Hold the Bar; Thread the Needle

FUTURE...

Now that I'm getting a few more hits than I used to, I find myself getting hit, literally. With pejoratives.

I shouldn't feel surprised by this. 

Most people, unless they are monks or nuns and will never have a romantic partner, are terrified and enraged by the very thought or mention of that horrific eight letter word, cheating.

They're thinking about themselves and how hurt, how destroyed they would be if it happened to them, how ruined their lives would be, and how much they would hate the parties responsible. And some would drag in the name of God. A sacred vow, you're going to hell. All that.

Anyone participating in cheating, therefore, is branded with The Scarlet Letter and heaped with scorn. Hit with words. 

And I understand the sentiment. Once upon a time, I worked in a place where the owners, married, were having problems. He took up with his assistant, who was in her early twenties and looked like Kate Winslet, only thinner. 

I was very angry, bitter, and judgmental. I had heard that the wife was an alcoholic, but I just didn't have any direct experience with that until the husband left the business, taking his girlfriend with him, and filed for divorce. Then the alcoholic wife started bouncing my paychecks and drunk-dialing employees late at night.

Very soon I figured out exactly what the man was dealing with, and how wrong it was of me to judge. He married the girlfriend, they started their own business together, she nursed him through cancer, and they have two beautiful kids.

I say this to make three points: One, unless you are VERY close to the marriage, and I mean VERY close, YOU DO NOT SEE THE TRUTH EXPERIENCED BY THE TWO PEOPLE IN THE MARRIAGE. Often, people are taking great pains to hide that from you. So, although you know full well how YOU would feel in the situation, you don't know anything about their situation at all. 

The last time I ran into the two people in question, I apologized to them for how I'd acted. I really didn't understand, and I really had no idea. And my behavior had just made a bad situation worse. And now others are behaving the same way to me. (On the Facebook page for this blog, not here.)

Two, simplistic moral answers, even though in most or all cases they may be essentially right, don't really help. All they do is slap people's hands and say, "It's bad. Don't do it." They don't do one thing to resolve the problems that are driving people to do it, any more than slapping cake out of someone's hand is going to force them to lose a hundred pounds. The problems are much deeper than that, and to heal the problems, you need deep understanding.

And, three, once you HAVE that deep understanding, you don't have the urge to perform the problem behavior anymore. IT GOES AWAY ON ITS OWN, once the necessary learning around the issue has been achieved. 

To that end, I'm going to discuss that deep understanding I've arrived at here. 

It's taken me almost three years to get here. I think it's pretty valuable. 

When Chi dumped me to enter marriage counseling, one thing he said to me was that I had set the bar high for what he should be able to expect in an intimate relationship...and never had, in this marriage.

And so I did. I set the bar high for Rory.

And then I spent the next three years setting the bar higher for myself. I had unresolved childhood problems and issues I was trying to rope Chi into fixing my feelings about. Rory did the same thing, and I detested her for it; so where exactly did I get off?

But there was one person I never raised the bar for.

Yeah, that guy.

A few months back, when I was receiving many astrological indications that Chi would come back into my life, and I really needed to be considering what the right thing was to do and how I would handle it, I realized that the range of acceptable behavior, behavior that wouldn't absolutely torpedo the lives of all three of us, would probably fit through the eye of a needle.

But I love Chi. So, the only thing to do is hold the bar up high, and thread the needle.

You see, each person is allowed and should have the freedom to be with whom they choose, especially in a situation where mean, unacceptable, hurtful behavior is occurring. I mean, look at this. We look at countries like India where arranged marriage is the norm, and we're shocked. Parents should never choose who their child is going to live with in marriage! And yet we believe it's perfectly okay when an adult child wants to choose for the parent who they should be with in holy matrimony, or when it's we ourselves who think we know what that person should do. Why do we think that's okay?

But people cannot choose a healthy relationship consistently when they are unhealthy emotionally. 

