Excellent discussion, barbiedoll; I recognize so much in your share and thank you for opening the dialogue.
Before I was married to D’s dad, he took me on a trip to a city I’d always wanted to visit. It was for my birthday, a big deal birthday, one of the decade birthdays. It might have been amazing, but for various reasons, it kind of wasn’t.
First, it turned out that his best friend from high school lived there, with a new fiancée. The high school friend was so boring, and the fiancée was younger than we were and a real pill, unaccountably arrogant and difficult to have any real conversation with. They weren’t my people, and only one of them was known and only to one of us. But staying with them made the trip cheaper, so that’s what we did.
It turned out that the best friend had the same exact birthdate as mine. :/ That was fun. *cough*
The friend and the fiancée threw a big swanky dinner party at one of the city’s hottest restaurants. Their local people turned up for it and I had one of the most annoying and uncomfortable nights of my life. And I’m previously a bit of an “IT GIRL”, and usually mix very well with others and in places like that. But those people were impossible to enjoy and while one of them hit on me with bizarre hostility all night, another aggressively went after the man who had brought me there, as if he’d come especially to see her. I’ll stop there because honestly, you don’t want to hear the rest of it. If not for the fact that we ultimately did marry and have a beautiful amazing daughter from it, that night and trip were massive red flags, like, THEY GLOWED LIKE THE FIRES OF HELL, and I might wish that I had heeded those stark signals and run for the hills upon returning home.
Yuck.
I think that women just natively have language for emotions and anything else because from such a young age, we are constantly required to live fully in our bodies. So we know when there’s blood coming, when it’s with us, when it’s late, what all the signals are of menstruation and pregnancy and miscarriage and menopause. And if we are mothers, then we also know to pay attention to every minor twitch or rhythm or anomaly in the bodies or moods of babies and children and teens. Fathers do this to some degree also, but mothers may have the more natural or explicit aptitude for it. It doesn’t make anyone better or superior or whatever; it’s just a different skill set or strength. We won’t talk about how it goes deeper maybe, if anyone was traumatized in childhood, except that maybe there are two sides of that — the one where reading another person’s body language or tone or moods is a survival mechanism that works, and the other where ignoring or dismissing or automatically not registering anyone’s verbal and nonverbal expression is also a survival mechanism that works.
I’m the kind for whom reading everyone and everything is what explicitly works. H is one for whom it is so painful and frightening that he can’t. Like, ever.
It’s sad, because he is really, really smart in so many other key ways. And before MLC, he was very able to express his deepest stuff to me, and did so with abandon. And now he isn’t and doesn’t. Or, he tries from time to time. But I am so mad at the 2500 miles and years of distance and replacement, that I can’t really hear or register him fully. I mean I can’t even see him, he doesn’t telephone, and as of last November, I have no idea where he even lives. There’s an ambiguity about it but there’s also so much unresolved confusion, and so much anger.
I’m not sorry, at the moment.
barbiedoll, what I want to say here is that I think when a man (or anyone) is like this, when they’re “FINE” even you know they clearly aren’t — when they turn to give their disclosure to some jackass third party, I think they do so without much conviction or commitment. My sense of it is that they unload on the outsider because that person is “safe”? Because that person has little meaning to them, comparatively, and will neither judge them nor be around long enough to really understand how the piece that is shared fits into the overall puzzle of that Self. And because that third party is originally without history and therefore both “new” and also meaningless, once it susses out that there is a problem with or disconnect in the narrative, it’s easier to ditch that connection too.
When h was here four years ago, he avoided looking at key decor in the then-new house. I had two framed artworks that I was so pleased to show him, and to tell him why I loved them, and he literally turned his face away from both. I asked him gently why, later. He said almost painfully that he didn’t look at certain things in case they were then taken away from him and he might never see them again.
It was one of the most honest and confusing things he’s ever said to me. And all I know from it really is that his inner pain runs deep channels and twists I know absolutely nothing about. And here I thought that *I* had it hard.
What I gather from experience of h is that the people he discloses to are like so many throwaway accounts. He can be anyone when he tells stories to them. The only person he can be with me, is himself. The present Self, a past Self, or some yet to be manifested future Self. But always only himself. He knows I know most of the pieces of him. He also knows I will hold all aspects accountable or in grace, or both.
Some people legitimately do not understand how to receive love, and they may legitimately fear it. Having loved, especially having loved him, I understand that fear a bit. I know you do, too.
