Sometimes the competition in a relationship is palpable -- and sometimes it even spills over into a kind of nastiness. If the relationship can't "right" itself it spills over into outright hatred -- or something very near to it. To call someone a nasty name, or even "think" them a nasty name, because they will not do your bidding or because they think differently than you do, is anathema.
I have had relationship battles. Even with Sheila, my wife of almost twenty years, there were battles: over money, and direction, and focus, and even over the most intimate of elements. Certainly with other women I had been with before Sheila -- there were also battles, and rivalries, and misunderstandings, and stupid decisions -- and now, looking back, I regret most of them. Since Sheila's passing in 2006 December I have been clearer-eyed and much more honest about relationships. If I can't make it work; or if I think that I am in a situation where for the good of all I need to leave, I will do so. Now in the very autumn of my life I am less inclined to even enter into the possibility of a relationship, ever again. It's not that I have been "burned" too often, or that I think that there is no one out there for me -- it is just that I lack the comprehensive energy to "try again" to make sense out of the senseless. I can live well even when I am in doubt -- but I cannot live when I am in crisis, and constantly so.
And that is why I said "Goodbye" to Bertina -- in spite of my feelings.
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