The longer you stay, the more it implicates you?

[Zapbasket]

You start dating someone. You start picking up on tiny red flags here and there. You notice that while some aspects of this person are very engaging and attractive, something in your gut makes you uncomfortable.

 

In one scenario, you fairly quickly come to the conclusion that these red flags and uncomfortable inner rumblings amount to a deal breaker for you. So you cut off the relationship. In this scenario, you can fairly safely say that the problems were with the other person, or with an overall compatibility (they're more of a smoker than they initially let on, say, and you don't want to be around smoke all the time). You don't need to examine what the "failure" of this liaison says about YOU.

 

But in another scenario, despite these early misgivings and red flags, something lures you further into a relationship with the other person. A dynamic begins to take shape between the two of you as the months pass and become a year or more. As is typical of any relationship past the honeymoon phase, conflicts arise. Maybe your initial misgivings and the red flags went away or minimized in your mind at some point; maybe they didn't. But you begin to feel that this is not the right relationship for you, and after trying to work through it with your partner, you decide to end the relationship.

 

In this second scenario, it seems fitting that given a "dynamic" was established between you and the other person, you take time post break-up to understand what your contribution was to that dynamic? Meaning, if things went wrong that caused you to end the relationship, you are IMPLICATED in what went wrong.

 

Do you guys agree?

 

Here's an example: early on in my most recent relationship, my intuition told me something wasn't right. I couldn't understand the signals I was getting from my boyfriend and from my intuition, and so I didn't act; I stayed in the relationship trying to figure out what the root cause of that niggling feeling was. As the months turned into a year and as the year turned into two then three, I tried to suppress my intuition as I dedicated myself to trying to sort out my discomfort and create a successful relationship.

 

While my ex ultimately ended the relationship after 3.5 years by cutting off any further communication, I myself pushed the relationship to an end by insisting on some indication of commitment from him, and he pushed back with a breakup.

 

I feel that if I had walked away from the relationship in its earliest months once I realized that my misgivings and the red flags were pervasive and my partner dismissed my feelings when I expressed my discomfort, I could wash my hands clean of responsibility for any of the problems in the relationship. I could attribute the end to our incompatibility and/or his issues and walk away "scott-free."

 

But since I didn't walk away but rather stayed on, and stayed on, I feel like I am "responsible" for the dynamic between us. I can't discern whether I helped to CREATE it...though I suppose for there to be a "dynamic" there have to be TWO willing participants, whether wittingly or not.

 

Would appreciate others' thoughts on this.

[Quiet Storm]

I would say that both people brought their own brand of dysfunction into the relationship. Both created the dysfunctional dynamic because of their own individual issues. Him because of the original red flags, and you for continuing to accept less than what you want & deserve. I wouldn't assign blame or say who is more at fault, I just think that you two were incompatible.

[M30USA]

I've read your entire post and understand your points but I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you wondering if staying past the initial "red flag" phase makes the responsibility all yours and not the other person's?

[BetrayedH]

You're being a little vague about this "dynamic" so it makes it hard to discern who is to blame.

 

That said, if this was 'his problem' then I don't think you're responsible for the problem, per se, as much as you might be responsible for the relationship lasting longer than it should have.

 

??

[FitChick]

The lesson might be that, next time this happens, move on quickly.

[nerd]

Yeah, it probably makes sense to figure out why you hung around so long, and how to avoid doing so in the future.

 

Or, drive yourself insane and make sure you don't move too far in the other direction. The pendulum always swings too far.

[jbelle6]

This is me. I agree with Fitchick totally. Next time I won't stick around.

[Zapbasket]

You're being a little vague about this "dynamic" so it makes it hard to discern who is to blame.

 

That said, if this was 'his problem' then I don't think you're responsible for the problem, per se, as much as you might be responsible for the relationship lasting longer than it should have.

 

??

 

Yeah, I wasn't sure how to ask my question. Here's another way: if in the beginning there are red flags, say, teasing and irritability that go too far / are out of proportion to the situation (that was an instant red flag with my most recent ex), and you opt to leave the relationship, then you're not implicated in the problem. The other person clearly has issues with manners/respecting boundaries/mood and attitude.

