On Patriarchy Rage, Romantic Getaways Gone Awry and Hard Conversations That May or May Not Be Go-With-The-Flow Breakups-L.

Saturday, June 24th, 2023, Shabbos:

We left the airbnb early. Such a shame, too. He did an amazing job finding us the best ever last-minute gorgeous mansion in the woods…

It’s true that some kid in the room next door decided to run up and down the stairs and then plunk screechily at the piano at an impossibly early hour this morning, but still…

It was beautiful.

Flowers everywhere, beautiful decorations that weren’t over-the-top, and these plush purple bathrobes! Plus, it wasn’t super expensive.

“Maybe we’ll come back one day when we’re more enlightened,” I said to him as we headed to the car.

When I got home, my phone was still on because of the GPS-ing. I decided that instead of immediately turning it off to resume shabbos, I would check the mommy thread.

She was already sending me messages.

“Mommy words maybe?” I said.

“Want to talk, kitten?”

“Yes,” right now right now right now

Ring ring

Signal disconnects because…VPN.

One more false try and then…

“Kitten? Can you hear me?”

“Mommy?”

“Yes, how are you, did you have a nice time?”

“I’m not sure, but I think that, Etienne and I may or may not have just broken up.”

“What???” I could hear the concerned surprise in her voice. “What happened?”

What had happened?

I struggled to even remember. Last night felt like a blur to me, difficult emotions bluntly spilled out in French, the ensuing conversation in English.

I had moved further away from him on the couch. I couldn’t sit that close to him while words were coming out of his mouth like, “I don’t feel right, and I’ve pulled away,” “You must have felt it too…”“walking on eggshells,” (did you know that in French, it’s “walking on eggs”?!) “distance,” and “distress”; “accumulation over time”; “don’t know what you’re thinking and it hurts me.”

When had we even seen each other or talked enough for all these patterns to emerge?!

Etienne actually cares about you, you nincompoop.

“He said…it’s just…well…it all started with the patriarchy.”

It did. Because I’m on a rampage this week. I really am. The patriarchy will be dead by tomorrow if I have it my way.

Except the truth is, all that anger is guarding this pool of hurt. Of sadness. Of disappointments. For people mistreating my friends. For all of us to be enabling the abusers. For people turning a blind eye to something that is literally everywhere you look.

The truth is, I’m taking the patriarchy personally right now. It’s been pretty shitty to me, and I want people to take my side during this patriarchy-and-me-breakup.

Especially Etienne.

Except…the problem is, I realized later, I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t say “Please hold me, because I’m hurting.”

Instead, I tried to argue unemotional facts.

But we don’t have all the facts, and he’s friends with these people too.

I’m triggered, I realized at the spa. We were back at Bolton Spa, where the girls and I went last week. I’m triggered but I can’t tell him because I’m too scared and my vulnerability is too fragile.

I was angry last week, and I’m still angry now, I thought.

Today resembles last week’s weather, overcast and misty. But yesterday, spa-day, was beautiful, so I ignored the saunas and spent most of my time down by the river, plotting my Vacation From The Patriarchy and the collapse of the current world order.

Etienne and I snuggled, and I tried to compartmentalize. You don’t have to bond with him about the patriarchy. You can bond over everything else. When you calm down, you can talk to him about it.

Except, why did he have to leap to the Reputation argument? And what does he MEAN we’re all doing our best? We are not! We are absolutely NOT all doing our best! Better can be done! And of COURSE it’s Gale’s job to fix it! She literally gave herself the job of Festival and Consent Coordinator!!

“It’s this thing about protecting each other from feelings,” I said to Mommy. “And then making assumptions based on our own insecurities. I was trying to give him space and not vomit all my shit on him, but he could still see I was upset. He just had no idea what was happening and assumed it was all his fault. Which it wasn’t!!! Not the way he thought it was, anyway, although some of the things he said definitely didn’t help. And apparently, it’s been happening for a while, and he’s starting to realize that, so he’s gotten distant.”

“I know the two of you,” said Mommy definitively. “This is not the end of you. You are two smart, rational, emotionally mature people. You can take your distance, if that’s what it comes to. It might even be a good idea.But then, when you are both ready, you have what it takes: You both care more about the other person than you do about yourselves. That’s really all you need.”

She told me a story she’s told me before, about how for the first 4 years of Matt’s and her relationship, everything was awful.

“There was no trust. Worse: There was constant suspicion. We were ridiculously in love with each other and completely distrustful of each other. We had both been so badly treated in the past that we just assumed it would happen again. We had to finally see that our fears weren’t about each other; they were about people from our past. Did I ever tell you the pizza muncher story?”

