Do you know that it’s easier
to get someone to change their church or even religion, than it is to get them
to leave relationship that causes them pain or unhappiness…Even if they are not
married, and have no children together..
This is astounding don’t you think?
This is astounding don’t you think?
At first, when I began to see
the pattern in this, I thought it was just about not wanting to be wrong. I
don’t love being wrong… especially when I thought I was SO right about a guy…
I don’t think I’m alone in
this. I seldom hear anyone else saying “Wheeeee! I was WRONG! Yee Haw!”…. But
still, do we really stay in a miserable marriage, pine over someone who didn’t
treat us well, then left us.. or try and revive a relationship that is for all
intents and purposes, dead….just to avoid being wrong about them?
One school of thought,
Abraham-Hicks, and the law of attraction says that when this happens it means
that that person is just no longer a match for who we are, and what we NOW
want… That we’ve grown and changed from the person we were when we started the
relationship…and the other person didn’t make the jump to the follow-up class
with us…
Okay, I like that
idea….Relationships as classes… I can see it…But that doesn’t explain why it
hurts so stinking bad when one ends. Why your guts feel like they are being
ripped out…and it seems to go on and on hurting.. And you catch yourself saying
“but I LOVE him” as an excuse to keep in touch, and not cut it off once and for
all.
That would be like choosing a
college class because you want to learn the material (or you HAVE to for your
degree requirements)..
So you sign up for the class,
you're excited (if it was an elective one) you get the text books, if you're
like me you caress the text books and love them and love the info you believe
they are going to impart to you....
Then let's say you get to
class and your professor starts out a HOOT, so much fun and charming and so on,
but before long you realize that he's not teaching you what you WANTED to learn
but goes off on other tangents, or never shows up to class and expects you to
get it all out of the book on your own, or grades in a way that is confusing,
and you’re frustrated and feeling like you are NOT learning what you're
supposed to be learning..
Next thing you know, the
class is over and you weren't pleased with it but no one ever finds you sitting
on the steps of the college lamenting "what did I do wrong? How could I
have chosen SO wrong?????"... Ya know?
We just automatically say,
"that professor sucked, and NOT in a good way"... and if we liked the
subject matter we might even take the class again w/a different teacher. But
even more often we don't retake it but it gave us an interest in ANOTHER class
so we sign up for it....
Now... as to the longevity of
a relationship... aka CLASS for this analogy... We don't (at least I've never
heard anyone doing this) choose classes because of the number of parts they
have... IE Psych 101/102/103/104... Like that... "I'm only going to take
classes I think will never end"...
Yet we try and do with
relationships... "OMG What is WRONG with me??? It ENDED!!! I finished part
104 and THERE IS NO MORE!!!! How did this happen? How did I CHOOSE so wrong?
But I LOVE that class!"...
So why do we treat our
learning experiences with other people…aka relationships, so differently…Actually
we DON’T treat our friendships as though they are life sentences…We get that
friends come and go and that it’s not always a reflection on us, or our
choices.
When it comes to romantic
relationships though, we constantly see people staying in classes..or uh..
relationships… that seem to have ended. Refusing to leave, until they became
negative, unhappy people.... All so they wouldn't have to feel like failures for
choosing a class that didn’t last forever.
I do know that there are
relationships that go on for a lifetime. I hope we can all say we know at least
one couple like that… A couple that, if we want to continue the class analogy,
you can liken to students moving on to other, less traditional settings than
the classroom... Maybe to do an internship, or some sort of study program or
research project that goes on for years...
I have dated several men over
the past 2 yrs. A couple of them have caused me excessive growth. I have to
confess, I’m not a quick study.
The most recent I call my
Butterscotch Pony….I’ll explain. I started riding a horses when I was 4 yrs
old.
My mother made us ride bareback until we could saddle our own horse
(unless we could con some adult to saddle our horses for us) because she knew
it would improve our “seat” and it worked. I rode like I was I was an Indian in
a wild west show.
Then, in second grade she did
the MOST insulting thing. She signed me up for HORSEBACK RIDING LESSONS!!!!! I
was stunned. Was she insane? Had she not seen me ride?
I went to the large stable
near our home and was further humiliated to find I was assigned to ride A
PONY!!!!! It was official. My mother
hated me.
Well, it turned out I didn’t
know it all. At 48 that no longer surprises me, but then it was a shock.
On this PONY, named
Butterscotch, I learned to ride Western Pleasure in horse shows. Yes, to sum it
up, they taught me to have class… They did have to put a rubber band on my
wrist so I could remember to keep it on my thigh and look proper.. But later
they moved me up to a full sized horse and taught me to ride English… Oh my
God, That was like bareback with class AND a slight saddle. I LOVED it!
So this past fall I met a man
and I knew right away that he was not a keeper. He could not carry on a
conversation with me, but he made me smile and he was nice to go places with
and hang out. He was so kind and loving to me and my kids that while I didn’t
think he was meant to stay forever I could see that he was teaching me many things.
How to just be… be still.. be looked at adoringly.. how to let someone in my
space and relax.. Unexpected lessons. Not unlike that Butterscotch pony.
We spent time together when
the Spirit Guides were with their dad. There were so many things that didn’t
fit and I told my friends every time they asked that he was not the one for me,
but just the one for right now.
He’d drift away at times and I
wouldn’t hear from him for days. I didn’t worry because I had known that
eventually one of us would have to go..
