Letter to Richard: Please stop hurting my friend
January 22nd, 2022:
Disclaimer:
This is a letter from the heart. It is not meant to make a legal case, nor is it intended as a scientific study. I’m just a friend who lives in her friend’s house.
I am certain you will disagree with some of what I say. Both of you will. That’s because what I’m saying is my own interpretation. You’ll have your own interpretations and your own memories to compare it to. Plus, some of the details are foggy because I don’t remember absolutely everything.
Please hear me when I say this, though: I recognize a pattern when I see one. You could, if you wished, take any one of my anecdotes on its own. You could isolate it and claim it to be a misrepresentation of the facts, an exaggeration, an assumption of what you were intending, feeling, or thinking at the time.
“It was meant to be light-hearted,” you could argue, and maybe you would be right.
I hope, though, that you’ll realize that’s not the point. The point is not to isolate one single event, or to debate the details. The point is to look at the circumstances as a whole and figure out how every single one of us can take responsibility for our emotions in a healthy way.
Dear Richard and Gale As A Unit,
It’s a really strange thing, being part of a poly family. It makes what would often seem like “meddling” become suddenly “perspective,” and “emotional support.”
At least, that’s what I hope. Honestly, I was trying to keep a low profile. To a certain extent, what happens in your relationship is none of my business. I really don’t want to cause conflict or make either of you feel bad. I also don’t want to damage my friendships with you or my place in your home. I love the home I share with you and I don’t want to jeopardize it.
But you both asked me to talk. Gale wanted peace and resolution, and Richard wanted to know why things didn’t feel right between us.
So I’m writing this letter to both of you because that way everything is on the table and nothing can be misconstrued. You can read it, as a unit, and decide individually and as a couple what you think. Please be warned: It is blunt, and my language is harsh. I’m expressing a year’s worth of feelings here, and sometimes, I swear.
Richard, you told Gale you feel like there’s something strange between us right now, and you are right. You are feeling the full force of a Mama Tiger with Fierce Protective Instincts.
I love your fiancée. I love her a lot. Like, I don’t even know how to describe it.
I love how she lives. I love how kind she is to everyone. I love how empathetic and nurturing she is. I love how she calls the kids little rascals, and how she cuddles them for hours. I love the plants hanging wildly from all the right hooks and the flowers bursting into bloom on the terraces. I love our conversations. I love her heart and her brain.
I love her home, with its sunbeams and good people. It feels warm, welcoming and safe.
I am worried about my friend right now. A lot, actually. It causes me angst and pain that I try not to burden either of you with, because I know you’re each on your own journey. My pain about Gale’s pain should not be your responsibility.
It’s hard not to talk about it though.
I wish I could talk about it with you. It seems logical that as the man who loves her more than life itself, you’d be the one I could turn to for help when I see her questioning herself, doubting herself, and constantly feeling like she’s done something wrong. I wish you could help me help her solve it.
I don’t feel like that, though. I actually feel quite closed off from you.
That is on purpose.
I closed the doors to my happiness palace on you on a Sunday night last March when my friend Gale and my friend Richard came home to the house that we shared in the middle of The Big Scaries. The world was ending but I had a family and I was happy. I loved sharing the home with you. I loved our Azul games and our group hugs when shit got real.
All that changed on that evening in March.
Neither of you seems to remember that evening.
It is burned into my psyche.
Gale had just kicked major ass. I mean, major. She had woken up at 4am to be a yoga model. I’m not kidding. How awesome is that?
I think she earned a model salary that day. I remember it being impressive and I felt really happy for her.
That afternoon, she did this Instagram live thing that got like a hundred jillion views.
(By the way, my heart is pounding right now. Writing this is emotionally taxing.)
That evening, you and she taught a class together.
You came home and she was in wonderful spirits.
You were not.
You sat at the table scowling at your laptop reviewing the class recording, insisting that you could do the work even though it clearly looked like you wanted to bludgeon something.
You know what, though? The problem wasn’t the scowl. I have said it before and I’ll say it again because you seem to keep forgetting, but I will NEVER ask you to apologize for your feelings.