“The pizza muncher…?” No, what was that story?

But then I had an urgent question, so the conversation took another turn.

I didn’t understand what Etienne was talking about, at first. He kept saying that he wanted to support me when I was in emotional distress, but he’d tried to, and he knew that he couldn’t.

“I take it on as mine. I want to support you, but I can’t.”

(Lest these words sound callous, it was a conversation we’d had right at the beginning.)

(It was also at the beginning that we discussed how I was currently leaving a “merde mariage.” I told him flat out, on multiple occasions, that the timing of my abuse/trauma recovery + Brand New Relationship might not be the best. “I warned you!” I reminded him. “I remember,” he replied. “Full knowledge and consent and I went forward anyway.” Gah gah.)

Essentially, he has a Rescue pattern, just like I have a Try To Make My Life Revolve Around Him pattern. We acknowledged from the beginning that that could be tricky. (I also have, I realize now, a Point out the Problems and Pick at Them Pattern. Which I’ve also been trying to hold in check, at least when they are just about things that have nothing to do with me. That’s good, right? Or is that me holding back too much?!)

“But…I haven’t been asking for support!” I said, thinking of how proud I’ve been of my efforts to break free of the Man Orbit. “I’ve been purposely not leaning on you. I mean, of course, you’re my partner, I’d like you to be there for me at times, and you are. When I need you, you are there for me, if you can be, even from miles away. But I also know there’s a lot of space and time separating us already and…”

“I’m not trying to say that you are asking for it. Or that you’ve done anything wrong,” he said firmly. “I have seen you over these last two years and it has been beautiful to watch. You’re doing amazing. It’s just that sometimes, you are upset, and…”

“But…when have I even said I was upset in recent history?” I asked, perplexed. I could think of phone calls I’d had with any number of people; my mom, Mommy, Estrella, Laurel. I’d told them I was upset. But I’d been purposely waiting for Etienne so we could have a calm, collected…

“That’s just it!” he said emphatically. “You don’t have to tell me how you’re feeling. I feel it anyway. 100%.”

Oh.

Gah gah.

I’ve always felt my partners’ moods. I just never fully trusted it because the conversations would be accusatory. There would be feelings-spiral-wars, with everyone denying, or not understanding what was happening. Sekhar and I used to second-guess each other for hours: Let’s do this because you want to, no let’s do this because you want to…And of course with Gavin, I learned that feelings would be punished. We weren’t ever supposed to admit to having them.

“It’s a fact,” he said, “I literally feel what you feel. Since I started accepting that this is real a couple years ago, it’s changed everything. It’s real, I feel it, and I need to put my boundaries in.”

Oh. I’ve been so fucking gaslit on this topic that it’s almost like I decided to discount unverbalized or unasked for Empathy as an actual data point.

“I do have this pattern,” I said suddenly, adding because, I had to, “It’s rooted in the patriarchy. Gah gah. Anyway, what ends up happening is that I suddenly care way too much about what the man thinks. So then I try to become what I think he wants me to be.”

“Je le ressens,” said Etienne, agreeing far too vigorously, “Je l’ai ressenti à plusiers repris.”

À plusiers repris is kind of like saying, “over and over.”

I’ve felt it over and over.

Ouch.

“And I try to offer reassurance,” he said, “but there’s only so much I can do.”

He looked helpless.

Suddenly it all made sense. The weird friction in the car from earlier; my deeply-rooted need for his validation of the whole Dance festival thing; my simultaneous suspicion; my desire not to be vulnerable. I didn’t trust him with my patriarchy trauma, but I wanted his support.

So I tried to pull his validation out with argument.

And he resisted.

I think I’ve forgotten that men can have feelings.

“I…I was trying to be emotionally detached about it,” I said. “But I can see now how it felt…more like an argument or something.”

“I just thought we were debating a topic,” he said. “And I was asking all the questions because I didn’t understand. And I know the person in charge. I trust Gale.”

I don’t, though. Not with boundaries and accountability. That’s kind of the whole point.

I sat quiet, for a minute. “I was wondering if I needed distance today, too,” I admitted finally. “Like maybe I wanted something you couldn’t give.”

He asked, “What was it that you wanted from me?”

“I…” I thought about my anger. About my inability to stop looking for evil and finding it. I thought about the people who are being mean to my friends. About Gale, all kind words but no action.

I thought about my sorrow. My pain at all the fucked up things Gavin did, my disappointment at the world and human beings as a species.

