The Destructive Side of Unconditional Love: Releasing My “Fixer” Ego Trap
“No matter what you do, I will always love you.”
I prided myself on my ability to love unconditionally. No matter what he did to me, I loved him. And with that unconditional love came a need to seek understanding and forgiveness. Why did he do that? What was the real cause? I wanted to believe that deep down he was a good person. Broken, but still good at heart. That he didn’t really mean to be abusive. That he didn’t really mean to be controlling. That he didn’t really mean to degrade me in the most humiliating of ways.
It was easy to find reasons that he behaved the way he did, to shift the blame from him to his disorders and his upbringing. His whole family is toxic. Every single one of them. Mental illness was rampant in the family. Self-destructive behavior was the norm for them. As was violence. He was raised that way. He genuinely didn’t know how to be any other way.
I would show him how to be a better person. I would show him, through my unconditional love, that the cycles of oppression and control and violence could be broken.
What an egotistical bunch of bullshit that was.
And it wasn’t even new ego bullshit, either.
For all of my relationships, it’s been a point of pride that I love unconditionally. If I love you, I love you unconditionally. That’s how I believe it should be. If you’re going to love a person, love them fully, completely, warts and all, because if you can’t love them unconditionally, then you don’t really love them at all, and you need to walk away. If you cannot love someone, they don’t belong in your field.
Toxic jobs and toxic friends and toxic family members I have no problem with cutting off. I’ve walked from so many of those relationships that I’ve long ago lost count.
Friend that betrays me? Sorry, but your email, phone number, and Facebook are going on the block list.
Roommate that stabs me in the back? Not only are you getting blocked on everything, I’m doing sorcery to send you packing along your way to the next destination, out of my life.
Job that I hate? Quit. I’ll figure out the money shit some other way. I always land on my feet. I might stumble a bit when I land. I might go down for a minute, but I get back up and dust myself off and everything works out just fine. I stopped getting jobs because they’re so easy to quit, because I have universally hated them, and so now I work for myself.
In fact, there are times when I’ve questioned if my ability to drop people and situations like flies is a bad thing. I mean, shouldn’t you give people more chances?
That logic doesn’t hold up internally for me. If you have no love for someone, why should you give them more chances to hurt you? Why should you give them space in your field if they’ve pushed you to the point that you can no longer love them? And walking away is okay, because there are 7 billion other people on this planet that they can go mingle with, and there is nothing wrong on insisting that you’re surrounded by love and only love.
But if I love you…
Oh, man. If I love you…
I love you unconditionally. And you can get away with anything until the point I stop loving you.
There are no degrees of love. I love you or I don’t. Period. I have compassion for all beings, but I only love a few. I’m selective about my love, about who I let in. Because for me, love is all or nothing. And I hate no one. Love or not love. Nothing else.
And that’s great. It works for me. I feel really good about that.
Until now.
I’ve had to learn a new way to love unconditionally, because for the first time in my life, I can’t stop loving someone.
This is weird for me. In the past, I’ve always hit a wall. I cannot go beyond this point, I no longer love you, goodbye. Just like that. Flip the switch. Turn it off. And the behavior didn’t even have to be particularly toxic, just a general pattern of respecting me less than I respected myself was enough. Consistently treat me like I’m stupid? Flip the switch. Repeatedly seek and then ignore my advice? Flip the switch.
With my first torrid love affair, toxic in its own way, but suited very well to my personality, and other than the toxicity, a model for my ideal relationship, I hit the wall five years in, and even at that point, we only saw each other every few months or so, with little communication between. I just decided one day, “This is it. I’m done loving him. I’m letting go.” I went and said goodbye, we fucked, and I walked away. That’s been it since. I grieved in my own way for the 45 minute drive back to home, then I went and got a tattoo, and haven’t felt anything for him since. And I was madly, passionately, and irrationally in love with him. Flip the switch and it was gone. I have memories, I can replay them like a movie in my mind, but there is no emotion, good or bad, in them. It’s just there.
Same with my first husband. And with him, it went even further. I flipped the switch on. I consciously chose to love him. Madly, passionately, and irrationally love him. I chose to fall head over heels in love and remain utterly devoted to him simply because I decided to stop running from the vision I’d had at 13 of him and I getting married. I consciously decided to flip the switch from warm friendship to torrid love affair that resulted in marriage. Even after our divorce, I consciously allowed the feelings of love to continue, though they evolved as our relationship evolved. And then one day, I decided, same as before, “This is it. I’m done loving him. I’m letting go.” After ten years, I said goodbye, we fucked, and I walked away. We’d already been divorced for three years, split up for a year before that, but we’d continued a purely sexual friendship.
If you’re in my life, I love you, and I love you unconditionally. How that love manifests will depend, of course, on the nature of our relationship, but I’m all in or all out. There’s nothing in between.
And it’s not just that if you’re in my life, I love you. If I don’t love you, you’re out. But as long as I love you, you get to stick around. Because I only have room for love.
