Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (12 page)

Trust your observations and act accordingly. If you find yourself second-guessing us, back up one guess. In most cases, one is more than sufficient. Stay the course. My gender is just begging to admit we’re outgunned and turn over the reins in perpetuity to a benevolent matriarchy. Half of us never wanted to leave the nest in the first place; at least a gentle takeover would allow us to retain some dignity. Our gender entire history is predicated on a series of increasingly embarrassing admissions of fault.

On behalf of men everywhere, please stop us before our apology becomes an extinction-level event.

In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how to get ahead by never moving an inch.

Chapter Twenty

Accountant in the Sky

A few years ago, a friend of the family, a respected commercial real estate agent and developer, excitedly told my father he was poised to make a killing on an older lakefront home he’d purchased for a song. He asked my dad to take a look at the property with him. Though he admitted the home had fallen into disrepair after standing vacant for a few years when the previous owners moved to Florida, it had been priced so far below market value that any repairs would be a relatively minor expense.

When my father took a cursory look at the dilapidated mess, he prepared his friend for some unfortunate news. A proper inspection was necessary to check for mold, termites, and cracks in the walls and foundation. When Dad’s friend called after the inspection a few days later, his earlier excitement was gone. His tone was angry and a little indignant.

“Grant, I thought you said that guy was reputable. That son-of-a-bitch gave me an estimate that was more than what I paid for the damn property.”

This was the outcome my father had quietly suspected the second he set foot inside the house. It was immediately apparent that this wasn’t the deal of the century, but rather a money-and-energy-draining shambles that wouldn’t see a profit any time soon, if ever. He’d tried to let his poor duped friend down as gently as possible. There was no point in repairing the property, as the cost would be more than the resultant home worth.

There is a term in real estate known as “replacement cost,” which refers to the estimated expense of rebuilding an existing structure with modern materials and methods. Replacement can express what a property is worth, but not in every case. Replacement cost is a term more often employed by property insurers in their attempt to properly compensate the policyholder when he suffers a total loss. For instance, if an insured warehouse essential to my business burns down, the insurance agency will give me enough money to erect the same building on my property.

Most properties are valued according to their replacement cost. If you buy a home and it depreciates, potential buyers are under no obligation to reimburse you for the amount you paid. Even if you wait for the market to recover (an incredibly difficult prediction), you may never get back what you spent. Such was the investment of my father’s friend. Repairs were so prohibitively expensive that he had little choice but to bulldoze everything and sit on the property until he could afford to rebuild. What looked like a quick, profitable flip of an undervalued asset turned into an expensive five-year mortgage on undeveloped land that nobody wanted in a down market.

Some of you may be re-checking this book cover to make sure you haven’t grabbed a real estate textbook by mistake. Don’t worry, we haven’t changed topics. I told this story to demonstrate a mistake people make in both real estate and relationships. Relationships are a lot like pieces of real estate. Both are investments that benefit from attention and care. Even the best investments require some maintenance from time to time. Neglect is ruinous to the long-term health of all our investments of time and energy.

Relationships also share this similarity with real estate: they’re not all equally valuable. Like any other investment, there are winners worth your attention and others that can never be saved. Throwing all your resources (time, love, energy, etc.) into a hopeless case won’t turn it into a winner. As my father told his friend after the inspection, trying to fix a loser is futile. Not only would you forgo more money than you might ever get back, you would also waste resources better spent elsewhere. In real estate, my dad calls this “throwing good money after bad.”

In Las Vegas, there is a similar term for this process of obsessively incurring greater and greater risks in an effort to reclaim “investments.” It called “chasing the loss.” Vegas has built an oasis in the sand off of profits from people who insisted that their losing streak was just about to end. Every one of them was certain his luck would change if he just stuck it out long enough. Go to any casino on the strip and observe people leaving after a long night at the tables. The unlucky ones lurch out like the walking dead, their eyes glazed over from waiting for a hot streak that never happened.

Pouring your heart into a bad relationship is no different than doubling down on a bad hand at blackjack or trying to repair a condemned building. No amount of commitment or belief is sufficient to change the outcome. Losing is inevitable. The best you can do is to minimize the damage, learn from your mistakes, and live to fight another day.

Okay, I promise not to bet it all on red or buy swampland in Mississippi. Where’s this all going?