 

But if despite these red flags you choose to stay, what then? Clearly their behavior is not "your fault"; that's not what I'm getting at. More that in choosing to stay and navigating around that red-flag behavior, you are creating a dynamic. By "dynamic" I mean a kind of chemistry between one partner's behaviors and the other partner's behaviors, some of which might be fully present at the beginning of the relationship and thus have nothing to do with the other person or the relationship, but others of which might be induced in reaction to the other person's behaviors.

 

I don't know if "fault" is the word, though that's certainly what it feels like at times. I just wonder if other people agree about this idea of a "dynamic" and whether it is always the case that each of us is solely responsible for our own behavior, or whether sometimes behaviors of the other person in an intimate relationship can draw out certain reactive behaviors. In an extreme (very) example: a spouse so beaten down by an abusive partner that s/he snaps and murders the abuser.

 

I'm with others on here re: staying in a relationship too long.

[jonsnuh]

Yeah, I wasn't sure how to ask my question. Here's another way: if in the beginning there are red flags, say, teasing and irritability that go too far / are out of proportion to the situation (that was an instant red flag with my most recent ex), and you opt to leave the relationship, then you're not implicated in the problem. The other person clearly has issues with manners/respecting boundaries/mood and attitude.

 

But if despite these red flags you choose to stay, what then? Clearly their behavior is not "your fault"; that's not what I'm getting at. More that in choosing to stay and navigating around that red-flag behavior, you are creating a dynamic. By "dynamic" I mean a kind of chemistry between one partner's behaviors and the other partner's behaviors, some of which might be fully present at the beginning of the relationship and thus have nothing to do with the other person or the relationship, but others of which might be induced in reaction to the other person's behaviors.

 

I don't know if "fault" is the word, though that's certainly what it feels like at times. I just wonder if other people agree about this idea of a "dynamic" and whether it is always the case that each of us is solely responsible for our own behavior, or whether sometimes behaviors of the other person in an intimate relationship can draw out certain reactive behaviors. In an extreme (very) example: a spouse so beaten down by an abusive partner that s/he snaps and murders the abuser.

 

I'm with others on here re: staying in a relationship too long.

 

It's quite possible that he had some red flags about you even if you left him at an early stage. It takes two to tango.

[Zapbasket]

It's quite possible that he had some red flags about you even if you left him at an early stage. It takes two to tango.

 

Perhaps and of course, but in this particular case his red flags were immediately evident and very destructive to any kind of healthy interaction. I spent the early weeks and months of the relationship utterly baffled at how someone who at first seemed so nice, could be so incredibly rude. The word, really, was not "rude" but "abusive," and no, whatever "red flags" I may have exhibited were not and could not have been destructive and overt to this degree. And those early weeks and months, there was nothing I could have "done" to have somehow "elicited" this bad behavior. Check out my thread, "Handling Teasing," where I tried to make sense of the behavior I'm talking about. Bad stuff, and if I'd known then what I know now I'd have gotten out of there.

 

But my question was not about equivocating or blame pushing. It's about when you do the relationship "post-mortem," in a relationship of several years' duration or more, how you separate your issues and behavior from the dynamic that you helped, whether offensively or defensively, to create.

 

Even in a dynamic of abuser and abused, for the abuser to have all that power, the abused has somehow to give it to him or her. It's not just a dynamic of active-->passive, but active/passive-->active/passive.

Edited May 22, 2014 by GreenCove

[whichwayisup]

Sounds like you're owning your part in the demise of the relationship, which I think is healthy and normal.

 

It's hard to listen to your gut and ignore little red flags when you're in love or very into the person you're with. Looking back now, you'd probably do a lot differently... Lesson learned for next relationship.

[Zapbasket]

Sounds like you're owning your part in the demise of the relationship, which I think is healthy and normal.

 

It's hard to listen to your gut and ignore little red flags when you're in love or very into the person you're with. Looking back now, you'd probably do a lot differently... Lesson learned for next relationship.

 

I have a good bit more work to do on myself and some deep-seated beliefs before I can safely say I'll have different tools for the next relationship.