I know what depression, sadness and insecurity feel like. I’ve lived with anxiety so bad that I started every single morning with butterflies in my stomach and a sinking feeling in my chest. For years.
So I empathize with you having a bad day, more than you can imagine.
The scowl wasn’t the problem.
The problem was your laugh.
The cause of the laugh, anyway.
Do you know what made you laugh?
After sitting there, in black dark silence, the thing that finally made you laugh was the recording you were working on.
The recording began in the middle of Gale’s sentence. It made her sound strange for a fraction of a second.
You played it, and you laughed out loud because of how she sounded.
Was it lighthearted? At first, your weird “I’m laughing with you but actually at you” moment rubbed me the wrong way but I wrote it off as innocent. Then you played it 3 more times.
By the third time, the alarm bells started going off in my head. Gale didn’t seem to notice, but I did.
That was the beginning.
It’s been a year and I don’t remember everything that happened on that one single night in perfect order, but I do remember the things you did to take your mood out on the people around you. In addition to the class playback thing…
· You barked at Felix
· You snapped at me very unkindly (something about a chocolate that you thought I’d taken from you, which I hadn’t)
· You accused Gale of breaking a chair (?!?!)
· You aggressively mocked Gale for biting her fingernails (How do I know it was aggressive? Because your comments elicited a flinch response. I saw Gale flinch. Your comments should not make your fiancée flinch. Fact.)
· You made fun of Gale for mispronouncing things and began to list off all the things she had mispronounced the previous day. That was another time you took a break from scowling — when you were pointing out her shortcomings, you started to smile.
· You spent about twenty minutes telling Gale how awful the kids had been, and you painted a picture that made it seem like the whole weekend couldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for you.
· You did not congratulate Gale on her accomplishments even once.
That was the night I realized that what I had thought were isolated things (a comment here, a snapping remark there, an ice coldness here, a depression there, an accusation here…etc., along with my own isolated reactions — why do I feel like I have to censor myself around Richard? Why do I feel like I have to constantly worry about hurting his feelings?) were actually patterns of something much more dangerous. Your uncontrolled emotions.
That was the night I saw the patterns, and I realized why I had been feeling tip-toey the last few months.
I went to bed shaking because of what I had seen. You had spent the entire evening belittling Gale right in front of me, and she had spent the whole evening deflecting and adjusting, modifying her behavior in order to accommodate you. The kids and I had suffered some of it as well.
That night I realized that you were not controlling your emotions properly. Uncontrolled emotions make relationships lopsided, and that is what is happening in your relationship right now. You and Gale play into each other because you give her responsibility for your emotions, and she accepts it.
I didn’t feel safe in my own home after that night, and that made me frightened.
I wasn’t certain Gale noticed it, and I experienced quite a bit of self-doubt myself, wondering if I could trust myself and what the boundaries were. I felt home in the house, true, but I also felt like a guest who didn’t want to intrude or speak out of turn. But a few days later Gale did approach me in the morning, quietly, murmered words about constant anxiety about you.
That confirmed it wasn’t in my imagination, and things started to become more and more clear.
I realized that there were stretches of days at a time when the entire house tiptoed around your feelings.
The kids were worried about you. Felix even asked you one night what was wrong, and you just walked out of the room, abandoning your dinner, and us, mid-meal.
Richard, the kids love you. You take the tiniest misunderstanding or Felix-acting-out and you think that it means they don’t love you or something, but they fucking love you.
You often miss their expressions of love, though. When you’re not feeling down in the dumps, (and even sometimes while you are), you’re setting up these Big Moments, and they’re incredible. You’re sooooo talented. I’m not kidding. You build these incredible things, you cook these elaborate feasts, you express your love so beautifully…
But then Felix is a jackass because he’s Felix, or Riley is rude because she’s a teenager and your feelings get hurt.
The thing is, your feelings SHOULD be hurt! Felix’s a little buttface sometimes, and Riley has her moments!
I wish you would just tell them. Just say that your feelings are hurt. Explain all the work and effort you put in. Tell them why it makes you feel yucky.