I told these stories to demonstrate a common mistake among those perpetually disappointed with their loves lives. Disappointment is natural when a relationship fails. Disappointment isn’t necessarily unhealthy. When we cease to be disappointed by anything, it’s usually because we’ve come to expect nothing. That’s a depressing way to live.

Don’t sacrifice optimism just to avoid being let down. If that’s the only remaining viable option, be like that guy at the casino who knows it’s just not his night and walk away.

There’s another opportunity to allay romantic frustration, and seizing it early can be exactly what you need to serve disappointment a temporary restraining order. Think about what’s at the core of your past romantic disappointments. What was ultimately missing? Did your partner fail to live up to his promises? Did he say things just to manipulate you? Did he misrepresent the person he really was? Where did he come up short?

Allow me to advance a potentially controversial theory. Maybe your ex-boyfriend didn’t fail you. You may be genuinely hurt by what happened, and you may even trace that hurt directly to his inability to meet certain expectations. That doesn’t mean he was responsible. If you see consistent patterns of disappointment in your past relationships, especially those repeatedly focused around certain chronic failings in your exes, it may be time to re-examine the evidence. If you find yourself let down by different men over and over again in the exact same ways, the failure may lie in perception more than reality.

When you examine the nuts and bolts of past disappointments, how much can you definitively ascribe to dishonesty or misrepresentation? Who failed to meet expectations, your exes or you?

We can’t reasonably expect to be all things to all people, especially not to those who claim to love us most. Unconditional love offers freedom from performance. In our daily lives, so much is presentational that moments of candid reflection are necessary to remind us who we are. At our jobs, we struggle to perfect an air of professionalism and confidence that will inspire our employer’s faith in us. Among our peers, our persona is defined more flexibly by the intimacy we feel with those closest to us. The more comfortable we are, the less our thoughts and behaviors are tyrannized by image.

The experience of being loved is essential to our humanity; love provides the only forum where success and failure are equally embraced.

Whether “karma” exists or not is a subject for debate, but it seems logical to assume that those capable of expressing love are most likely to receive it. Is that an expression of some kind of cosmic “justice?” I have trouble envisioning an all-seeing supernatural accountant in the sky who has any interest in the countless petty intrigues here on Earth, but your guess is as good as mine. For our purposes, it’s more instructive to sort out cause and effect than it is to judge right and wrong. After all, being “right” isn’t much consolation when the person you love leaves you for someone else, nor does being “wrong” prevent him from leaving.

If there’s any consolation in this terrible scenario, it’s that very little good comes from ignoble beginnings. I experienced this firsthand in my last long relationship in Los Angeles. I met my girlfriend under inconvenient circumstances. Though she’d lived in L.A. her whole life, I met her online just after she moved away to Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t ideal for starting a relationship—exchanging emails and texts, occasionally talking on the phone when our schedules permitted, not knowing when we would see each other.

Oh, and she was married. Did I mention that bit? Anyway, this happened many years ago, though not so long ago that I can comfortably write it off as youthful indiscretion. I was dumb, plain and simple, and I knew it from the outset. She’d been married her entire adult life, mostly unhappily, and I wasn’t much more than a convenient impetus to abandon a sinking ship. That didn’t stop me from falling in love with her, of course. Masochism wasn’t a hindrance at the time; it was a bona fide aphrodisiac. I lost a great job, all contact with my friends, all the money I had, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t encased in Lucite. I think she also took the last of my self-respect when she left, but I can’t say that for sure. In fairness, it could’ve rolled under the refrigerator during one of my numerous post-breakup crying jags.

I tend to be a little absent-minded when I’m sobbing uncontrollably.

Don’t think that I’m fishing for sympathy. I’m sure the ex-husband would like to raise a few objections as well. I got exactly what I expected and nothing less than I deserved. There may not be a supernatural accountant in the sky, but justice was served nonetheless. I suffered through spiraling depression and a litany of other mini-crises too numerous (and embarrassing) to mention. Like my old calf injury, the memories of that pain will probably never disappear completely, but neither will the hard-won wisdom.

If that woman is reading this, I want to say I’m sorry. I was a whiny, selfish teenager in a man body, and I don’t blame you for leaving when you did. As awful as things were the last time we spoke, I never stopped caring about you and wondering if you turned out okay. I sincerely hope you’re doing well, and I honestly owe you thanks. This book might never have been written without your influence.

