User blogs

Dear Captain,

I (she/her) am thinking about moving in with my boyfriend (he/him) of 4 years. The problem is that I am afraid of losing my sense of self, and I don’t now if I can be, or want to be, 100% committed to him.

My boyfriend is wonderful in many ways. I love him, and really like spending time with him. I also tend to have better habits concerning sleep and food when I live with someone versus when I live on my own. So, co-habitation with him seems like a good choice. From former relationships, I know that I tend to care too much about my partner’s happiness, and forget to think about what I want. For example, I want to have more adventures than my boyfriend, but I might tell myself I am content with staying at home when he doesn’t want to join me. Maybe this is because as a woman in our patriarchal society, having a successful relationship with a man is seen as the objective.

I should also mention my long distance friend/former hookup, let’s call him Mr. Distance. We met five years ago and spent a couple of days together. We live on opposites ends of the continent, so we couldn’t date. We have have kept in touch, and met two more times as friends. Our conversation can still be a little bit flirty. It’s easy to fantasize and image a perfect relationship, when we never had one. In reality I think any relationship would crash and burn in less than than a year if we tried. But talking to him still gives me a thrill, that I miss in my daily life. It gives me a resort from the worries of everyday life, a space where I don’t have to care what anyone else thinks.

A work-friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer recently, and the first thing she did besides starting treatment was marrying her long time partner. That made me realize that if I had a year to live, I wouldn’t spend that year with my boyfriend. I would travel the world, alone or with Mr Distance. But if I am thinking about the long term future, then I don’t know what to do.

Kind regards,

Twined

Dear Twined,

There’s no rule that couples have to live together after a certain amount of time, and there are other ways to improve your sleep hygiene and eating habits than mixing your books with someone else’s books. If you’d rather not move in with your boyfriend, don’t.

If you decide to give living together a try despite your misgivings, put safeguards in place. For example, instead of combining your current rent payments to afford a bigger place, cut your housing payments in half by looking for a place that either of you could afford on your own if the other person moved out. Sock whatever you can into an emergency fund. Talk openly about how you both want money, housework, and house rules to work to make sure you’re on the same page, like you would with any potential roommate. Talk about what happens when the lease ends and make a plan to check in a few months before and decide for sure whether you want to renew (together, separately, at all) for another year. Lots of people move in with romantic partners as a compatibility test for eventual marriage or long-term cohabitation. Lots of those same people skip these conversations even when they explicitly call it a trial run, and I hear from them when they “can’t” break up without massively destabilizing their finances or access to safe housing.

“What do we do if one or both of us realizes that living together isn’t working?” is a scary question. Love yourselves and each other enough to ask the scary questions. Would your boyfriend want to move in with you in the first place if he knew about these doubts? Does he have doubts of his own, and is there something either of you could do that would make moving in easier to say yes or no to? Does delaying that step spell the end of your relationship, and is that risk worse than the alternative? ‘Cause I can tell you from experience that moving in with someone when you are unsure about the relationship and then realizing that you’ve made a huge mistake once you’re already locked in is in no way easier, cheaper, or better than breaking up or deciding to hold off until you’re truly ready. (Signed, a lady who looked at multiple studio apartments the same month she packed to move in with her ex)

You say “I want to have more adventures than my boyfriend, but I might tell myself I am content with staying at home when he doesn’t want to join me.” Is your boyfriend stopping you from having those adventures, or are you stopping you? Meaning, is this a “break up with people who make your world feel small” problem or is this a “please get a therapist and learn to do stuff without him” problem? “Mr. Distance” sounds like one of those motivating crushes, where it’s not so much about being with the person as it is liking the parts of yourself that come awake when you’re around him. The realization that you wouldn’t spend your last year on earth with your boyfriend is another version of the same message: There’s a happier version of you out there, and there is still time to become her! In your letter you are literally describing what it’s like to experience a call to adventure, so what would happen if you answered? If your life were a rom-com, you’d be in the part where the heroine has to date herself. 

Movie-Twined would have a pretty good relationship with a solid guy who wants her to move in with him, let’s call him Mr. Dependable, and she’d also have tempting Mr. Distance circling around. But”which guy does she pick” wouldn’t be the story, it would just be the rom-com shaped vessel for the real story about figuring out who she wants to be.