Show them your sadness and they will melt like butter. They don’t want to hurt you.
They just don’t want to be told what to do, ever. And they’re little jerkuses sometimes.
But Richard, let them show you that they love you. Because you know what usually happens?
You get your feelings hurt, and then one of them says something super sweet…
Or does something really adorable…
And you don’t hear it.
You don’t notice it.
Or you don’t believe it.
It’s super sad to watch.
It’s also hard to have a place in it. Because I know how worried you are, and how you’re comparing yourself to me. (I only write those words because you’ve said them. On multiple occasions.)
There’s no need. Seriously. They fucking love you. But you act like they don’t love you or something. Then, you start launching accusations and commands at them, and also taking it personally when they don’t follow your orders, which they’re not going to do, ever. Not because of anything to do with you. Because they’re them and they do not follow orders.
Maybe even worse than you being mean to Gale, was how you were acting with the kids.
Not all the time, of course, but often enough…you would belittle Gale, me, AND them. You constantly interpreted things we said as slights against you, making us all unsure of ourselves. I saw the children start to experience loss of confidence and self-doubt. We all had to constantly frame everything we talked about in such a way as it would cater to your possible perceptions of what we were saying. It was exhausting, and the children started to act out.
The kids suffered that winter right alongside Gale and myself. You made them responsible for your insecurities. You questioned their motives. You doubted their love.
As your departure drew closer, Riley told you several times she was ready for you to leave, and we all saw how hurtful that was for you. I don’t think she really meant it. Not fully. But I think she meant it partially. She was tired of how you were behaving, and I could sympathize with that. I was tired too.
You and I had a long conversation about a week after that crazy night. It was a four-hour conversation that I had not been planning on. We were up until 2 in the morning. I had a hangover the next morning, which was rather aggravating because that weekend, I was going to have the first pure, beautiful, healthy romantic weekend with a man that I had had in the prior five years.
I started my weekend with an unintended hangover.
But I was okay with that mostly. I really was. Because I fucking care about you two and I want you to see the patterns, too. You initiated the conversation and I figured if you were open to talking, there was a chance that I could reach you.
I told you what I was seeing. I said I was concerned. Your behavior was impacting all of us, and I told you that.
I told you that. I said I was concerned and that it wasn’t okay.
We drank whiskey. You cried. We hugged.
It was a good conversation, but it was also exhausting and honestly the conversation should have between between you and a therapist, not between you and me.
During that conversation you said you didn’t need a therapist.
I’m really really really glad you have one now.
I’m also pretty annoyed.
Because you keep acting like you don’t remember that conversation at all, as though it had no impact whatsoever. Those were four hours of my life I spent trying to help you! It ended with you noticing some of your deep-seated insecurities and agreeing you needed better coping mechanisms.
But then you did not obtain those coping mechanisms, and continued to blame other people for your mismanagement of your own feelings. That’s the main reason why I don’t feel like engaging with you anymore. I don’t want to emotionally invest in you if you’re not going to put in the effort.
Three months later, you came back, and you tried to write everything off as a momentary covid depression (which PS, that is no excuse. We ALL had a shitty 2020, but some of us were not allowing our uncontrolled emotions to make us mean.)
(I suppose I should insert another disclaimer here. ALL of us can be jerks, and even mean, at one point or another. Myself included. The big problem is when our jerkus-ness becomes a pattern AND when we prioritize our own emotional comfort over examining our own shortcomings. That’s when the trouble starts and we launch our bullshit on other people. Once in a while, okay, we’re all human. But you were doing it on a daily basis for months.)
It took the better part of the three months you were away for us all to recover. We were drained from months of having to prioritize your mental health over our own. Gale started to feel like herself again. She felt better physically and emotionally and started to remember what a badass human being she was, because she had forgotten.
She was pretty scared leading up to your return. I remember seeing the fear and hearing it in her voice. I remember her say out loud that she was scared. She is super in love with you though, and truly believes you two can make it work. So she was scared, but she was optimistic too.
