I had a long phone conversation last night with a friend about the friend’s current romantic relationship.  It’s not going so well.

Like all relationships, some parts are good and others not so good.  In this case, there’s one part that is upsetting, maybe a dealbreaker.

I tried to mostly listen and offer as little advice as possible.  After all, looking at my lovelife, who am I to counsel anyone else?

Fortunately, as these things go, the more my friend talked about the problems, the more the solutions came from inside and not from me or elsewhere.  Sometimes, what we need the most is the chance to articulate our own thinking — to hear the words out loud.

Relationships seem to me to be difficult under the best of circumstances.  One of the more difficult problems is letting go.  I think it’s very hard to be either the dump-or or the dump-ee.  You care about the person and you don’t want to hurt them, but the relationship isn’t working for you any more.  How do you end it?  You care about the person and want to be with them, but they don’t want to be with you.  How do you accept the end of what you want?

Very hard for me to do that, either way.  You can say I’m a Cancer and moon children get their claws onto something and won’t let go.  Of course, astrology is bullshit, but that’s nevertheless my own pattern.

I don’t think I’m the only one by any means.  How many divorces do you think I have to do before I find clients and their estranged spouses in exactly that situation?  I also read MCARP’s blog and know he’s had trouble letting go.

Others, however, seem perfectly capable of floating from one person to another without seeming to have any problem at all.

Sometimes, that seems a function of those people not being able to let go of a much earlier relationship in which they were badly hurt and they run into and out of new relationships to escape the feelings they still have about the old relationship and spread their angst to others.

Gosh, as I read that, it occurs to me that I’ve done some of that — it’s back to articulating your own problems as a way of finding your own solutions and I’ll have to think about that some more.

Anyway, this wanting to hold on and let go at the same time reminds me much of what I wrote yesterday about the congnitive dissonance I feel about intellectually rejecting the ideas of Honor, Duty, Truth, etc., as Aristotilian ideals while still feeling the underlying truth of those ideals at work in my life.

Here, you know you must move on and let go, but you just can’t seem to do it.

In this case, it’s a matter of emotional honesty with ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it seems like my emotions have a mind and life of their own. 

They seem to come and go on their own schedules and that there isn’t much I can do about it.  Do you DECIDE to fall in love?  That just sounds yukky.

Nevertheless, I think to a certain extent we DO just that.  We have a little internal dialogue we hardly notice — sometimes it takes very little internal talk — and we “talk” ourselves into being mad, sad, in love and whatever.

When we should be letting go, what we do instead is keep the feelings alive by obsessing over them and having little conversations with ourselves that include assumptions that we don’t really believe.  An example:  I’ll just die if I can’t have HER.  Well, crap.  We won’t die.  We won’t even get sick unless we worry ourselves sick.  Eventually, there will be another HER.  Or there won’t.  We will still have jobs and bills and pets and family no matter what, so it’s not like we can’t possibly be happy without that one particular person.

Sure doesn’t feel that way sometimes.

The hardest thing for me to do in the world is not think those things to death.

Last year, I made myself absolutely miserable to the point of just wanting to die over a failed relationship.

Mostly, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I couldn’t just let it go and think about something else.

I punished myself far more than any other person in the world could punish me.

I would have preferred a hard whuppin’.  At least that would eventually be over and my wounds would heal.

Thinking myself sick over it seemed like it would never end.  And, while I don’t know about you, I can think myself into more pain than my body can feel.  If it were a physical wound, I’d just pass out and my body would take care of me that way.  Instead, my mind is capable of infinite torture.

Once you get in that pattern of thinking, it’s almost impossible to break the pattern.  The best I’m able to do is to force myself to think of other things, things I can change, things that don’t make me crazy, and eventually I can see that problem/torture in a different light.

In the case of my friend and the discussion last night, the problem is even more subtle.  The problem there is also one of timing.  Something is going on in the relationship that isn’t pleasing and is, in fact, disagreeable.  How long do you wait before you call a halt?  When does bad become bad enough and when does bad enough become too bad to keep going?  My friend has a history of sticking with relationships long after they aren’t working, at least in part because it’s so hard to say the words to someone you’ve cared about:  “honey, it’s time for you to take a long walk off a short pier.” 

Then, there’s the problem of Oklahoma City being the world’s largest small town.  If your X lives in Oklahoma County, there’s a great liklihood that you’ll run into them.  Can you be friends with someone who has hurt you badly?  Can you be friends with someone you’ve told to go take a hike? 

Being human is such a funny thing.