Fade in on Twined and Mr. Dependable as guests at a terminally ill coworker’s wedding, where the topic of “what would you do if you only had a year left” is on everyone’s mind. During wedding planning, the bride and groom made a giant list of all the places they want to go and everything they want to see and do over a lifetime together. They’ve written each adventure-task on a slip of paper, and put the slips into a giant bucket, and their plan at the wedding is to draw twelve slips, one for each month of the next year, and then distribute the leftovers between the guests. The couple will accomplish as many things as they can in the time they have, and then it’s up to the people they love to do the rest in their honor.

Twined ends up with three slips of paper. We don’t see what’s written on them before we head into a montage of tearful toasts, first dances, and other wedding reception staples while the soundtrack lays it on thick with At Last and Time In A Bottle and (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life. By the time Ben Folds sticks the knife allllllllll the way in, we find a runny-mascara’d Twined out on the balcony for a little much-needed air. She’s finally looking at her “bucket list” items when Mr. Dependable comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her from behind, and the last thing we see is her, engulfed in his bear hug almost like she’s being strangled, the slips of paper clutched tightly in her hand. Each subsequent act of the movie will correspond to one of the slips as living out her friend’s dreams leads Twined to discover her own.

What are the adventures on the slips? You tell me. If I were really writing this as a movie, I might build a trio of the bride’s best friends, and each of them gets one adventure like it’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-meets-Little Women-meets-Sitting In Bars With Cake. Since this is your story, you get to fill in the blanks with everything you’d rather be doing when you pretend to be content with staying home with your boyfriend. What could you do with a year?

You could get a therapist and ask them, “How do I figure out where I end and other people begin?”

You could devote one night a week to do something interesting outside of your house, invite your boyfriend or not invite him, and if he doesn’t want to join you, you could do it anyway.

You could finally learn to fence or play an instrument or do the moonwalk or get really into darkroom photography or roller derby or improv or a foreign language or whatever that thing is that you keep resolving to try every January 1 and then not doing.

You could close your eyes, spin a globe, and plan a trip to wherever your finger lands when it stops.

You could volunteer for a cause that you care about and do your bit to change the world.

You could make this the year you focus on making new friends and deepening ties you already have.

You could make this the year that you put in the work to level up in your chosen career field.

You could go to your nearest animal shelter and walk out with just one of the many loves of your life.

I don’t know, but you do. These are your sculptures, your potions, your traveling show, and this is your song. If the duet you’re currently singing has stopped feeling good, improvise something new.

We live in a competitive world and want to give our kids every advantage. But with helicopter parenting, it can backfire big time.

The post Helicopter Parenting: From Good Intentions to Poor Outcomes appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

Announcement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this July one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably October.

27th July, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.

We will be on Level 2 (the upper levels are closed to non-ticket-holders), but I don’t know exactly where on the floor. It will depend on where we can find a table. I have shoulder length brown hair, and will have my plush Chthulu which looks like this:

https://images.fun.com.au/products/53367/1-1/cthulhu-12-plush.jpg

Please bring your masks/exemption lanyards, and obey any rules posted in the venue.

The venue has lifts to all floors and accessible toilets. The accessibility map is here:

https://bynder.southbankcentre.co.uk/m/7dc306803bc2d7cf/original/21539-24-Access-Updated-Access-Map_Proof-2.pdf

The food market outside (side away from the river) is pretty good for all sorts of requirements, and you can also bring food from home, or there are lots of cafes on the riverfront.

Other things to bear in mind:

1. Please make sure you respect people’s personal space and their choices about distancing.
2. We have all had a terrible time for the last four years. Sharing your struggles is okay and is part of what the group is for, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm each other or have the conversation be entirely negative. Where I usually draw the line here is that personal struggles are fine to talk about but political rants are discouraged, but I may have to move this line on the day when I see how things go. Don’t worry, I will tell you!
3. Probably lots of us have forgotten how to be around people (most likely me as well), so here is permission to walk away if you need space. Also a reminder that we will all react differently, so be careful to give others space if they need.

Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.

kate DOT towner AT gmail DOT com

Hi Captain!

I (she/her) am currently in a relationship with a person (he/him) that I would characterize as abusive. I also grew up within an abusive family, including an abusive stepfather (he/him). A few days ago, my partner  made a huge scene about how a trivial item I own (and remember buying)  was actually his (although he has never previously shown any interest in  it). I basically shrugged and said, “OK, if you say so” and he made off with the item and stashed it. (I know where it is, and can easily retrieve and/or replace it. The item itself doesn’t matter.) It reminded me of a similarly weird incident with my stepfather years ago, when he suddenly started screaming at me that a trivial item I owned (and which I remembered buying) was actually his. (He had never previously shown
any interest in this particular item, and it was easy to replace.) Do you have any insight into what this behaviour is about, and what response (other than “OK, whatever” and just replacing the item) could be useful?