Then I went to Colorado for
Christmas with the Guides and had stress. The Ex and the gal who is like my
sister, and 27 yrs younger than he, are now dating… yeah… I think it’ll be on
an upcoming episode of Geraldo…but I’ve left my mental track….In the middle of
all the….being nice and gracious, on my part…the Butterscotch Pony came back in
contact… And he was like a lighthouse marking the harbor back home. A beacon
back to my REAL life that I’d thought was so dull and uneventful just a week
before.
When I returned to Oklahoma
before New Years we spent the next week together and had so much fun. I no
longer found fault with him because I’d already decided he wasn’t a keeper. I
didn’t have to evaluate him for the long haul, just enjoy him for today…
That’s when it happened. I
see it now in hindsight. I had the thought “I could just keep him, you know” …just
as a guy I did things with… a boyfriend that just stayed that way. If we never
lived together, or took it any further it could just be boyfriend/girlfriend
stuff. Separate houses and lives but together. At least until my kids were
grown and “on their own”.
Two days later he was gone.
And I haven’t seen him since. It was a sad parting. I still don’t understand
it.
I hurt to this day, a month
later. But I think I’m starting to understand why.
I asked my girlfriend LD, who
is gorgeous and brilliant and a dating expert, why. Why did this happen? How
did I go from “take him or leave him” to “but I LOVE him” ?
Hormones, she said. Women get
hormonally attached when they have sex with a man.
Well that’s not fair, I said.
Why don’t the men get attached and she said that men have to go out and
hunt/provide and if the women didn’t get attached they’d just leave and the
children would starve….
Hmmm…… Okay…. I can see
that…..but WAIT! I slept with BP repeatedly, in the beginning, and never got
attached. Not even a little bit. I thought he was GONE before Christmas…
And it hit me….I CHANGED MY
STORY ABOUT HIM!!!!!!!!!!
In the beginning I told the
story to anyone who would listen that he was not a keeper, but just someone to
snuggle with on the couch and have fun sex and go places…. Just until the right
one came along… And when he’d drift away it would take a day to notice that I
hadn’t heard from him… No hormonal attachment, no sadness or heartbreak…
Then AFTER Christmas and the
drama on the prairie, I CHANGED MY STORY
I started telling a story
that I could just keep him until my kids were grown.. live in separate houses,
be boyfriend/girlfriend open endedly…. And WHAM! The hormones descended, and
the expectations followed and so did the sadness, disappointment, and hit to my
self esteem when he left…
That’s when I realized it’s
not out of a fear of being wrong that we cling to relationships that have outlived
their expiration date…It’s because we told ourselves a story about them…A fairy
tale even…Like “This is the ONE!” or “My last first kiss” and so on….
It is in TELLING a story that
we unknowingly enlist our inner mental Border Collie… That amazing creature
will go in search of any and all evidence to back up any thought we think for
more than a minute….
I’ve mentioned here before
that I teach my children that they will find what they look for… That they can
walk into a room with 12 people in it, 6 nice and 6 jerks, and if they have a
belief that people are always out to get something from you they will run into
only the jerks…
When there were just as many
nice people there. The odds were that they could have run into them instead…But
it’s like those keys we couldn’t find… We get what we match up to vibrationaly…Our
vibration is determined by the way we feel, which is determined by the thoughts
we think…Or as I like to call it, the story we tell…
Butterscotch Pony’s abrupt
departure kicked up some negative beliefs that I had not been able to put to
rest before. They say that a belief is just a thought you keep thinking, so I
knew I had to start with the underlying thought behind feeling bad…
I was thinking I was “not
good enough”, “not worth fighting for”,
“not worth doing what it takes to keep”…. And I’ve experienced being treated
this way since the Ex….but ESPECIALLY the Golf Pro!
The thing is I KNOW I am a
good person, and good wife/girlfriend, a good friend! All the men that left
told me that I was like no one they’d ever known. That they could be themselves
around me in a way they never had with anyone else…
After enough of them said
that, I ended up telling myself the story that after finding me they decided
there must be OTHER fantastic women they hadn’t discovered too and they better
go look….Along with the “not worth it”
stories….
My friend LD set me straight
though… she rewrote my story and I’ve been telling it HER way… And you know
what? It makes sense… It FEELS good, which is our EGS (emotional guidance
system) telling us we’re on the right road, believing a true thought…
She said “I want you to rewrite the story from "I'm worth
having but not worth keeping." to "I'm worth having SO much that even
emotionally unavailable men who know they don't have their ducks in a row and
can't keep me can't resist trying."
I think you have to realize
that they all WANT you. YOU have to pay attention …and decide if what they
offer is enough or not. And if it's not, let them move on and say
"NEXT!" and DON'T talk yourself into keeping them when you know
they're not EVERYTHING you want. This is not about YOU not being worth keeping,
this is about you ALLOWING unavailable men who can't keep ANYONE to come into
your life and your heart...”
I know that we stay in
relationships that make us feel bad because of other stories we tell as well…
Stories like “this is the best guy I’ve ever had, even though he’s not all I
want.” “There’s no one else beating down my door and I’m afraid that if I let
this go I’ll be alone”… And I know that, for some, being alone is worse misery
than being with someone who makes them feel bad…
It’s hard to tell a new story
when you’ve spent so long with the old one… I know…Sometimes it’s a start to
just stop telling the old one… and …maybe question it a bit…
I’m working on it… I’ll keep
you posted…
Angels on your body,
Prairie Girl.