Honestly, most of the meaningful truths I’ve gathered over four strange decades came at a terrible price. There are things that happened when I was much younger and things I witnessed that are indelibly burned in my memory even now, as well as all that I lost or gave up through ignorance or negligence and all the people I drove away or left without saying goodbye. I’m usually happy to forget nearly all of the insight and wisdom collected here through my experiences.

I hope you’ve derived a substantial lesson from what I’ve written. Suffering is by no means a prerequisite for wisdom. Anyone who suggests otherwise is more sadist than teacher. Besides, sparing you the harder lessons is the least I can do in return for your money and patience.

Only three more chapters to go, gentle reader.

Chapter Twenty-One

Raze/Repair

To use a metaphor from the previous chapter, how do you distinguish a repairable building from one that needs razing?

The first step is to properly assess its existing state. In the same way that a faulty foundation can’t be fixed with a bit of duct tape and spackle, neither can wholesale changes in someone be effected with gentle encouragement and a few carefully placed promises of reward. A person is in many ways harder to fix than any building; a building doesn’t have to want to be repaired for change to happen. By contrast, people do require motivation, and their will can do or undo everything you envision.

Psychologists once believed that personality is, by and large, set by the age of thirty. For some of you, it wouldn’t give you much time to fix that dolt wasting away on your couch. For others, it means that you’re wasting your time completely. However, conventional wisdom on the subject of personality change has transformed recently. Here’s what psychologist Dr. Jan Goldfield says on the subject: “If you’re ready for change, you can make it happen.”
[lxi]

Notice what the good doctor doesn’t say. She doesn’t say that everyone will change or even can. She says that those who are conscious of a desire to change and willing to act upon that desire are capable of change. Think about all of the New Year resolutions you’ve ever made. Now reflect on the almost infinitesimally small percentage that resulted in major changes of behavior. Rather than a knock on your willpower, it’s a reflection of how the majority operates, and I certainly count myself among that majority. If I had a dollar for every failed promise to eat better, or exercise more, or quit some vice or another, I’d have about two hundred and sixteen very disappointed dollars by now.

Your capacity to change shouldn’t be mistaken for your likelihood to do so. Keep this in mind when you envision any change in your romantic partner. Do you seek a reflection of your own qualities? If so, how wholesale a change does he require? (And if not, what changes are required for you to be less of a hypocritical jerk?) Try to compare your partner’s perceived major flaw against one of your own, choosing a defect that’s similarly entrenched. How hard would it be for you to “fix” the comparable trait in yourself, even under ideal circumstances?

It wouldn’t be too easy, would it?

Let’s look on the bright side for a moment. According to researchers Sanjay Srivastava and Oliver John of the University of California at Berkeley, not only does our personality change over time, it also changes more in adulthood than during childhood.
[lxii]
Theirs is a message of optimism for anyone who has ever lamented a seemingly insurmountable Achilles heel that he or she appeared powerless to overcome. These researchers have outlined a five-step plan to change:

#1 Figure out why change is needed.

We’re driven as much by the need to avoid pain as we are by the pursuit of pleasure. This instinct initiates many of our attempts to change. We get sick of suffering. We hate the way our bodies look, so we fight the impulse to overeat and change our diets. We get sick of always being broke, so we balance our checkbooks and become more frugal in our spending habits. We get sick of feeling tired and run down, so we begin to exercise.

Many of the big changes we make in our lives come from learning to forestall short-term pleasure for long-term good. The ability to do so is one of the primary steps toward adulthood. If these decisions represented only moral victories, no one would change, ever. It’s easy to accept or even embrace glaring flaws within ourselves when we’re young, seeing as we can’t imagine being any other way. As we get older, we start to see how our shortcomings can cripple not only our present but our future as well.

I didn’t change because I suddenly became a stronger or better person. I changed because I was sick of being unhappy and no longer able to deny the reasons for my unhappiness. Your reasons for changing anything in your own life were probably similarly self-motivated. There’s nothing wrong with using selfish motivations as the driving force behind change. The benefits of change aren’t only yours to enjoy. They usually benefit the people around you too.

#2 Pick something specific to change.

“I want to be a nicer person” is a laudable goal, but it isn’t easy to define and even harder to achieve. Imagine trying to fix a leak without any idea where it originated. All the good intentions in the world won’t stop the water from dripping. The same is true for changing anything about ourselves. Start with a smaller goal, such as “I want to be more agreeable at work.” It’s far simpler to examine the problem (“I don’t want to be known as the ‘office asshole’ anymore”) and thus easier to outline a strategy for relief. (“I need to be more patient with my co-workers’ incessant babbling and more tolerant of their stupidity.”)