Thanks for everything you do!

Weirded Out

Dear Weirded Out:

There’s a book called Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft that may interest you, and a more recent book called See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, And Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill, which really digs into the “hows” of coercive control and the depressing similarities between interpersonal abuse and systems of punishment and control. If you’ve never seen the movie Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944) you might find it educational and relatable, and there’s tons of info at LoveIsRespect.org.

Abusers are creatures of entitlement who assume that everything about their targets is theirs for the taking. They don’t think of your time, attention, compliance, or resources like money, space, or stuff as something you get to make decisions about because they don’t think of you as a separate, complete person who deserves human rights or autonomy. They believe you owe everything to them, all the time, and some of them use that belief to engineer relationships that resemble cults where they are the Supreme Leader and you are a mere acolyte who is lucky to serve them. Through that lens, everything you do and say becomes a reflection on them, and everything in your life that does not center them becomes a threat to their authority. Some abusers of this ilk are very good at engineering absurd little tests of loyalty and compliance where there’s no way for you to win. If you resist they use it as an excuse to punish you. If you comply, they get to colonize yet another corner of your life.

There is a classic flavor of Reddit advice-request post where the Original Poster (OP) says that a new relationship is going great except for how their wonderful new partner has taken a strong dislike to something that gives the OP pleasure. The partner wants them to get rid of their [beloved pet][too-interesting hobbies][quirky decor][lush houseplants][family heirloom][childhood comfort object]. The problem often emerges at relationship milestones, like several months in when the relationship gets more serious or right after they move in together or when someone gets pregnant, and it’s weird because the partner knew they had [cats][a collection of awesome swords][a shelf devoted to their favorite fandom][the teddy bear their departed beloved grandma sewed for them with her own hands] the whole time they were dating and never said anything, but all of a sudden it’s a huge problem. Teddy is suddenly “gross and embarrassing.” Their interesting hobbies are suddenly “childish.” Old photo albums in the closet full of happy memories become a problem because they contain evidence of exes, which is “disrespectful” to their current relationship. Beloved pets are suddenly inconvenient and messy, and allergies that were easily controlled with over-the-counter meds during the courtship stage are suddenly “it’s me or the dog” life-threatening.

The partner presents this criticism and the demand to get rid of the offending object as the kind of reasonable compromise everybody makes in relationships. Does the OP want to have real, grown up love and build a future together or not? If they do, why would they choose [a bunch of stupid plants that Perfect Partner is not interested in][to surround themselves with reminders of The Past, which did not include Perfect Partner and is therefore without value][time-consuming hobbies that take their attention away from Perfect Partner] when it would be so simple to just give in? “Do you really care about a silly object more than you care about me?” the abuser whines. The OP likes both the partner and the object and was not aware that they were in competition.

Like clockwork, the OP wonders if they are the problem. They bend over backwards to be “fair” to the partner, to locate a nexus of diagnoses or past traumas in the partner that would make these demands all make sense somehow. They accept the partner’s bad-faith framing that wanting to hold on to their own stuff they enjoy constitutes “making a big deal out of nothing” but coming into their space like an obsessed protagonist in an Edgar Allen Poe story demanding the removal of said items is the chill, normal path. They worry aloud that they are being too selfish, too immature, too unyielding, etc. to be loved and wonder whether their reluctance to sacrifice whatever this thing is is “holding them back” from adult relationships. Sometimes friends and family who are more invested in the idea of a perfect relationship than they are in the poster’s happiness within their actual relationship double down on this with, “Well, all relationships take work and require compromise” advice.

These stories tend to end a couple of ways. The happiest endings are the ones where the controlling partner issues an ultimatum and the OP sees the red flags and says “Oops, if you need me to let go of stuff that’s precious or enjoyable in my life so that we can be together, I guess things aren’t going work out between us after all, too bad, so sad, have a great life” and gets the hell out of there before things escalate. The controlling partner is free to go tell the story about how they got dumped for no good reason to anyone who will listen, and the OP is free to enjoy their “silly” and “childish” pursuits in peace and hold out for someone who isn’t threatened by how awesome they are.

