How My Relationship Saved Me From Myself pt 2
Traps, Gender Studies 201 and not walking it back.
In Pt. 1, I explore the concept of allowing our relationships to challenge and change our beliefs. What we feel weird about gets brought to the surface. And when we’re ready, our “better half,” morphs into a way better counterpoint to the argument we’ve sort of but not really been letting ourselves have in our head.
(Here’s the link to Pt. 1, if you’d like to get caught up. It’s ok if you don’t. It’s not like a Marvel thing. This one will still make sense).
Now, I’m going to dive into the idea of holding our own.
Man or woman, age gap or even, breadwinner or non-breadwinner— At some point, we’re gonna be tested. It’s a good thing. We’re in these relationships to know ourselves better, so it makes sense that, eventually, we put ourselves in a position to stand on something. Stand up for ourselves. And, in doing so, for each other.
It’s one thing to stand up for yourself to someone you don’t like, or a boss or a friend or something. But how about when it’s the person you’re intimate with? The difficulty level goes up about five notches if you have to share a bed with that person.
In so many of my bad relationships, I would stand my ground until the girl threw a big enough fit that I would back down because I didn’t have the bandwidth, skill, or strength to deal with it.1 This was a huge disservice to both of us every time and just led to both of us resenting each other. They resent me for being a wuss. I resent them for being a bitch. Yay!
I’ll give you one example.
It’s 2020. My then-girlfriend and I are in the car, I’m driving. It’s smack in the middle of covid lockdown, so I can only assume we’re getting takeout. I forget how it came up, but she asks me what my “type” is. I’m super taken aback because, A) We’ve been dating for at least three months– and this is covid dating, too. All you can do is chill inside and talk. So we already know a lot of deep shit about each other. And B) We’re not those people. She’s a journalism major at a very prestigious LA-based university. We’re politics heads. We read big books. We both fancy ourselves intellectual, writer types. We chain smoke marijuana in her apartment all day and do one of three things: fight, fuck, or wax super philosophical with a kind of edgy, brash, lefty slant. (We were like if Sydney Sweeney and her friend in White Lotus were legit dating).
So, yeah. I’m surprised at this question. I figured she’s above that, and/or we’re past that. Apparently not.
After laughing it off a few times (“lol, yeah bro, what’s your favorite color?) she keeps pressing me and I realize she’s not kidding. I try to deflect with the classic “I don’t have a type.” (“C’mon, you know I love Rae Sremmurd”).
It’s not working. She’s lowkey getting pissed. I gotta engage. And by “engage,” I mean ask her three times three different ways “Is this a trap?” “Are you sure it’s not a trap?” “It’s okay if it is a trip, just can you please tell me if it’s a trap?”2
She thrice confirms, it’s not a trap. One time with an eye roll.
It was a trap.
And I stand by that I didn’t even give a bad answer. I think it was totally reasonable, very nonspecific, but obviously included her.
That was part of the problem. She told me it was fucked up that I had this type and that she would’ve liked it if she hadn’t been my type, that way she’d feel more special and not fetishized.
I apologized, like a beta. We broke up a few months later.
Three years later, Me and Good Girlfriend are in Bali.
A couple weeks back I had busted my toe open real bad and had a mini surgery that she watched and grabbed my hand through (so gross, she a real one for this and so many other things).
We’re at dinner, finally going surfing the next morning. My toe’s healed enough. She’s never been surfing, it’s gonna be a big day. My head is completely on the future waves. I’m not at all present. She clocks this and is also kinda tipsy. Pretty unlike her, but after the past couple weeks playing nurse, seeing all the grueling shit, plus picking up the physical slack while I hobble around, she deserves it.
After a few minutes of silence, she points to an IG model-looking girl in the doorway and asks me, “Do you think she’s hot?”
“The one with the big fake tits?3 Nah, not really,” I reply.
I was 100% telling the truth, and yet, somehow, this conversation devolved into a debate on which gender is more responsible for upholding the current beauty standard for women.
I felt attacked out of nowhere– I thought I answered the question correctly. “How am I in an argument with the love of my life about this weird side tangent thing, at dinner, in Bali?”
She was coming at me pretty hard (unlike her) so I was comin back hard too.
I’m a good arguer, especially on shit like this, that I’ve observed and thought long and hard about for years. I had the receipts, and I got the last word fairly quickly. She went silent, close to tears. Could not speak.
“Oh, no! What the fuck have I done? Have I just killed this relationship? In Bali? At a candlelit dinner? Over a fucking Gender Studies 201 discussion?”
I immediately regretted failing to be present. I could’ve recognized that I was going too hard. I could’ve made it more of a conversation instead of an argument. I was left with the empty, sinking feeling common among men who let their pride get in the way of the big picture.
We walked back to the hotel in silence. She was many steps ahead of me.
When we got back, she was sitting on the bed, still close to tears. I dropped to my knees to get to her eye level. I said I was sorry for taking it too far, and if this was the end, I would be devastated but I’d understand.
I was also clear that I did not take back any of what I said.
I respected her too much for that. I loved her too much to bullshit her.
She loved me enough to not just swallow her pride, give me my technical “W” and go to sleep.
We ended up staying up into the wee hours of the morning exploring our personal experiences on the topic, why these experiences were so important to us, and how they lead us to our ideological conclusions.
By the end, we both realized that the answer to the question kinda didn’t matter.
We just both wanted to be heard and understood. That’s it. “Can you please just recognize my experience?”
Yes, of course.