So now, I have to learn how to do something completely new for me.
I have to learn how to cut someone out while I’m still madly, passionately, and irrationally in love with them.
I’ve always been able to walk away from what was no longer serving me. From what was consistently draining me. And I’ve always been able to walk away before it really hurt me.
Until Him.
I knew I should have walked away the moment I laid eyes on him. I was conflicted. Here was the man of my dreams. Literally. I had dreamed of him years before even meeting him or anyone that was connected to him, dreamed of marrying him, dreamed of being wrapped up in his arms, and there he was in my fucking living room, thirteen years younger than me, my roommate’s baby brother.
And there was no conscious choice to love him. It was just there. Immediate. I am in love with this man who isn’t even really a man he’s 20 and he’s a kid and he’s bad news and his family is crazy and I just want to touch him and hold him and take care of him and spend the rest of his life with him and I don’t even care how that happens as long as I can have him.
And I loved him unconditionally. No matter what he did, I forgave. No matter how angry he made me, I forgave. No matter how much he hurt me, I forgave. No matter what he caused me to lose, I forgave.
An odd thing started to happen. I started to watch myself. In the aftermath of vicious and cruel fights where we both slung the most hurtful words at each other, I’d pause and I’d reflect and I’d wonder, “Why do I stay? He’s hurting me. He’s toxic. He’s never really going to change. I don’t want this energy in my life. He makes me angry all the time. He’s needy, clingy, and takes advantage of me. Why do I stay?” And the answer was always…
Because I love him.
Because he’s broken and he doesn’t know any better. Because I can show him how to do better. Because he’s made so much progress and already grown up so much.
All the reasons I gave myself for staying, for toughing it out, for trying again. For forgiving him, even though it was the third time he’d cheated. In a year. Every year. For letting him get away with it, because there was no point in getting pissed when nothing I did stopped him from doing it anyway and I couldn’t even bring myself to leave.
I watched myself in horror as I returned to him after getting the strength to leave and moving out for three weeks in 2015, only to have him move out and have what turned out to be a two week affair because he came back, too. We couldn’t stay away from each other, no matter how hard we tried.
Except… except…
That’s all a bunch of bullshit.
Oh, it’s truth. Every bit of it. Everything I just wrote is absolutely, 100% true. I stayed because I love him. I still love him. Try as I might, that switch won’t flip. I can turn it off for anyone else, but for him? It’s stubbornly stuck. And I’m done trying to turn it off. I’m not going to try to stop loving him the way I’ve been able to stop loving others in the past.
What’s bullshit is that I’ve been holding onto a definition of unconditional love that is fully and totally ego driven. That if I love someone enough and show them that unconditional love that it will heal them and we will be happy.
And I didn’t realize this until I went through an abusive and toxic marriage that has only just ended.
I thought I could fix him.
I thought I could make his life better. Because I’d done it before. Repeatedly. Not necessarily on purpose, but my way of being in the world is so odd that people take notice, and when they take notice, they learn, and when they learn, their lives improve. It just happens naturally.
And his life did improve with me. He did get better. The better I got at my boundaries, the more he seemed to grow up. He seemed to become a better person. The physical abuse stopped, I stopped being afraid of him, I stood my ground, I regained my own power.
But every so often, the other him would surface. The mean one. The one that couldn’t or wouldn’t control his darker impulses.
And for a long time, I still continued to forgive these outbreaks. Because after all, he was doing better, and I still loved him, so it must not be time to leave yet.
I’ll know when it’s time to leave.
I can’t count the number of times I said that. Almost from the beginning of our marriage. I’ll know when it’s time to leave.
But I never did know. I still don’t know.
I had to choose.
I had to choose to be done. I had to choose to be over, to end the pattern, the cycle.
And it’s been hard. So hard. Because my old way of flipping the switch isn’t working with him, and my heart aches in ways it has ached only once before, and that was when my son, the only other person in the whole world for whom I can’t flip the love switch off because he is my son and nothing will ever make me not love him, left to live with his dad.
There came a time when I had to make a choice.
Completely lose myself to him or break free.
For awhile, I lost more and more and more of myself to him. I chose to submit. To please him. To cater to him even.
But that just made things worse.
The more I gave, the more he demanded.
And then I had to make a choice.
Fight back or die.
I fought back.
But man is my ego a big bitch, and she just kept hanging on.
I can fix him. Look at how much progress has already been made! He hasn’t put his hands on me in…
At first… I counted that time in weeks. Then months. Now, it’s been three years. Three years with no physical violence. I was so proud of him.
I was so proud of myself. I’d stood up for myself, and he’d learned that he couldn’t do that anymore.
I used that as proof that if I just kept persisting, if I just kept trying, if I just kept holding on, we could make it work. He would get better, I just had to tough it out, and we’d have our happily ever after.
