Lesson Plans

I suck at relationships.

Not that this needs to be said out loud (or written publicly); the briefest of glances at my romantic resume would make it very plain. I suck at relationships.

There was a period of a few months after the separation when I believed this so intensely that I thought I did not want to be in a relationship--a traditional, monogamous, public relationship--ever again, and made decisions on that basis. (Lesson Learned #1: Don't make decisions in the first few months after a separation. It's a bad idea. Trust me. Whatever seems like a good idea right away, if it really is a good idea, will still seem like a good idea in six months to a year when your head starts to straighten out.) I even flirted with the idea of open relationships and polyamory, though the opportunity to put it into practice never appeared. Good thing, too.

You're all familiar with Attachment Parenting, so I'll assume you are at least minimally aware of the (misused) theoretical basis of it, Attachment Theory, which argues that an infant's relationships with its primary caretakers in the first two years of life will influence the kinds of relationships that infant will seek for the rest of its life. (Cue sense of foreboding and doom.) This may be overstated; later events and relationships can both ammeliorate and exacerbate those early lessons. But the evidence still shows a clear relation between the style of attachment between a caregiver and an infant and the quality and duration of relationships (including friendships and romantic relationships) that infant will form as an adolescent and adult. Most people (app. 60%) have a secure attachment style as adults, meaning they are low in jealousy, high in trust, can self-disclose, and have relatively happy, stress- and conflict-free, and long-lasting relationships. Bracketed on either side of the majority are two quite different kinds of minority: those with insecure attachment styles, and those with avoidant attachment styles. Insecure attachment styles in adults result from relationships with caregivers that were too close, too clingy, and did not allow the infant to differentiate or form an independent identity; the adult then forms relationships that are jealous, possessive, even obsessive, high in stress and conflict, with difficulty in ending bad relationships and tolerating absences and separations. Adults who had unresponsive caregivers as infants or caregivers who were inconsistent in their ability to meet the infant's needs develop avoidant attachment styles. These adults end up in relationships where conflict is low because self-disclosure is nearly absent; they feel they don't particularly need or want closeness, don't depend on other people, tend to have short relationships, and are very low in possessiveness and jealousy.

It occured to me, sometime in the months following the separation when my head began to clear, that declaring myself 'over' relationships and going for casual or multiple relationships would, in my case at least, be nothing more than giving free reign to an avoidant attachment style that had never done me any favours before and wasn't going to start making my life any better now. It was just a way of hiding from all of the things about myself I didn't want to change or confront.

Some people do that, and it works for them. But if I'd gone on in that direction, absolutely the thing to do would have been to keep Frances separate from all aspects of my romantic life forever. It would have been traumatic for her to constantly be getting attached to new "important" people who inevitably leave.

Which leaves me in a much trickier position: someone who would like to be in a 'regular' relationship but whose track record does not inspire much confidence in the success of that endeavour; certainly not enough for me to just throw Greg and Frances together.

I could just not have relationships, but that too strikes me as a way of giving in to the avoidant attachment style and the conditioning that produced it. Not good.

I could just keep it all compartmentalized indefinitely and hope that "permanence" would announce itself to me one day, with gongs and cymbals and banners and an interpretive dance, so I couldn't miss it. As if permanence and the lack thereof were an external condition, and not a partial result of my own behaviours (including the choice of who to be involved with). But this strikes me as wishful thinking, mostly, as well as a shirking of responsibility.

I've decided to do the much harder thing: unlearning all that conditioning that left me with the avoidant style in the first place so I can eventually have some confidence in the permanence of a relationship, to the extent that fate doesn't intervene (Mac Trucks are not particularly responsive to reasoned argument). Then the worries about introductions and the eventual traumas following from them will be much, much less important. (Which is not the same thing as unimportant.) I think, this way, there is the potential for everyone to be happy and to get what they need.

I wonder why this doesn't come up as an option or a suggestion more often in the discussions on this topic that I've read--that if a divorced or single parent is going through a lot of short-term relationships to which the kids are intimate participants or observers, the best course of action may be for the parent to honestly explore the reasons for this pattern and work on fixing it (and in the meantime, keep the kids minimally involved). Doesn't it seem like a good idea? Yet all of the discussion revolves around whether or not you should introduce the kids, and how evil and selfish you are for wanting to introduce the kids, and how much damage it will do to introduce the kids to someone who ends up disappearing. Instead of what kind of relationship the parent is looking for, and how the parent should best go about achieving that, and how much involvement kids should ideally have in that kind of relationship.

It all comes back to the same place these days: I need to learn how to be different. This is yet another way it will make me a happier person and a better mother, not to mention a better partner.

Posted by Andrea at July 22, 2008 9:57 AM under Single Momming

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