The same is true when trying to change something about our romantic partner. If the problem is “I want him to be nicer to my girlfriends,” things are probably repairable. If it’s “I want him to be nice,” roll out the bulldozer. The building is most assuredly ruined.

#3 Allow time for changes to take place.

This is necessary for any changes you make for your own benefit, and it’s doubly true of any changes you ask of other people. It took a lifetime for your partner to become the way he is. If he doesn’t take an equal number of years to change, consider it progress. The time it takes for change to occur isn’t just a challenge for your partner. It’s a challenge for you called “patience,” and if you don’t have it, nothing will change. Your choices are patience or acceptance. Your eventual choice will reflect something about your own shortcomings in one or both of these key areas.

If you can’t be patient or accepting, at least be honest with yourself. There’s nothing wrong with admitting your own limitations and acting accordingly. There’s no nobility in continuing to suffer an untenable situation just because you’ve already invested a lot of time and energy in it. The fact that you’ve invested so much without seeing any improvement is exactly why you should leave. Sticking around is, to use my father phrase, just throwing more good money after bad.

I’ve met several people who continued to hang around in lousy relationships for no other reason than they’d already been in it for a long time.

“I can’t leave [Terrible Boyfriend X] now,” they protested. “I’ve put too much time in to quit now.”

Listening to this argument has always reminded me of a joke once told by the great film director, Woody Allen:

Two elderly women are eating dinner at a restaurant, when one of them remarks:

“Boy, the food at this restaurant is really terrible.”

“I know!” agrees the other. “And such small portions!”

Staying in a bad relationship is like demanding more of a terrible meal. Quality doesn’t improve with quantity. You just get extra helpings of shit.

#4 Demand accountability for change.

This is one area where you can be a positive influence for change. If your partner is committed to changing a specific behavior, you owe it to him to point out both his failings and his successes. Resistance to your involvement can indicate resistance to making the change at all. Resistance to your methods of censure or praise is a different issue. If that’s the problem, you may want to re-assess how you’re “helping.” If you’re being overly negative or demanding too much, too quickly, you’re more likely to cement the flaw than erase it.

That said, the impetus toward personal improvement is also a wonderful bonding opportunity for you and your mate. Employed appropriately, your influence can motivate your partner and help strengthen his resolve to change. His personal success in this matter becomes a shared victory, one that can exponentially strengthen your relationship.

#5 Look for other sources for change.

The researchers encourage seeking outside help to change your personality whenever possible. This is good advice whether we mean papers like the one published by Srivastava and John or the good book you’re currently reading. Any help you can get to assist you in correcting certain personality quirks is useful, whether it’s you or your partner who needs improvement. It’s probably more important for him, as few of us welcome the idea that we need correction in the first place. It won’t hurt to have a few experts on your side.

Another point brought up in the Srivastava and John paper isn’t terribly encouraging. The researchers discuss the extreme unlikelihood of change when the sole motivating factor is what another person wants. Their paper doesn’t differentiate who the other person is, either. Mother, partner, roommate, brother, girlfriend, sister—the relationship really doesn’t matter. Change not firmly motivated in the person trying to change is likely to be doomed. It’s less likely to take hold in the short-term and far less likely to be permanent. The researchers even go so far as to describe changes made for others as “unhealthy.”

Consider this for a moment, if you have some grand design for your romantic partner. Whatever changes you envision are unlikely to occur if:

• The changes are large in scale.
  

• The changes aren’t specific enough to be addressed in detail.
  

• You aren’t willing to be patient.
  

• You don’t provide a helpful influence.
  

• You aren’t willing to accept outside help. And, last but not least.
  

• He didn’t want to make the change for himself. (Seeing a pattern here?)
  

If you intend to “fix” a “broken” boyfriend, you’d better be sure repairs are even possible. If too much work is needed, you’re better off seeking better accommodations. Moreover, even if just a little requires your reparative expertise, you’d better be sure your boyfriend shares your views, or you’ll stare down disappointment and more than a little mutual resentment. As I noted earlier, buildings don’t need motivation to be repaired. Your boyfriend does.

In the next chapter, we’ll examine a popular myth that leads to relationship destruction almost as much as infidelity.