Every time he cheated, I adjusted my behavior, trying to figure out what I needed to do to prevent him from cheating again. And I actively ignored the fact that maybe he had no desire to not cheat. That he only had a desire to get better at hiding it from me. That he was actively seeking someone who would feed his ego more than I did and who wouldn’t challenge him the way that I did, and that he was just hanging onto me until he found someone else, and the only reason he kept coming back was because I still had more to offer him than the someone else’s did.
Every time he had a meltdown, I adjusted my behavior, trying to figure out what I needed to do to prevent him from melting down again. And I actively ignored that his meltdowns had the purpose of making me change my behavior.
I discovered that even in fighting back, even in standing up for myself, I was losing myself simply by being with him.
And my ego kept me staying, because I love him unconditionally.
Unconditional love became my ego trap, and his adaptations, which were really designed to keep me hanging on and supporting his habits, feeding his ego and his narcissistic hunger, convinced my ego that I really could fix him.
Even now, I struggle with thoughts of he and I splitting up for a couple of years and then getting back together after he gets his shit together, and I don’t know if that’s me seeing the future or if that’s me holding onto hope, and it hurts and it’s annoying and it pisses me the fuck off because he is needy and clingy and narcissistic and only ever does for others when he’s clear on how it will benefit him.
It pisses me off that I can’t even tell if this is me seeing the future, or me wanting to keep trying to fix him when I see us growing old together after a few years apart.
Because when you can see the future… when you’ve seen the future so many times, and watched as what you saw unfolded in front of you even as you fought to keep it from happening…
There are two kinds of predictions I make.
The predictions based on probability, and I’m really fucking good at those, but probably means that shit can change. Someone can make a different choice, and it changes the trajectory of the future. This is the path you’re heading down, and if you do X, you’ll go down this for but you you do Y, then you’ll go down that fork. These predictions, I just know what’s going to happen. I don’t see it, I know it.
And then there are the Visions.
With a Vision, it’s like watching a movie, projected right on the screen in my head. BAM. It’s just there. This is what is going to happen. You can’t avoid it, no matter how much you try. There is no X or Y. No matter what you do, all paths you take will lead you there. Points of convergence, black holes so strong there is no escaping them.
Call it fate. Call it destiny. Whatever.
I used to fight against it.
When I had the Vision at 13, when I saw the man that would later become my first husband, I freaked the fuck out. I’d never had a vision before, I had no clue what it was, and besides, he was a dork and not even attractive at that. I gave him a chance when I was 18, and we dated for a short while, even getting engaged, but he annoyed me, fawning over me like I was some goddess that he wanted to worship. It was kind of creepy, and I broke it off, long distance, over the phone. I was harsh. We didn’t see or speak to each other for five years, when we bumped into each other at my work, and I stopped fighting fate and chose to fall in love with him.
I saw him, he gave me his number, and for two days, I sat with the cards and argued with my goddess, because he was not attractive at all to me, and he was a dork and he was annoying and I had a three-year-old son, and he was an adult male who collected fucking comic books and action figures, WTF Universe, why would you want me to marry him? And that’s when I learned how to flip the switch on, to choose to love someone, and to allow myself to be led by the Universe, because we’d been converging again and again and again for ten years, so there was obviously something there that I needed to experience.
I got a lot from that marriage, not the least of which was an actually pretty amazing father figure for my son, who didn’t even meet his biological father until a month before I was getting married.
I learned the hard way I can’t run from Visions.
No matter how hard I try. In fact, the harder I try the more ridiculous the coincidences get.
The Visions come while I’m dreaming and while I’m awake.
They flash into my head without warning. BAM there it is, me zooming through time to watch something happening that I don’t even necessarily want to happen, but I don’t know when and I don’t even know how, it’s just there and it’s just happening.
In a dream, I’m sitting at a table I’ve never seen before, and somehow, I know my boyfriend is there, and the phone rings, and I pick it up, and I hear a male voice, “Your grandmother is dead.”
And when I woke from the dream, I was perplexed. I didn’t have a boyfriend, I didn’t want a boyfriend. And my grandmother surely wasn’t going to die any time soon. I’d gone downstairs and told my roommate, “I had this dream where I was sitting at a table and some guy told me my grandmother was dead.” And then, I started dating Him, and there I was sitting at that table, meeting his aunt for the first time, and the phone rang, and there was a male voice telling me, “Your grandmother is dead.” Two months after the dream.
I’ve had too many unavoidable Visions to deny them, and I see us growing old together. But he is too toxic for me to continue with him at this time, and so I have to learn a new way to be.
I have to learn how to release the ego need to fix him. To make him better. I have to trust that everything is going to work out the way it’s supposed to, and I have to learn to love him from a distance, and I have to accept that loving him at a distance might have to go on forever. I have to accept that maybe I’ll never learn how to stop loving him, but loving him doesn’t mean I have to let him keep tearing my life further and further apart.
