I am sincerely very sorry about all of that.
It won’t happen again.
— Trace
* * *
That’s all, really. I’m only placing that letter in this part of the book because it arose from some reflection in which I had time to engage during the insomnia bouts.
Until a couple of years ago, it really seemed to me that my family history dictated an optimal approach to relationships that was based deeply in the romantic ideal of pure, mutual loyalty and absolute commitment. As hi-falutin’ notions go, it sounds very pretty anyway. My particular patrilineal history said that a man would always stick with “his woman” no matter what, no matter how badly she treated him, unless she decided to leave first. Simple. Of course there is a variety of behavior that represents that sort of “leaving” or emotional abandonment. Coldness is one prominent such type.
(Naturally, there are relationship diversities well beyond “a man and his woman” when taken across other people and their orientations and identities. My language choices here only reflect my discussion of my individual, personal life as a hetero male.)
Lately, however, particularly in the light of a marriage that has been going so phenomenally well (with burgeoning, healthy growth), I have found myself analyzing this poorly examined past and asking myself why this current, solid-over-time sort of relationship never happened with me before. I can see now that my attachment to my family history amounted to a type of bigotry, and I am just as ashamed of that as if I had discovered any other intolerance in myself.
So, it turns out that I was pretty ignorant about romantic involvement, or at least about how to maintain an ideal like that while projecting it onto reality.
This all means that each of my former partners endured what amounted to some unfairness. Not physical abuse, or anything like that, but they had to struggle with my unrealistic expectations. That was not right.
Don’t get me wrong. Almost all of those folks had their own serious problems, and I am not waxing amnesiac about the times that I got clobbered, but some of them really deserved a whole lot nicer treatment from me when I was oblivious to the pain that I was causing them by expecting something that they shouldn’t have had to give.
There were times when I thought that I was really, really right, when I was actually really, really wrong. It is only the change engendered by my marriage to my truest, most trusted friend, plus some scarily enlightening talks with Camrin, who knows me so very well, that has exposed the poison inherent in that idiocy around my family history. Fortunately, once I have something like that pointed out to me, it doesn’t take me very much time to embrace the change.
All-done ignorance.