I’m not sure how we get around it. I once tried the Human Design approach for his design type and asked only yes/no questions and was, for a while, satisfied with those blunt or gruff answers. Sometimes I rephrased a more open-ended question so many times in the same conversation that it was like trying to get the horse to drink, which amazingly he finally did. If I can find that chat in the deep archives, I’ll paraphrase it sometime here for you. It was like pulling teeth but it was successful and I don’t think it was bad or codependent or anything else negative for me to do, because it did work. The only trouble is that it’s tiring for the questioner, and it’s hard to keep up that style long enough for the answerer to register that it’s functional and can be streamlined to make it easier on both.
Communication dynamics are a discipline and maybe that’s what marital counseling is about — the showing up together on routine schedule for a structured and different or better kind of dialogue. Sometimes it seems really damned unfair that we should have to “learn” how to just even *talk* to our spouse; you’d think that after years or a decade or three together, we both would know how to have a normal and reasonable conversation. But life throws all kinds of junk into the mix. Dialogue gets cluttered with so much else.
On throwaway accounts: during that birthday trip with the man who would eventually be a husband, then D’s dad, then ex-husband, the best friend’s fiancée took us out of state to a big deal antique fair. On the long drive up in the dark, she drove with my partner sitting shotgun, and me alone in the back seat listening to them talk as if I wasn’t even there. That was a red flag too; it doesn’t make any sense to me even now.
At a gas station in the dark, I stopped breathing as the man who would eventually be my first husband told a total stranger that his last name was fabricated by his father for reasons no one understood. And that his name at birth had been something entirely different. I had known him and his father both for something like five years by then, and had never heard this story even once. I thought he was lying. But you know what? It was the truth.
He told it to some woman who was a total nobody to either of us, as if it was nothing. And it wasn’t something he wanted to talk to me about, after we returned home. Instead he bugged me for years about that trip and said wasn’t it a good trip?
Well, yes and no.
In the many years that have passed — 20 or more, with a brief marriage and a long divorce at the midpoint — I have at least realized that some topics aren’t to be discussed. Not because we are not important enough to discuss them with or to, but because we are *too* important.
If that makes sense. It flies in the face of what I had always wanted and expected of intimacy, but I understand it better now. I think what I have learned during the MLC hurt is that some hurts are really unsayable, unspeakable, and painful enough that maybe they are better left unsaid. I’ve learned that too — that I don’t have to make sure “you” understand 100% and every facet of my pain. It’s weird to describe it like this, but, it’s *my* pain. Sometimes I want to keep it all to myself, not to hoard or wield it for any reason, but just because I am still working on how to understand the ways it inhibited or defaced other aspects of my life, and whether that is still important, or why.
I didn’t ever think that a marriage was about two very self-contained persons living a life in daily and nightly tandem. If anyone had made that clear, years ago, I might never have wanted marriage as much as I did and still do. But I think now that self-containment seems the better and healthier idea. I don’t want to be responsible for managing anyone else’s past hurts anymore. I get that h has those, that I have them, that we all do. Just, at a certain point we have to be the manager of our own inner stuff, or else the train derails and it feels almost impossible to get back on a healthy track.
Sometimes I recognize that what D’s dad said then is still true — that my inner world is pacific. He meant it in the proper noun sense, like the ocean. But it was wordplay and all the definitions and intimations hold true. I think it’s true of every person alive. The inner world and history of a person, and its experience of itself, is so vast and deep and wide, and we can’t really manage it for them. Only the Self itself can do that well.
barbiedoll I hope you can have some peace in giving his self authority fully over to him. I know it hurts when the loved one confides in someone other than us, and that it’s unfair. But maybe it is just because we are far too important to show these doubtful or dark inner parts to. At some point, hopefully, there is a stirring to awareness in the MLCer that we can’t be in the dark much longer.
I’ve read for years on the EUM; I wish I could remember the title that worked best for me. It was by a woman who I think is in the UK. If I remember it, I’ll PM you. What I do know is that there were signs of emotional unavailability or lack of emotional intelligence early on, and I worked with those for several good (if touchy) years, and then MLC began and there wasn’t emotional availability anymore. Just a sh!t ton of emotional lability, which is not great to receive.
It made me wonder if in MLC, any third party gets “the best” of the MLC spouse...for a *time*.
Ultimately the real Self does factor in, and so does familiarity, and then the resultant discomfort of being known more fully. This discomfort is either something that Self is going to get used to, or keep running from.
My prayers are that your h learns to sit comfortably in being known by you. And also that this will happen without you having to become so tired by the effort of it; that a time will come when it is easier for him to trust and let down his habitual guard and just be present with you in a mutually good and continually rewarding way.
I know this was long and thank you for reading it; your thoughts give mine a reason for being.
The Emotionally Unavailable MLC Male
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