I wasn’t quite as optimistic. But a tiny part of me did hold out hope that you would use your return as an opportunity to make things better.
Instead, you came back and felt “unwelcome at home” because of a problem of your own creation, made your fears our responsibility to resolve, and perpetuated the cycle.
I said it earlier, but I’ll say it again now: You NEVER have to apologize for your depression (which you have done, a lot). Or your insecurities, or any other feeling. Ever.
But you do have to apologize for hiding them, running from them, denying them, and gaslighting others about them. And you have never apologized for that. Not once.
In June, you did not try to make things better for anyone but yourself. If anything, you made things worse for us, because now you realized that Gale was upset, which made you worried. So you spent the whole three weeks talking about how bad you felt that you had made us feel bad! (Do you see the irony? Please tell me you see it.)
We had to spend those three weeks reassuring you that you didn’t need to be worried, when actually, there was good reason to be concerned. Not only that, but despite the fact that it was now June and you were dismissing the past as the past, your patterns of behavior continued exactly the same. We had been hurt by your behavior, and instead of working out how to help us, you just got really worried and put us in the terrible position of having to choose between our feelings and yours.
I’m not sure what happened after those three weeks because I left. I don’t know the ins and outs of what has gone on since, but I don’t see any evidence of your soul searching. I only hear excuses, justifications, and accusations. Gale is constantly on the defensive, questioning her own behavior, and modifying what she does in order to accommodate your insecurities. She frequently forgets how beautiful, wonderful and intelligent she is.
Now, I’m not blaming all that on you (she has work to do too, and she is doing that work) but I do think you’re contributing to it by constantly calling her wonderfulness and intelligence into question. She is suffering from the burden of taking on your emotional responsibilities, STILL, and it’s been almost a year since that fateful night in March.
You’ve spent all this time apologizing for legitimate emotions you are allowed to have, while deflecting responsibility that you should be taking. In all that time, you could have examined yourself and tried to figure out how to stop being mean. Richard, the entire house recoiled after you left because it had been so emotionally challenging for us. It was HARD. And we all still loved you, but you owed us some soul-searching after what we had gone through, and instead, you made it all about you AGAIN.
Gale will probably defend you here. She usually does. I think calling you mean is going to get her hackles up.
So Gale, I hope it’s okay if I remind you of something that you said to me several days after Richard’s return last summer.
You said to me, whispered to me really, during a moment caught alone on the terrace,
“I feel like a prisoner at home right now.”
The three weeks in June were really not fun.
I had been open with Gale. I had told her I was worried, but that maybe it was none of my business, and I could leave the house and stay somewhere else.
But I really didn’t want to. And she didn’t want me to.
So I stayed, and I hoped that maybe you would have done some soul-searching.
But you hadn’t.
You were angry at Gale all the time, probably because you were so worried that she had said things weren’t right. You said lots of things about her that weren’t nice.
You even made fun of her plants.
Her plants!!
You also insinuated she wasn’t a good mother, and sometimes outright said it.
That’s fucked up.
You continued to paint a picture, in front of the children, of her being incompetent around the home.
(In the in-between months while you were away, I told Gale it was fucked up for you to criticize her mothering skills or her home-running skills. She was hurting because of comments you had made about conscious decisions she had taken with respect to Riley and Felix. It broke my heart because you were making her out to be a bad mom and she believed you. Later on, I understand you talked about it and you took back the things you had said, but then you kept saying them.)
(I actually believed your lies at the time, too. I believed you when you painted her out to be all disorganized. I was surprised when you left and the house ran like clockwork. I felt guilty I had let you convince me otherwise.)
(The kids believed your lies too, and mimicked your attitude. It took a month or so after you left for them to start speaking respectfully to her again.)
In June, you came back and were more worried about our perception of you than about actually looking inward. Which PS, you don’t have to be worried about our perceptions of you. We love you.
You were really worried, too, about whatever conversations Gale and I had been having in your absence. You seem to have this vision of us here at home, like you’re picturing Gale saying rude shit about you and influencing my opinion of you. So I’ll tell you this. Gale isn’t perfect — I do love her, but I also know she’s not perfect. And of course, she’s the first one to tell you how she isn’t perfect. Which is part of why I love her.