 

What concerns me, too, is that while I did love him, I evidently constructed an image of him that had little to nothing to do with the actual behavior I was experiencing from him. I attributed to him an integrity, maturity and self-awareness that he did not and does not possess. That's scary, because intuitively I'm a very good judge of character.

 

So how did I so misjudge him? Love, I realize, had little to do with that skewing of the truth. It was my own low self-esteem. ANY TIME I tried to hold him to the standard of behavior I value and respect from an intimate partner, he'd fight me, he'd outright SCORN me, tell me how "oversensitive," "difficult," etc. I was and that I'm "making a big deal out of nothing" and "telling him what he's not all the time, rather than what he is." He'd convey that I was ridiculous for having and holding those standards, and even though outwardly I'd fight him, inwardly I'd believe him.

 

In my earliest threads on this relationship--threads to which you contributed, WWIU--people tried to tell me he was abusive. I couldn't hear them because I couldn't respect my own intuition as not only "valid," but SPOT-ON. And so I couldn't leave, or rather, DIDN'T leave, and the behavior never changed, but also our DYNAMIC never changed, because I never claimed my self-esteem enough to ACT on what I knew deep down to be his true character and capabilities. I could have changed the script by hauling up my shipwreck of self-esteem from the depths and riding it to the "shore" which in this case would have been the end of the relationship, which was the ONLY viable solution and I just did not / could not acknowledge that.

[Zapbasket]

I asked a slightly different version of the same question that is the topic of this thread on another thread a few years ago, in reference to the relationship I also refer to in this thread:

 

I find myself wondering whether it's possible to start out in an "immature" relationship, meaning, where both parties struggle to manage past baggage in their communications with one another...and then together grow it into a more mature, healthy relationship before marriage. This, as opposed to making relationship problems out to be one person who is the "immature" one in relation to the other person as "the more mature" one. I feel there's no point in cutting people out of your life as long as at least a few things are good in the relationship, until you understand what YOU contribute to the dynamics you don't like. That's one reason why despite MANY temptations to end this relationship I have not. I don't want to end this one only to find myself in another relationship where I end up feeling I am carrying more of the weight.

 

All I know is that I find myself wishing with all my heart that I could finally meet that man who is smitten by me, polite and respectful towards me, caring and attentive to me without any conflict about expressing those things. I love romance but I don't require huge daily gestures of it; mainly I want someone to treat me as a dear, cherished friend towards whom he also feels a passionate attraction. Someone who feels inspired on their own accord to feel protective of me without my ever having to ask for it. Having never met this man, I'm unsure whether what I'm hoping for is even possible. I just want someone who feels the same drive for personal integrity and caring that I feel I possess in myself. Is that too much to hope for? My instincts say, "No."

 

But then I wonder whether perhaps that kind of partner is CREATED out of mutual efforts in a relationship, rather than just THERE from the get-go and all of their own accord.

 

Thoughts?

[EverLastluv]

I understand exactily what you are saying... You feel if you had left when the lettle red flags was up it would have been less heart ace. Thats right, I am in a relationship with my fiance for 1.5 yr before we ended up marry I was CRISTAL CLEAR about everything I dont like, until it came to a point when he went home back to his mom I close him off totally. Just for hime to realize what he had and to realize what it takes to live with me. Only if my fiance ever show he would change I would take him back.

 

So before i waited a few more years for him to pick up and leave me instead I am happy that it ended this way I believe If you had pick up with the red flags earlier it would have been much easier to let go

[BetrayedH]

My gut says that you have put too much hope in people changing or that you can somehow inspire them to change. I don't really think people change (particularly major problems with their behavior) until they decide to change on their own and that usually only happens when they hit 'rock bottom.' It's not a place you want to be.

 

It reminds me of the saying: Women marry men thinking they will change and they never do. Men marry women thinking they will mever change and they always do.

 

I also have to wonder if you might choose broken partners because saving them can be a boost to your self-esteem. For men, it's "white knight syndrome." Sadly, many of these saviors end up throwing a lot of good money after bad in an attempt to get them to change. And their low self-esteem keeps them from giving up on the person for fear of being a failure.

 

Just some thoughts to consider.