And that's the case here. That's why we got into this mess in the first place. Rory, Chi, me...all unhealthy emotionally. 

I've WORKED MY ASS OFF to get better, even studied astrology in order to do it. 

I'm sorry to say that I have not noticed similar efforts or progress on the part of the other two corners in my triangle.

Rory may never change. It's one of those situations where a person is inflicting pain on someone else, but feels fine themselves. Why should they change? They're not unhappy. They're fine. It's the other person who has the problem, what's wrong with them?

But, Chi. Ah, Chi. I've known Chi twenty years now, and he's been wrenchingly miserable every single year I've known him.

There's only one cure for this: Codependency recovery. Emotional HEALTH.

In the previous entry, I discuss the astrological signs that Chi CAN do this work, and that this year could be a banner year for him to do so. I've always wondered what the hell to make of all the clues I've uncovered these past three years: 

1.) A big split in his transits starting right about now, between those that reflect a person working in therapy and healing and getting well, and spending the rest of his life much happier and healthier, and those that reflect a person who makes no progress, makes the same mistakes over and over, torpedoes his next relationship, and dies alone and shattered.

2.) My transits, which call me addicted to power and control and warn me repeatedly not to reenter The Bermuda Triangle with these two.

3.) Our Davison, which states that one of us makes a sacrifice for the other one, and that the relationship can be healthy if and only if I heal from emotional problems and am completely capable of living all alone.

Well, after the work I did in the previous blog, the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place and it all makes sense. I was confused, because it appeared that perhaps Chi simply isn't capable of working in therapy and getting well AT ALL. So what was I to make of all this conflicting stuff I was reading? 

Now, it's very clear: Chi CAN get much, much better, but he's scared of the work and doesn't want to do it, and he keeps getting sidetracked running off to nursemaid anyone else in the northern hemisphere who's having problems they can in any way rope or guilt him into prioritizing above his own.

If I offer him a way out--an opportunity to have an affair with me INSTEAD of doing the work to heal from ACoA issues in therapy--that's what he does instead. And the time in the life this happens is now. If I'm correct, his progressed sun by both methods should be sextile to his natal sun. Checking the charts, it is. 

One degree per year of the life. A sextile is sixty degrees, and this is Chi's sixtieth year. Right on the money. 

I was supposed to kick him into therapy and walk away, risking that I'd never see him again. If I'm not strong enough to do that, I get him in the end, after seven painful years of horrible angsting and back-and-forthing, but he hasn't gotten any better and our relationship is horrible, just a repeat of Chi's and Rory's in a different key. 

Chi may just decide to live with what he has, and through therapy find his way to living with his marriage in serenity the way it is, so he can keep the ties with other family that he values. Or he may leave after all, and I may see him again. 

But it's HIS choice, not mine, and it has to made AFTER progress in therapy, NOT before, with a healthy heart and not a sick one.

And if I'm too scared to lose him, I panic and start to pull him back to me again. I try to fight for him, and I, the person who came in to inspire him to go to therapy and heal, end up being the very person who destroys the therapeutic progress she came here to initiate. It's pretty clear: I don't know what happens if I walk away and don't have the affair, but if I do have the affair I absolutely destroy any chance Chi has of ever getting well...and now I know, he does have one.

And fuck knows, I of all people understand that there's NOTHING more important than doing your work in therapy and healing and getting well.

There's only one choice here. You can moralize all you want about God and about "hurting the wife," but this wife made her own bed. All she does in lie in it, and she doesn't even want to change the sheets. It's her choice to heal and do better in her marriage, or not. 

But nobody who professes to love anyone, could or would destroy that person's one chance to recover from lifelong emotional problems because she's too selfish and too scared to let go of him. And I started out thinking I'd be helping by hanging on! Clinging, directing, trying to live someone else's life for him, instead of letting go to allow that person to find his own competence.

So, the course is clear. 

Hold the bar, thread the needle, and say goodbye.

I may never see him again, but I'll know I did the best thing for everyone.