But Gale never says rude shit about you. Ever. And she always gives you the benefit of the doubt.
Sometimes, I would like to influence her opinion of you. Sometimes your behavior is so abominable I would like to say something. I usually don’t though, because I don’t want to make her defensive. I want to empower her to make her own determinations about what is happening. So I’m usually just a sounding board offering perspective, and I don’t bring something up unless she already has. When she does, I’m very careful to separate whatever anger I feel toward you and deal with it separately. I examine my advice for bias before I open my mouth to Gale, and everything I say is in service of her mental health and sense of self.
I see shit though, in what I hear and what I’ve actually witnessed in person.
For example, you get angry with her for silly reasons. (And I’m not talking about Pierre here. The topic of Pierre is a giant can of worms that is a whole different letter and I won’t get into it here.)
No, you get angry at her for other silly reasons, to the point where she literally said all anxious one evening in June, and I do remember this word for word, “I feel like I’m in trouble. Am I in trouble for something?” She literally asked you if she was in trouble, like a scared pre-teen. Um, what?)
You’ve gotten seriously angry at her because she arrived home 15 minutes later than she had said she would.
Richard, Gale will always be 15 minutes late. At least 15 minutes late. Always. It’s the consequence of being engaged to a butterfly and I’m pretty sure it will never change.
Or a different time, you texted her to pick something up for you, and she came home all in a good mood from having seen a friend in person for the first time after months of quarantining, and you got mad at her because she hadn’t looked at her phone so she hadn’t seen the text and gotten you the tylenol you’d asked her to get.
Personally, I would be thrilled she hadn’t gotten my text because the less we are slaves to our cell phone, the better. But you were angry, which is fair, I guess. You had wanted something and it was important to you.
You didn’t say you were mad, though.
Instead you said, with a roll of your eyes, “I guess that’s how much you care about me.”
Richard, the size of Gale’s love for you is not measured in text messages and Tylenol!!!!!
She leapt out of the house and was back with your Tylenol within a matter of minutes.
She loves you. Of course she cares about you and wants you to have what you need for you to feel better. Her missing a text does not change that. You should never ever doubt it, and if you do, that’s for you to examine.
But your feelings get hurt. Now, although I disapprove of how you express it, I do understand your feelings getting hurt. Sometimes Gale exasperates me, too! There, I’ve said it! She is not perfect. I’ll note one of Gale’s imperfections: She loves everyone so much that she gets spread so thin she’ll pop, and whatever’s happening in the present moment takes priority. That is wonderful but can be a challenge when you’re Anal Retentive like Lorelais and Richards tend to be, with a strong reliance on Plans and Continuity.
So sometimes the Richards and the Lorelais get the shortchange; Gale doesn’t have quite as much time left for us, because she only has 24 hours in a day to devote to other people. And that hurts our feelings. I get it. (Although the real person who suffers is Gale, because she considers herself last usually, after everybody else. If you think you’re not getting enough of Gale’s attention, imagine how Gale feels with no attention left for herself!)
The point is, you get your feelings hurt and that’s valid.
So TELL her your feelings are hurt. She knows what to do about feelings! She can totally give you the love response you’re aching for there.
She might hurt your feelings sometimes, but it is never because she doesn’t love you. Tell her you’re hurt…but without the assumptions or the accusations.
Right now, you’re weaponizing your hurt feelings and I want you to stop. I mean it.
Once you’ve done that…take the time to help her so she doesn’t spread herself so thin anymore. Support her in her journey without criticizing her or making her doubt her capabilities. Right now she’s worrying about you so much she doesn’t have time left over to work on her own stuff.
But don’t fucking tell her she’s not…what did you say? You told her that she wasn’t good at making people feel better, or something. Consoling? No. What did you say?
[“Empathetic,” Gale murmered quietly as I was reading the letter to her that day last January. “He said I wasn’t empathetic.”]
