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May 2009 Newsletter: This silly
little thing called love A middle-aged friend of mine is breaking up with the partner he loves and he is heart-broken. Five years ago they left their previous relationships so they could be together; it must happen to couples every day.
My friend’s view of his partner in this relationship has gone from her being the woman of his dreams, but him not feeling worthy, through nothing he did for her felt good enough, to craving more personal appreciation. He began to doubt himself seriously, eventually indulging in a fling merely to prove that he could still do it. In a perverse way winning his “ideal” woman drove him to it.
By most standards my friend is a very decent guy, charming, thoughtful and helpful. But this masks a dangerous malaise. He is one of those men who use relationship conquest as his primary strategy to improve his sense of his own worth, and it’s what he habitually does when his current relationship start to get difficult. It doesn’t make him feel good about himself for long, it destroys his relationships and is ruining his adult life. He needs to develop a range of more mature strategies for feeling adequate.
We examine romantic relationships in Chapter 16 of Building Self Confidence for Dummies. Because romantic and sexual relationships can put such a strain on otherwise well-adjusted people it’s the chapter we give away free to anyone who asks for it. It starts with a quiz where we describe five popular romantic film plots and the reader has to guess which films we’re talking about. Any idea which film my friend is living in?
Almost everyone who reads this will have an opinion on his behaviour. For some readers he is simply a “love-rat”, for others the whole story will be a direct challenge to the moral authority under which they choose to live, and the demise of the relationship serves them both right. Some of you may feel sorry for my friend, but most will have no time for him at all and focus on the trail of broken hearts and damaged women he must have left behind him.
The reason I’m writing about it as our confidence subject for the month is that it illustrates in a powerful way, the downside of not developing a healthy, mature way of dealing with our personal confidence issues. In the fictitious country of Erewhon (Samuel Butler’s classic satire of Victorian society) ill people are considered criminals. He argues that the natural state of human beings is healthy, so if anyone neglects or abuses their health to the point of illness they should be punished for it.
We could take a similar view of people who fail to develop and maintain healthy and socially supportive strategies for feeling loved. Those who resort to drug-taking or violence against others to feel adequate are already criminalised, but what about my friend and other philanderers, what about greedy fat-cat bankers, what about manipulative aging parents, what about anyone over the age of 21 who depends upon others constantly to feed their emotional well-being?
Should we always give them the attention they demand, or put them in metaphorical prison? My friend is now in relationship-rehab, where he is learning the things he should have learned in his youth. We’re interested in your personal views, and once again we’ll have book-prizes for the first entries.
RSVP – Brinley & Kate
2007 Creative Retreat in Greece
Building Self-Confidence for Dummies by Kate Burton
and Brinley Platts
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