confront the irrational jealousy demons in her head, but maintain your clarity regarding what you will not accept in your relationship. Doing so is the most loving thing you can possibly do—for both you and your girlfriend.
If you have been trustworthy, you deserve to be trusted. That’s your line, your boundary, the one you will not allow others to cross or drag you over. I hope your girlfriend finds the strength and clarity she needs to respect this in you and also in herself, but if she won’t or can’t, you need to cut her loose. I know that sounds tough, but spending the rest of your life having nonsensical arguments about which woman you’re allegedly ogling is tougher. A long-term relationship with an emotional blackmailer is a soul-sucking spirit death. And it’s a death you sign up for all on your own. Don’t.
Yours,
Sugar
***
A Note From Sugar:
Hey sweet peas! Thanks for reading my column. I need to take a little summer hiatus over these next few weeks. I’ll be back on Thursday, August 4 with a new column.
xo
Sugar
28 responses
Yes. I also highly recommend the book Emotional Blackmail by Susan Forward. Lots of great tips for managing the crazy in there. Good luck!
As always, your column is more relevant to my life than I would have expected when I started reading. Thank you! But could you give some specific tips on what to do after telling the emotional blackmailer you won’t put up with it anymore? You say: And then don’t. Really don’t. But how does one really not?
I think that’s the really scary part for those of us on Dead Ahead’s side of this dynamic. After living with the dysfunction for a long time, we, too, actually feel safer in that dark crazy space. Just walking away or never answering the phone again is terrifying.
WORD. Soul-sucking Spirit Death is letting people (the beautiful, the troubled) drag you into the dark. Me? I know it the whole time it’s happening, my guts tell me. It’s the doing what they say that’s the hard part.
Sugar, you are the tower of song.
I’d like to put a word in here: Jealous girlfriends/boyfriends don’t necessarily get better. Sometimes they get dangerous. A girl I knew from high school lived with her boyfriend’s unreasonable jealousy for a long time before trying to get away from it, too late. Be safe out there, people.
I’d be very interested to hear Sugar’s advice to the girlfriend in question — how would one even begin to tackle solving that problem within themselves?
Is it possible I just read a Sugar column and didn’t cry? But that’s a good thing, I think…sometimes straight-up advice is better than heart-crushing, soul-wringing, crying-at-the-computer stories. Last week’s was tough so this week I appreciate the break. And the good advice! We all have insecurities. But the way we handle them matters, especially with those we love. Good call, Sugar.
I expect a few of those heart-breakers when you’re back, though.
If this man really loves her then it should be worth it to him to help her with her insecurities. Sure, it’s a soul sucking spirit death, but the letter writer never indicated how he treats her. While it’s up to her to feel secure about herself, if he never takes the time to make her feel special, let her know she is beautiful and unique and that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her-well her insecurity seems just that much more rational to her. She can mill around in her dark space because she feels justified. Too often we take our partners for granted and then feel frustrated when they behave jealously. Jealousy is intolerable, but it can be helped with more than simply refusing to deal with it any longer. If her jealousy and insecurity only manifests itself negatively in this way, then perhaps he could tell her what she means to him, lavish her with just praise, then firmly explain that if she continues to accuse him of ogling women, each time she does so he is going to end the date and drop her off at home. if she continues to behave this way after he has laid out exactly what she means to him, then the relationship is in trouble. Insecurity is so sad. She is not entitled to him complimenting her everyday while wearing blinders in order for her to feel better, but she may need to hear concisely spoken kind words so she can hear how much he loves her and perhaps what an idiot she has been to be accusing a man who feels so deeply for her.
I was on the other side, the psycho-girlfriend side. My insecurities with him caused me to go through intense feelings of jealousy and despair, and maybe this heightened state also spilled over into my love for him. We never addressed it in an adult fashion, head-on, and did something about it to develop the relationship, but it was my fault that I didn’t draw my own boundaries in some very reasonable compromises (no, I don’t think it was ok that he slept in the same bed with his ex-wife when he went to visit her, but he fully believed that if there was no sex between them then I had no right to be jealous). He eventually did leave me for someone else, in a brutal act of lies and betrayal. I am afraid to enter any kind of relationship because of my jealousy responses. More growing up to do…Thank You Sugar!
Thanks Sugar!