I can’t remember the word, now. I can only remember this walk I took with Gale.
During that walk, she expressed to me (not for the first time) that you had said to her that she wasn’t very nurturing or something.
Ummmm…that’s bullshit.
Don’t tell her shit like that.
There’s a good chance she doesn’t remember many of these conversations. Her forgetfulness of her moments of clarity worries me. She’s currently experiencing brain fogginess and self-doubt, and sometimes it just makes her feel shitty about herself and indebted to you but she can’t figure out why it’s happening. These are debilitating symptoms of a relationship steered by the imbalanced division of emotional labor.
So my main thesis statement is, stop being on team Richard.
Start being on TEAM GALE AND RICHARD.
Gale is on that team already. I see it in how she always defends you, gives you the benefit of the doubt, and thinks the best of you.
You could be on that team too. You could always defend her, give her the benefit of the doubt, think the best of her. But you always assume she’s out to get you. (Same with the kids.)
To be quite honest, I’m not really on Team Richard and Gale anymore, because I’m not alright with what I’m witnessing.
But that’s so sad. You guys are so fucking amazing! I was so EXCITED when you got engaged! You were the best poly fairytale come true. Your wedding was going to be an all-out festival and you were both
Smart
Beautiful
Kind
Talented
Interesting
Passionate…
The list goes on. You’re a fucking power couple.
You’re hurting right now as a couple though.
And you’ve gotta look at yourself if you want to fix it.
And DON’T say you are already doing that. Don’t. I don’t want your words.
Don’t say you are. Do. Not. Tell me. You’re looking inward.
SHOW me that you are looking inward.
I want to see it.
I want to see Gale feeling safe in her own home.
I want to see the kids feeling like they can express their love and learn good lessons from the way you handle your own feelings. I don’t want them experiencing self-doubt either, or mimicking the way you take your feelings out on other people.
I want you to NOT make your feelings about what I’m saying into their problem. I don’t want apologies, excuses, or justifications. I don’t want you to make anyone in the house feel like they have to make you feel better because some of this letter has hurt your feelings.
I don’t want you to love-bomb Gale, either. This is a problem that is not solved by beautiful gifts or fancy vacations. It’s about you taking responsibility for your actions.
I want you to stop perpetuating a cycle of abuse, with honeymoons, tension-building and acute explosions. Then, apologies that aren’t apologies. Apologies that are just excuses making it look like it’s the other person’s fault that you were emotionally violent. Then, honeymoon, tension building, around and around we go.
Relationships characterized by such a pattern of abuse inflict self-doubt and the debilitation of confidence. I’m seeing that cycle in front of my eyes. Look it up if you’re unfamiliar with it, suspend your judgement, and see if you can recognize this pattern. Then fix it.
I want to STOP hearing you talk shit about her; making fun of her; insinuating she is a bad mother. You have made her the victim of thousands of little micro-aggressions, some of them so tiny that none of us understand what is happening until the moment is over and we just feel a little strange. That is NOT okay.
It is especially not okay for your to do it in front of the kids.
You have a lot of opinions on what the kids should and should not see.
The children should not see you put down their mother, EVER.
I want to see you take steps to manage your feelings in a way that they do not pose a threat to the people around you.
I will say that again.
I want to see you take steps to manage your feelings in a way that they do not pose a threat to the people around you.
Until then, I will continue to close the doors of my happiness palace to you. You will feel it, because I’ll be colder and more removed. I have to be that way for my own sanity, because even from hundreds and thousands of miles away, I worry about Gale so much it hurts. At the end of the day I have to remember you are both on your own journey and I can only be a source of support and a sounding board inasmuch as it doesn’t affect my own mental health. So I have put some emotional distance between Richard and myself and will continue to do so until I don’t have to anymore.
Of course as her fiancé you should be welcome home, and if you don’t feel welcome when I’m there too, I’m going to absent myself.
I love both of you, by the way. Richard, you get so butt hurt about everyone not loving you. Everyone fucking loves you, myself included.
I just want you to stop hurting my friend.
Love,
Lorelai