Sometimes the OP says no to getting rid of whatever it is, and the partner seems to accept it, but really they are just biding their time until the OP goes out of town so they they can “accidentally” kill the houseplants or “accidentally” donate the heirlooms or “accidentally” let the nieces and nephews play with the pristine collectibles or “accidentally” spill water on the artwork in progress or “accidentally” run Teddy through bleach cycles until he’s in shreds. Please notice, it’s never their own shit that gets “accidentally” destroyed, which perfectly tracks with situations where abusers break household objects to punish and terrify their targets, claiming they “lost control” but maintained enough control to only break things that didn’t belong to them. Sometimes the evidence of naked destruction is enough to turn the alarm bells into klaxons and the OP realizes that someone who destroys everything you care about will eventually destroy you.

Other times, the OP complies and complies and complies. After all, it’s “just” a plant. It’s “just” a photo. It’s “just” a memory. It’s just “stuff.” They fall for the controlling partner’s promise that it was only this one tiny thing that was getting in the way of their perfect relationship, and then they learn, sometimes over the course of a lifetime, that it was never “just” one thing or even that thing, it was the systematic eradication of everything that brought them joy or reminded them of the possibility of existing as a separate person away from their partner. The irony is, the more abuse targets comply, the less satisfaction the abuser derives from each act of compliance, and the more the abuser escalates to get the same hit of dopamine or whatever the fuck it is that abusers derive from controlling other people. The appearance of temporary compliance can be a solid short-term strategy while an abuse target figures out how to get away from the abuser safely, but it doesn’t actually fix anything long-term.

Do you see the pattern? Your stepdad and your current partner probably stole your stuff for the exact same reasons: 1) They felt entitled to it 2) They liked upsetting you and feeling powerful at your expense 3) Taking a seemingly unimportant item away from you is a perfect way of testing your compliance, manufacturing a source of constant friction, and then gaslighting you for “making a big deal” out of something so small. The less significant the item, the more irrational their behavior, the “crazier” you seem when you get upset about it or try to describe the fight to other people, and the more they paint themselves as the only rational party.

If there’s one thing that abusers and other kinds of bullies excel at, it’s creating lose-lose situations that leave you second-guessing yourself about whether it’s worth it to confront their bad behavior or easier to just let them win. If you make a stink about it at the time of the theft, you confirm that they have power to upset you and they get to have an argument about how it’s “just” stuff, they were only joking, how you don’t need it anyway, how petty and selfish you are for starting an argument about such a small thing, how ungrateful you are for everything they’ve ever given you, how you just need to learn to take a joke, etc.. If you don’t make a stink about it, the walls of your cage close in a little more.  Now that your partner has a baseline of what kind of treatment you’ll tolerate, he’ll start to test you harder. What will you stay silent about to “keep the peace” that he gets to destroy at his sole discretion? Once an abuser gets a taste for this, they will never stop taking things from you and testing your compliance.

You asked me what a “useful” response was to this kind of behavior, and you’re the best judge of that. When your partner steals your stuff, if your instincts tell you that the safest thing to do in the moment is to ignore this (or seem to) and quietly replace the item later, then you are probably correct. Like I said, deliberate de-escalation or the appearance of compliance can be a useful strategy to keep yourself safe in the short-term. However, there is no “useful” script or advice that turns an abusive person into a not-abusive person or that can keep you safe from an abuser in the long term. If your partner wants the stimulation of a fight and an excuse to escalate, he will find one, and the quiet compliance that worked all the other times will become the pretext.“What, you’re just gonna sit there and let me take it? I thought you had more backbone than that! ” His bad behavior will always be both your problem and your fault if he has his way.

The most useful thing I can probably tell you is that abusive relationships are unfixable from the inside. There is no happy ending where you redeem an abuser with the power of your perfect love and understanding, there’s only the one that you claw into existence by getting away safely and staying gone.You’ve correctly spotted a harmful pattern that you recognize from childhood, and you could spend decades trying to plumb your partner’s psyche and figure out exactly why he does what he does or whether it meets the standard for ABUSE-abuse, or you could decide right now that you don’t stick around in relationships where people steal your stuff and gaslight you about it.

I wish you safety, peace, and all of your stuff being right where you left it whenever you want it.

You might find yourself feeling stuck, lonely, and helpless. When your husband yells at you, it can feel scary and alone. The fact you are reading this means you are […]

The post Why Is My Husband Yelling at Me? appeared first on The Gottman Institute.