About how I’m ready to go into hiding, now. Because I’m leaking fury. And it’s wrong of me to take all my rage at the patriarchy and sling it in the faces of Gale and Etienne, who are two of the best people I know.

“There’s just this pool of hurt inside me and I just wanted…” and then the tears came. All of them at once, as tears go. Funny, in the end I didn’t have tears with Mommy this week; not like that, sobs and all…I guess they were all waiting for Etienne.

“Oh baby girl,” he said instinctively and held me close. This was what I had wanted earlier, I realized. This.

“But wait,” I said. Even through my tears I could still remember what he had just said about my emotions impacting him negatively. “Isn’t this wrong? Aren’t we supposed to protect you from my tears?”

“Not when I understand what is happening,” he responded. “Not now that I know how to support you, and I can choose to, or not. Now it is perfectly fine. Actually, now it is much much better.”

“This is how I am,” I told him just in case he wasn’t sure. “I’m kind of all or nothing. Either I’m holding back, or I’m…not even an open book. I’m a rushing river. I laugh, I orgasm, I cry. I flood. This is who I am, and my life has gotten a lot better since I owned it.”

“I know,” he agreed.

Gah gah.

I wrote a list before we went to bed. I wrote down the key points of our conversation so I wouldn’t forget them, and then a list of the things he had said I do that impact him:

• When you are feeling something intensely but you don’t say what’s happening
• When you are trying to pull something out of me
• When you’re nervous about telling me something

Oh. Oh, oh oh.

Sekhar did every single thing on that bullet list all the fricking time and it drove me absolutely bananas. What have I become?

“This isn’t all about you, you know,” said Mommy. “You are both humans, who are learning and growing, and both of you have had a role here. He also made a lot of assumptions about how you were feeling, without actually asking you what was going on last week.”

“Mes petites histoires d’amour ne te déstabilisent trop ces jours-ci?” That had been his opening. I had no idea, but he has spent all this time worrying that his recent adventures have been too much for me, emotionally.

All the while I’ve mostly been just ignoring them, because I’m determined to let him have his life while I live in my own orbit.

But the problem was, he saw something was wrong with me at the festival assumed it was about him and the morning’s conversation…he distanced himself, and I did feel it, like we weren’t connected, and I assumed it was about ME, like I might not be a good dance partner, and the spiral just continued…

The truth was, my feeling off that morning had nothing to do with him. It had to do with my feeling unsafe at the festival. Which I had actually told him, but he didn’t know yet because I’d said it on the sensitive thread. Which he thanked me for doing; my intention had been not to bring him down from his festival fun and he appreciated that. (“Although you can always, at any time, tell me when you need support like that. You don’t need to explain why.”)

“I mean, I had a little 30 second temper tantrum when I first got your message,” I admitted to him, “But then my anger at the patriarchy overshadowed everything else, and I was like, I got this! I can handle a little unexpected polyamoury awkwardness. So I went to the sensitive thread, listened to all the messages you’ve sent me these months, and was like, cool! I really appreciated that you were taking such care to talk to me about those things at all. And as for feeling destabalized…I think proximity and potential awkwardness/scheduling conflicts can make things a little scarier, but even there, I’ve been so busy that it hasn’t been a problem! I can’t promise that I’ll never need support in this regard again, but it’s gotten much, much better since we started. Besides, how can I expect you to stay celibate to me when we see each other a few times a year and we aren’t having sex?!”

DISCLAIMER: I hesitated so hard writing that, because, what if my mom reads this post? I’m not sure if she’s reading anymore, but I am SURE that if she does, she’ll be like, “I told you so, it’s the polyamoury,” while overlooking everything else. The thing is, if I omitted it, she’d be like, “I find it curious that there was a coincidental overlap of these relationship troubles and the arrival of Adriane.” So basically, I can’t win, so I decided to tell the whole truth, because Adriane was involved, tangentially, but only as a misunderstanding and assumption about feelings on top of a pile of other misunderstandings and assumptions about feelings. But none of that matters to my mom; either way she’ll say that polyamoury is the root of all evil.

However…if that’s true, that leads us back to the whole Monogamous Relationship Escalator route, and we’ve seen where that gets me, so…I’ll pick my poison.

“I know,” I said miserably. “And he knows, too. It was really ‘nnoying! I kept wanting to be all defensive, but he said all the right things. He was saying how it’s not about blame or either of us doing something wrong…it’s just our patterns and how we deal with them. He also wished that he could have identified what was happening sooner. He said he was trying to forgive himself for not noticing and voicing it earlier; that he simply hadn’t known how.”

Gah gah. Of course I know how that feels.

