Hi, Carolyn: I recently had a huge fight with my girlfriend of three years. Our relationship is a good one; we talk of being married but have not set a wedding date.
Recently, she was on the phone with a college friend (male) who suggested the two of them take a vacation together on the opposite side of the country. I was not included in this vacation plan. I am currently attending classes and am not available. She was on the phone with this college friend and in no way was trying to hide the call or the plans from me. At the end of the call, I was furious. I stormed out of her house, and currently our relationship is in question.
I suspect this might be her way of getting me to propose sooner, but do you think her making these plans with a male friend is at all fair to me?
— P.J.
P.J.: I think we need to square up our definitions of “good.”
Your relationship may be a good one in terms of your compatibility, or general goodness as people.
It may even be a good one in terms of where you are in the process of learning to get along with someone in an intimate relationship. If one or both of you came from a dysfunctional home, especially a volatile one, or an abusive prior relationship, or came to each other from a path through emotional or neurological differences, then a stable and positive three-year relationship is great, even. Trust is the hardest thing there is to learn from scratch as an adult. That and maybe ice hockey.
But if you’re still storming out of places in anger and if she is still having performative conversations to “get” someone to do something? Or you think she’s capable of doing that? Or you assume that’s how everyone operates? Then that’s not a get-married-to-it kind of “good.” Not yet, and not soon.
So I will answer your question now, using that context: If your girlfriend was using her friend or their conversation in any way to manipulate you, then of course it wasn’t “fair.” It was somewhere on the scale from adolescent to abusive.
But neither of us knows whether she did that, because you stormed out before you found out — and apparently got this far without following up. And that’s on you.
If difficulty trusting is your explanation for that, then I’m sympathetic. Here you want to marry this woman, hand yourself over to her for life, basically — the most precious thing you’ve got — and she’s making plans out loud with some other guy? That can make a person lightheaded just thinking about all the possible life-altering mistakes in progress in that one moment: You think your whole future is off. You think your judgment is broken. You think you’re an idiot (and everyone knew it but you). You think it’s either this endless loop of suspicion and betrayal, or no one.
Maybe I’ve imagined it wrong, but clearly your thoughts dropped three years of facts and ran after some grim speculation.
What matters more, though, is that you didn’t stop the runaway girlfriend-distrust long enough for an override: “I’m panicking. I won’t know what this is really about till I breathe, think, ask.”
What gives you or any of us the presence of mind to pause and think in such a terrible moment is trusting your own strength to get you through even the worst-case relationship scenarios. She’s done with me, she’s replacing me right in my face, I just burned three years of my life on that? Devastating, yes, but also something you can emerge from whole — because no one gets through life without some kind of rejection.
Another way to look at it: You will be ready for life partnership when your trust and self-calming functions are working for you from the inside, so they’re not constantly reacting to the latest thing someone else does.