No on has earned a break more, dear. Here’s wishing you great weather, plenty
of sidewalk chalk and a healthy dose of sweet relaxation.
In addition to the many good self help books out there, I would encourage anyone with issues like the jealous girlfriend to seek therapy. It’s a safe place to work through a lot of issues and there are a lot of different kinds so you can find a technique that appeals to you. The harder part is finding a good therapist–ask around for recommendations. If he wants to work it out with her, I would also highly suggest couples therapy or pre-marital counseling before making the commitment to spend the rest of their lives together. It’s a safe, objective place to learn how to communicate with one another.
I am thankful for every person I’ve ever been in relationship with because every relationship helped me grow and evolve as a person. I’m 51 now. When I was just starting my Saturn Return just shy of 29, I embarked upon 3 1/2 years of hell with a guy I’ll call P. P did precisely what this woman is doing and it was so uncomfortable for me to be constantly accused of imaginary infidelities, that I *let him* cut me off from all my friends. After being together for almost 3 years, I convinced him to go to couple’s therapy with me. The therapist gave me a piece of chalk and told me to draw a circle around myself on the carpet. Then she told P to do walkie fingers over towards me. He walked across the chalk line, up my leg and when he was all the way up to my groin, I violently pushed his hand away. The therapist asked me if I understood what just happened. I said no. She said, “The chalk line was your boundary. You let P cross your boundary and get dangerously into your space to the point where you panicked and pushed him away. This is the formula for boundaries: ‘This is my boundary. Don’t cross it unless you are invited, but don’t go away.’”
What I learned from this session, which was the only one he came to with me, was that I had been a kid who wasn’t allowed to have boundaries and as a still fairly young adult, I had no idea how to set them and have them. So I started the process. In the end I finally got P out of my life. After I had done so and I was miserable, a friend of his broke “biker’s code” because he liked me and felt sorry for my suffering, asked me over and he and his wife sat me down and told me that P had been lying to me and cheating on me and then bragging about it to his biker buddies for years. The more I would set boundaries, the more he’d go out on me as some kind of secret (to me) punishment for asserting my rights as a being. While he was accusing me of infidelities, it was HE who was committing them. That’s called Transference.
The therapist I had in the aftermath told me he had been my “piece of gold” because due to his jealousy and abuse, I had begun the journey of learning how to set boundaries in healthy ways. And those boundaries included my right to seeing the world through my own eyes and trusting my own inner voice rather than letting someone else dictate how I’m supposed to see the world and feel about what I see.
What I realized years later was that if I had had a good grasp on setting boundaries, P and I would have never gotten together in the first place because as the 51 year old I am now, I don’t and haven’t for many years allowed anyone to trample over the boundaries I set.
All this to say, controlling, irrationally jealous people tend to hook up with people who really, really, really need to get busy with their own boundary work, AND trust their own beauty and goodness in the world.
Today if my wife (yes, I have a wife now) did anything with me even remotely like P did, it would get cut off at the pass and there would be BIG lesbian process around it, new boundaries would be set and if trust had been compromised that would definitely be verbalized and acknowledged. Then *together* we would tend the injury and see the healing process through.
I wish I knew then what I know now, but there you have it. I’m grateful to have learned the lessons.
It can be one of the most difficult, frightening experiences of a life, to draw boundaries for ourselves, or for others, and uphold them. It’s taken me a long time to learn that and I’m still terrified that I’ll make my boundaries too tight, too loose. I was foot-stuck in the trap thinking that there is a “just-right” setting. It is far too easy to set boundaries that we know we can’t keep, to let the lines slip free. That won’t help us learn self respect; what we need before we can learn to be disciplined.
Self respect is tough. Respect for others, enough to do the hard thing, holding someone else to an agreement when you’re used to letting them slide, is tough. Here’s what someone told me: “Expect to make mistakes, try and be accepting of exactly how you failed. Be merciful.”
Yes. Simply yes.
You nailed it again, Sugar.
It’s one thing for someone to say, “I have abandonment/insecurity issues. So, sometimes I get scared and upset and act out. I want you to know that it’s not about you. It’s my stuff and I’m working on it.’
But, as you noted, this woman is not owning her issues. She’s putting them on Dead Ahead. And, as long as he tries to ‘fix things’ with/for her, she’ll keep doing it.