“I did apologize, for all my things.” I considered, “And he really didn’t, but also, he wasn’t assigning blame, and I was, because that’s what I do, and I sincerely did feel sorry that he’s been taking all that on.”

I think we haven’t been trusting each other.

Trust isn’t easy, is it?

“Trauma in a partner isn’t easy,” said Mommy. “You can tell him that. It’s hard to know what to do, and the Trust Tremors can be really destabilizing. It can be very scary. You can feel so helpless, watching the person you love and not knowing how to help them. Tell him…Actually, I tell you what. I’ll tell him myself. Tell him he can go out to lunch with me, if he wants. We’ll sit down and I’ll explain how your brain works to him! It’ll make so much sense, after that.”

“I’ve often wondered if it was good for you to be in a relationship with me, when so much of what you’re processing is about men.”

“I mean…it’s true you were kind of grandfathered in. There’s a reason I’m not dating anyone right now, and when I start, it will probably be with women first. But…I like that we’re together. I mean, not if it’s stressing you out. But you are important to me, and I don’t want to lose you. It’s a gift to have you show me what it can be like to be with a man who actually does have empathy and emotional intelligence. I want to be with you, if it feels right for both of us.”

That’s when he said all the we’ll see how it flows yada yada.

“Do you want to make plans as to if/when we’ll see each other again before you leave?” I asked. (He heads back to Europe in three weeks.)

“Let’s wait a bit and see how we both feel,” he responded.

If a relationship is a garden, ours is a jungle.

An organic jungle, but a jungle, nonetheless.

And it won’t always be peaceful, I reminded him. And it will need maintenance, from time to time.

But he knows that. He just needs to make sure he’s protecting his empathetic little heart.

Outrageous.

Outrageous that a man would have a heart, and want to protect it.

Here I thought I was the only one…

A few seconds later, Mommy said she had to go.

I looked down at my phone; we had been talking for an hour and thirty-two minutes.

“Okay Mommy, I’ll let you go.”

“Well, I have a few more minutes. I just wanted to tell you early so you’d get used to the idea. Now about the pizza muncher story…”

She said that four years into her relationship with Matt, he looked at her one day in a pizza shop and had a realization.

I’m not sure if this happened before or after she yelled at him for treating her the way he should have treated his past exes; they were the ones who had been mean-spirited and manipulative, while all she wanted was to love him.

She said that even though she was yelling like crazy, with all the swear words, he heard her words. He left abruptly to go on a walk. When he came back, he said she was right; that all his walls were defenses he’d erected for those other women. How he was ready to open up to her…

“And then he started convincing me to take down MY walls. Now THAT took some work,” Mommy chortled. “Anyway. Matt’s epiphany. We were in the pizzeria and he said later that there was this moment when he looked at me and thought, She doesn’t mean any harm to anyone. All she wants to do is sit here, have a nice time and munch on that pizza. That’s all.”

“He still calls me ‘pizza muncher’ every now and then,” said Mommy.

“Eew, that’s gross!” I said, “You guys are so gay!” (P.S. Gay should not be used as an insult, but in this case it is really a compliment, because whoever invented a love story that crazy?!”)

Etienne said a lot of blah blah blah about how we’ll see where things go, and see how we feel, and even if we do decide to take a step back it doesn’t have to mean we cut all contact.

“I mean, the line between friend and relationship is definitely more fuzzy now that we’re not even having sex,” I said.

Except that I was comfortably snuggled on the bed in my underwear with my head on his man-chest, and I liked that in a way that says more than friends.

“Yep,” Mommy agreed with a laugh. “We’re totally gay for each other. Okay, Baby Girl. You feeling better now? Good. My work here is done. Everything’s going to be okay. Trust in time and what will be will be.”

And we hung up, and I’m here now, in my bed, my heart sore and my brain at the edge of fatigue. I lie here, potentially boyfriend-less, but potentially not. Either way, I have to go clean Patriarchy Poison out of my body if I’m going to make an army of Sex Goddesses to bring the world to its knees.

Yes! Get out the poison. That’s exactly what you have to do, said Mommy. The best way to fight the patriarchy is by healing yourself. THEN you can conquer the world.

Like the Mocking Jay, or Daenerys Targaryen.

Now all I have to do is survive the next two and a half weeks.

My cabin in the woods awaits.

Love,

Lorelai

PS I spent a blissful 48 hours live and in the flesh with Mommy this week, about which I have not written a word, because, Patriarchy and Man Orbits took this week’s compulsive-writing-energy by storm and the Mommy-magic just stayed…magic. Beautiful, mindful, sweet, magnificent magic.