It’s About Making Babies!

NML points out that many unhappy people act contrary to what they say or think they want, in Personal Happiness: What do you want? on Baggage Reclaim.

At some point you have to ask yourself:

What is the point in living the life you don’t want now in the hope that an external party will do a 180 or 360 and give you the life you want at some point in the future?

Divorce, separation, breaking up – betrayal

For a variety of reasons, at Baggage Reclaim the best – healthiest, most reliable, often most secure and safest strategy – is to dump the relationship.

1. Because of the peculiar common factor at Baggage Reclaim, the partner was unsuitable when chosen, hasn’t adapted to the relationship, and is interested or capable of forming a family unit.
2. At Baggage Reclaim, choosing an emotionally unavailable or disrespectful partner, and staying with such a partner, usually accompanies emotional unavailability and disrespect on the part of the chooser, the one that now recognizes the couple isn’t becoming a healthy family unit.
3. The existing dynamics of the couple are harmful to each, either by reinforcing unhealthy habits, by diminishing one’s control over their own life, or both.
4. Lack of interest in change, lack of vision of what needs to be done, and distraction of anger and hurt prevent – completely and permanently prevent – the ability of either of the couple of finding a better and healthier form of relationship. They cannot make a safe and nurturing home for each other, or form a functional and joyful family.

Non-BR, unhappy couples split, too.

Other people split up. One moves away for business or other reason, and during the separation interest in the coupledom fades. A couple gets together because they like the hair, the boobs, the legs – some physical aspect of someone. Then they separate as the looking one finds someone else that looks more attractive to them. Cheating, or chasing appearances from partner to partner, is *always* a failure of character. A child, friend, or other family member might die, and the resulting grief comes between the couple without getting resolved. Job promotions, a new friend, new education opportunities, new hobbies or interests can come between a couple, and if tensions are left unresolved, can break two hearts apart.

Baggage Reclaim, and Emotionally Unavailable dates

Baggage Reclaim is about freeing oneself from a cycle of choosing emotionally unavailable, abusive, and/or disrespectful intimate partners. The “partner” part is often a euphemism in the lives of the visitors to Baggage Reclaim, because the lover only partially fill the role of partner. And they often don’t show much love or intimacy.

Friend, lover, mate – or family.

Many people seek a partner in life, someone to share a bed and hopefully an enriching love with. When, as many visitors to Baggage Reclaim have, we choose someone that isn’t able to commit themselves, or isn’t willing to commit themselves, to a relationship with us, we face a dilemma. If we decide we no longer want to “make it work” with someone, we may also face a problem.

Are we breaking up with a date, or holding a family together?

Family, friend, or date

When a marriage has lasted many years past the time the youngest child has left the nest, the couple is pretty much the definition of “family”. Certainly the bonds between the couple and the children are family bonds, as are bonds to siblings and parents of the couple.

The day a couple meet the first time (unless at their wedding!), presumably they are not family, but dates, or possibly friends.

I consider a date as someone to share social recreation with. A friend is someone you choose to share time and personal and social activities with. Friends earn each other’s trust and respect, and we come to depend on friends for physical and emotional support. Usually we enjoy the time we spend with friends.

A couple is two people sharing a socially recognized relationship, often an imminent or actively intimate or sexual relationship. One euphemism for an extended couple kind of relationship is “long term relationship.”

The unhappy couple

Two things can go wrong with a couple. First, they could pick someone unsuited to being part of a couple with them. Second, one or both people can screw up, and no one fixes the problem.

Ending a date is an easy choice.

It is said that a girl’s character is set by the dates she walks home from, not the dates that bring her home. On a first or even third date, the correct reaction to any suspicious, unwelcome, or untoward behavior is to end the date, and refuse further dates. Continued contact with a date or a friend is an earned privilege, one that we can lose if we aren’t respectful, careful, and an appropriate choice of companion.

What are we doing when we end a “serious” or intimate relationship?

I think that in the past there was reluctance to allow sexual activity before marriage, because physical, sexual intimacy creates part of the bonds of a family. We are taught that the first experience with love in our lives, between parent and child, is “forever”. We are told this over and over. Some families have had to face the truth that this isn’t always so, that one can do the unforgivable, can turn the love of others away.

But still we face the romantic notion that love is forever. We carelessly lump feelings of lust for an individual, empathy with their interests and joys, possessive feelings about their time and attention, concern and identification with their needs and wants, and the joy we feel in their company, and we label all the pieces and interactions – love.

Love of family.

Families love each other forever. It says so, somewhere. We all know this. Love between family members is the foundation that we build our lives on. “Blood is thicker than water” and all that.

Except – we no longer jail women that flee a bad marriage. We no longer shun a man that mistreats his family. We no longer press charges for adultery and fornication (sexual contact between unmarried people) unless we, sometimes, for political reasons, consider charges for statutory rape where one of those involved is “under age”, younger than the local age of consent to engage in sexual intercourse. How can you have a classroom of 7th and 8th grade expectant mothers and not have a jail full of their sex partners, and claim to care about “family values” – or about the law?

In the 1960′s, I was told that in Texas you could be arrested for statutory rape, if you are in a car with a girl with her shoes off. Just in case you missed the significance in the John Wayne movie In Harm’s Way, where Patricia Neal slips her shoes off and takes her nurse’s cap off, that was an implied sexual encounter. Or the infamous Doris Day kiss that “knocks her shoes off”, that was portrayed as a special effect in the filming, instead of the implied kissing that escalates to sexual contact.

In the past it was relatively easy and quite clear, when one crossed the boundaries into becoming a family. Pregnancy was sometimes referred to as knocked up, preggers – and “in the family way.” Girls were often eager to get intimate with a guy they liked – knowing that the likelihood was that social and family pressures would assure that marriage would follow.

Breaking up the family.

Historic and cultural baggage that is unseen is often the toughest to identify and deal with.

Today, after the “sexual revolution”, the claim is that each is free to experience and pursue their sexual destiny.

Yet once one has shared sheets, spent the night with someone, that feels like a family. Cohabitation, unmarried people sharing a residence, was illegal in many communities and areas until 40 and 50 years ago. Today, sharing a bathroom, a kitchen, accommodating another in planning meals and bed times – these are things a family does. How would one avoid feeling like a family? How could you face the problem that – love ends?

Sometimes love isn’t enough.

Whether love ends, or isn’t enough to overcome obstacles, relationships, dates, and even families end.

But how do you recommend to someone that they have to leave, forever, someone they have tried to make their family and their home with? After a week or a month or a couple of years together, how do you tell someone that this time they made a mistake, picking someone unsuitable, but if they pick someone suitable (character, discipline, honor, compassion, joy, and involved with community and family) and act responsibly, that love will brighten their life?

How is one to recognize that love has ended, that the family must split? Many of us recognize that families have troubles and sadness at times. Once we begin to feel family-like feelings in a relationship, when do we say, “This hurts. I go.”

For many people, they don’t. And so we have abuse in families, and disrespect, belittlement, and isolation.

I think that it is this, the belief and bodily reactions that one has become a family, that perpetuates couples that have become harmful to one another. The current practice of an extended sex life while avoiding “starting a family” – pregnancy – confuses the body and emotions with social hand waving long after our biology and culture recognize that a family has been created.

And you cannot give up your family, without fearing that you won’t have a family of your own.

Even if you didn’t pick someone to partner with, that would ever be the partner that you need to make a happy home and family.