Thanks Sugar, I am eternally grateful for your response. You definitely get it, I can’t even begin to tell you how much I identified with all five of those letters you quoted.
My partner acknowledges she is insecure. We have attended couples therapy numerous times (Maddy’s chalk boundaries exercise included). Having her acknowledge that this is “her” problem doesn’t make it any easier for me unfortunately. I feel like I know where to draw the line, I just have no idea how to prevent her from dragging me across it.
Dead Ahead,
You might’ve already tried this, but just in case…since it seems that she is at least nominally willing to acknowledge that this is her issue, but the situation keeps unfolding in a way that makes it your issue…might it help to develop a set protocol, with the help of your therapist, that you both agree to, that you will adhere to when this situation arises? I’ve had great success with this tactic in handling a couple of very difficult people who liked to make their issues mine — what tends to derail good intentions about boundaries is not having a protocol in place for the problem situation.
It might go something like this: you both agree that if she verbalizes suspicion, you are allowed to remind her that her reaction is not reflective of what’s happening. Once she is reminded, she has to acknowledge that this is her pattern behavior. She is free to verbalize that she feels confused, vulnerable, insecure…whatever she is feeling, but she is not allowed to accuse you of something you’re not doing. You are allowed to support her need to verbalize what she is experiencing, but you don’t defend yourself against an accusation that is in no way reflective of reality. You both literally write out a protocol, sign it, and allow a neutral third party, such as your therapist, to keep it. Then you try it for a week or two, go back to the therapist, and report how it went.
If she is absolutely unwilling and/or unable to get down there in the blood and guts of the pain that causes her to act out in this way, then yes, you have a really tough decision to make. As Sugar points out, you may have to prevent her dragging you across the line by walking in the opposite direction. But something like a mutually agreed-upon framework might be worth trying first, because it can be pretty baffling to figure out how to get out of a habitual emotional way of responding.
The person may be willing to *acknowledge* it is her problem but she isn’t *owning* it. Big difference.
I was with someone for a while who acted in a similar fashion, except she was fixated on the idea that I was in love with one particular friend of mine (we were close but not at all attracted to one another). After repeated protests of my innocence, I finally accused her of being in love with a male friend of hers I also knew. She was truly shocked, and could honestly not believe I thought that. I responded that I didn’t think that, and that her accusations felt equally ridiculous to me. That made her really aware for the first time, I think, although the issue did come up again after a short period. I don’t think she ever really believed in me until we broke up and I didn’t start seeing that friend romantically.
I found the column very difficult to read. I had to take several long breaks from reading, then made myself go back. Decades ago (I’m 73) I was in that kind of relationship. It started when I was 16 – my mother informed me solemnly that I needed to know that the school friends who came to my house were coming to see her. They were her friends, they only tolerated me – that I, in fact, had no friends. She was a lively, likeable woman without any friends of her own. I didn’t argue or respond in any way when she made this pronouncement, but I was alarmed. She & I had always been very close & we got along well. At 17, I got a job – Mum suddenly flew into a rage that I’d done that without asking her permission. I was rejecting her as surely as the time when I was 6 months old & I pushed her away when she was holding me in her arms. (One of the first signs of the infant’s individuation). I’d never heard about that “rejection” of mine before. Mum’s mother died when I was 20. She had lived with us because Mum would never leave her mother, not even to get a job although she was single until she was 31. Mum ordered me daily to “get rid” of my friends – people I’d met at university & at work. She hadn’t met them, but it sounded to her as if they were “bad for” me. I kept the friends (& the job). She demanded that I tell her everything about my life & gave me less & less privacy until I was in Hell. I felt like a stinking piece of garbage. If she met my boyfriends, she believed that they were attracted to her, not to me. She also took them aside to tell them that I “would make a lousy wife & a rotten mother”. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I managed to drag myself out of there (losing weight, hair falling out, & stuttering for the first ever)to a place of my own. That place was the apartment vacated by my closest friend who had just died of cancer at 25. But the verbal abuse went on – Mum was now in a permanent rage that never let up. At 32 I AT LAST went into therapy& I changed my life. By this time my father had not a single friend, had quit the men’s religious organization whose company he’d valued. He had retired, but had dropped all hobbies & interests outside the home – never went out except to attend Mass with Mum on Sunday,or to go to the liquor store to get her enormous bottles of scotch. He, who had never used alcohol, began to drink, too. He had long ago been sucked into her dark place & everything Mum said about me (all bad) was true for him. I left the church & saw no reason to tell my family, but they found out. Uproar – Mum saw it as a rejection of the family tradition yadda yadda, but really it was solely about her. In Fact, it wasn’t about any person – it was that I could no longer say the Creed & mean it, & I would be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise. Not a good enough “excuse”, of course. Immediately after my therapy was done, I went to their house with my boyfriend to tell them that I had quit my job (responsible, lucrative one) & was going to go camping across the country & wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone. My bachelor uncle (Mum’s brother) , who lived with us (he wasn’t “allowed” to leave & had no friends, no hobbies etc.) shut himself in his bedroom along with his brother (a priest who was staying there on furlough from his mission in Taiwan), thus avoiding the fray. After 5 hours of non-stop battling, I said goodbye. Mum said I wasn’t going anywhere. Dad ordered me to stop all this nonsense about living away from my mother & to come back “home” where I belonged. (I’d been on my own for 7 years). No one said goodbye. My uncles wouldn’t respond to my knocks even though I reminded the priest (through the closed door) that he’d be going back to Taiwan & I might never see him again. Throughout, I never lost my cool although I said my piece clearly. After an absence of several years, my self-esteem was back. I never went “home” again. I settled on the farthest coast with my boyfriend (husband, then). 18 months later, Mum, Dad & bachelor uncle arrived on my coast, in my city. Less abuse because of my husband’s presence, but no real change. Dad suddenly died in a few months, & I was pregnant. When the baby was born I became a quiet tigress. Took Mum aside & said that she would no longer abuse me if she wanted to see me & her grandson. My husband had showed me the ways in which I cooperated in what he called the mum/daughter dance, & I quit dancing. Mum stopped drinking & at long last began to understand that the rejection she felt wasn’t coming from outside her. We became very good friends & she was a wonderful grandma for 5 years. Definitely, she did need professional help & would, I’m sure, have gotten around to it, but a sudden physical illness took her life. I still have some trouble forgiving myself for reaching a suicidal brink before quitting the doormat role. My wonderful kid grew up happy, left home at 19 1/2, independent, self-sufficient, intelligent & self-aware, knows how to be a good friend, & he has a great many. We’re very close but we’re both aware of boundaries, & never dream of crossing them. I’m not evn a tiny bit jealous of his life; I have my own. Life is good!
Sage advice Sugar…as usual. I’ve dated this type & getting away from them is the best thing that I ever did. Love ya, girlie….enjoy the break
This is an excellent and timely piece. My husband was like this in the beginning of our relationship, he would create imaginary abandonment situations due to his overwhelming fear of abandonment. Thankfully, with therapy and lots of reassurance (perhaps on my part, TOO much, but I never think there’s too much reassurance if it’s all true) he has gotten over it and we can laugh about some of the funny things he had claimed in the past.
If Dead Ahead’s girlfriend is like I was, she has internalized the message that there can only be one woman who is hot enough to attract all the men, and the men have no choice in the matter: they have a biological imperative to trade up if at all possible. Love as a cold, analytical zero-sum game. Mix this with the vortex of low self-esteem already present in my head when I was younger and the result? World’s worst girlfriend. Oh, I got dumped so many times – ironically, no one ever left me for someone else. They just left because they couldn’t take it. I deserved it every time.
It took years of therapy and one very understanding boyfriend to get me out of it. The boyfriend was always firm with me, never angry, at least once he figured out it wasn’t about him or my trust in him, it was about the mess in my own head. He told me how much my accusations hurt him and explained that deep down I knew he’d never cheat on me, so something else had to be going on. He was right. We’re married now and I still have to occasionally face down my own self-loathing, but at least I know that’s what it is and that it has nothing to do with him.
Dead Ahead, it’s a hard road being in love with someone who is chronically insecure and takes it out on you. If you want to stay with her, Sugar’s tips on firm yet gentle boundary-setting are excellent – I should add that if you yell at her, this will validate her view of the world and romance and you as generally hostile towards her. I’m not saying don’t ever express your anger to her, because you’re hurt and she’s irrational and keeps hurting you and you shouldn’t have to swallow all your anger when someone is being mean to you. I’m just saying shouting at her will will feed her twisted worldview, so try other strategies if you can.