That was the first time I really stood my ground in an argument with a partner, and even in the face of death, (end of the most beautiful relationship I’d ever been in) I was able to get present and return to love. Had I apologized, pleaded, walked everything back… Whoo. I don’t know.
I really thought the key to a healthy relationship was not having conflict.
Now I know I gotta be with someone who can handle a bit of conflict and move through it with me. It’s gonna get dark. We gotta get weird. We’re gonna go off.
It’s like the weather. You don’t know when it’s gonna rain, but you can be sure that at some point, it will. What are you gonna do? Always carry an umbrella? Never go outside? Wear only waterproof clothes? Nah, sometimes you’re gonna get soaked.
Who can I stand in the rain with? That’s my new criteria. Who can I get soaked with, hash it out right there on the spot without doing therapy exercises? Mano a mano, you give me your best, I’ll counter and before you know it, we’re going deeper than the original argument, we understand each other better, and circle back to love.
How this really saved me from myself though?
It showed me that 95% of the arguing I’d been doing my whole life was fucking futile.
I’m not afraid to admit, I used to love it when people came after me. It was the only time I ever had an excuse to spit venom without people looking at me completely crazy. As a boy/young man (up until like a year ago) I had so much pent-up energy I had no idea how to address in a healthy way, so when someone decided to challenge me with concepts and words? Holy fuck. It was like someone offering me a glass of lemonade after a day of yard work on a summer day.
But what this Bali, gender-studies conversation taught me is that, all the times I’d thought I cooked someone? Yeah, that was worth absolutely nothing. I didn’t change their mind, I didn’t gain their respect, and nothing was solved. It was just an activity. Wheel spinning.
More importantly, I finally got it through my thick skull that people hadn’t been arguing points with me. They’d had something, most likely one something, happen to them, and now they feel like they have to defend it until their death whenever it comes up. And I’ve been doing it too. We all do it. It’s in our nature. This is how we “stand up for ourselves” a lot of the time. We hear some shit that loosely relates to a thing we experienced personally, and all of a sudden we’re back in time, defending that shit on behalf of our younger self.
That’s how ideologies are formed. That’s why people vote for who they vote for, eat the food they eat, go the places they go, and as Good Girlfriend reminded me: “This is why people go to war.” Some shit happened a way long time ago, they didn’t talk about it, and/or people didn’t listen and a lifetime later it still has a massive fucking hold on them.
There’s no “correct” answer to the question: which gender is more responsible for upholding the beauty standard for women? I mean, feel free to slug it out in the comments or my dm’s (I’m still down to get after it), but only if it’s fun! ‘Cause it ultimately doesn’t matter.
Very few people actually enjoy getting into the nitty gritty philosophical, political, and social ephemera.4 But I’ve had massively good results in asking people what their experience is. People love being granted the space to say what happened to them. Now, when I find myself in these confrontive, abstract conversations, I try to lead with: “Ok, what happened?”
And I was too much of a moralist coward to leave them on the spot.
These are the moments I look back and feel the most disgusted with myself. “Hey, dumbass… It wouldn’t be a trap if she told you! Also, why are you asking your girlfriend three times if she’s gonna trap you? Please show some fuckin pride and drop her off, leave and never come back.”
We were both really unsettled with the amount of plastic surgery in Bali. It’s really strange to be in a developing country, guys are cutting steel in flip flops while blasting cigs, and bam- there’s a $10k pair of tits walking by. No judgment, just a funny visual for where we’re at right now, collectively.
This is the only time I feel like I should’ve stayed in college. That’s where you can argue with people who like it.
Experiencing human-ness is what connects us all, it's what makes life life, and it begs the question what/why the fuck are we experiencing being human for? And I think a pretty good answer to that is the question you pose at the end of this essay: asking others (and yourself) "what happened?" There's really all the "why" in there that you could ever need. Soooooo muuuuuch spacceeeeee!!!!!!!
It's a question that will take a lifetime to answer. Literally. The experience(s) will never change, but the way in which we think about the experience, what values we hold/don't, where we place ourselves in society, how we feel (generally), how we think (generally), our takeaways and our insights, what we continue to defend and what we happily let go will likely change and morph and evolve, which is fantastic. We get to see the ways we change through that one question, and press up against past beliefs, ideologies, and values. So rad.
You go on a hike and come across a river. It's flowing. It's beautiful. After looking at the river for a minute, are you looking at the same river you came across a minute ago? Your answer depends entirely on your perception. Your perception depends entirely on your life experience.
A conversation that revolves around the question "what happened?" is much more fluid than an argument revolved around the same question. I don't even know how an argument could happen over listening to another person's experience and PURELY their experience. There's certainly a time and a place for both dialogue and arguments, even in relationships (Shakshuka girl). But being able to ask and answer "what happened?" to your partner and to yourself allows for more space, forgiveness, and love. Let me hear about what happened to you and why you think this, and you can listen to me talk about the same. Yes, let's just recognize the differences and similarities between our experiences of human-ness, let's recognize how we're all, in some ways, murals of the life that has passed before our eyes, and let's be eager to see what will change tomorrow, so that we can morph just a little bit more. Let's love each other and trust each other and walk through the rain together.
No language has words to express my gratitude for walking through thunderstorms with you. "Thank you, I love you" will have to do for now.
P.S. Pretty fucking ironic how I needed all my shit for that trip to be waterproof!!! I've been so scared of getting drenched. But now I lay in my backyard and get soaked, knowing I'll find answers in the downpour.