I could be slightly off here, but I’d like to add that I think these kinds of jealousies and insecurities are something a lot of women struggle with in particular. I’m not sure how or if you could suggest this to her, but honestly something that helped me a lot with my own insecurities was reading about feminism. Women are taught from an early age that they are not skinny enough, not beautiful enough, not like the women in the movies or on the covers of men’s magazines. We are taught that our success is measured by how we are viewed in the eyes of men, against a criteria that were not set by us; we see one another as competition rather than potential friends. Once I started to unravel these myths in my head, I could stop pouring belief into them and started pouring it into myself. It really did help my confidence, and provided a framework to understand where some of those insecurities were coming from, so that I could have the strength to explore and own my dark spaces.
Dead Ahead,
Try assuring her that she needs to be more confident in herself. There’s no reason for her to think those other women are better than her. That her doing this to you doesn’t make you love her less, but may be the thing that does it some day if it keeps going on.
Wow. A friend just recommended this site to me, and the very first letter I read is exactly what I needed to hear. I have a lot of work to do on boundary-setting. It is good to read about others’ experiences with it.
At times I feel that I can relate to the girlfriend in this situation and I’ve sought therapy because of it and other self-esteem-related issues. One thing that helps me to center myself when a wave of irrational fears come over me is to refer to a list of unique and positive qualities I’ve made about myself and keep on hand. It reminds me exactly why I am worthy of my boyfriend’s love. As a female, I feel like there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way in order to be worthy of love. To so simply compare myself to others based on looks reduces me to being just a body, a hairstyle, a face… I am so much more than that. There is a precise mixture of traits both positive and negative that make me who I am. THAT is why I am loved.
I hope Dead Ahead’s girlfriend can learn to love herself as Dead Ahead so obviously loves her before the relationship is beyond repair.
One of the hardest things one can do in life is to say “Good bye”.
I am like Dead Ahead’s girlfriend in many ways. I’ve always had a hard time trusting people, and relationships have always been particularly rocky and heartbreaking for me. I spent the majority of the time waiting to be betrayed, lied to, or simply abandoned when someone “better” came along. I’ll admit that I’ve actively searched for reasons to be angry with my boyfriend, reasons not to trust him, in much the same way as Dead Ahead’s girlfriend. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism or lack of self esteem. I honestly don’t know if it stems from some traumatic childhood experience or not. Really, it doesn’t matter to me. It ruined a number of past relationships and started to ruin my current one, so it simply had to stop.
My boyfriend and I had many arguments, and during most of them he was openly confused about why I was so angry at him. I accused him of terrible things, of which I had no proof, and sat back and waited for him to hate me. But, much like Dead Ahead, he didn’t. He told me he loved me. He left little notes on my dresser telling me all the things he loved about us. He purposely made comments about the dolled-up girls we would see when we went out – how ridiculous they looked in their 4-inch heels, how they all were superficial, silly clones. It was all in good fun, but he was also making sure I knew what was really on his mind when they walked by. I learned that he wasn’t lying or placating me, and I stopped imagining all the terrible things he was thinking. I felt more confident. He encouraged me to wear whatever I wanted, to go out without makeup, to relax and be myself. He wasn’t afraid of what his friends would think of my looks or personality. He confided in me his own insecurities and fears. He never asked me to change for him, but he did need me to trust him. He couldn’t abandon his life or friends to satisfy my insecurities, and if I couldn’t accept that, the relationship was over. I think the thought that I could lose him because of my actions, not his, was what really woke me up. He wasn’t the enemy. My fear was.
His open communication, and diligence on my part to keep my fear in check, has kept us together and really bonded us as a couple. I know he loves me. I know that no pretty girl we see on the street can change that. And when I feel insecure, I tell him. Not angrily, not accusingly, but honestly. And he’s honest in return. There have been a lot of bumps in the road of our relationship, and it will never be as easy for me to trust as it seems to be for other girls, but I know that he understands this. That he loves me anyway. And that makes me work harder to focus on what we have together, and not drown in baseless fears. I hope that Dead Ahead’s girlfriend can recognize how lucky she is to have someone who is willing and ready to work through this overwhelming issue. With hard work and the courage to take a chance, she can overcome this. There is much joy to be had on the other side.
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