It’s About Making Babies!

What to do with a drunken sailor? The *best* thing - is to avoid the problem in the first place.

In the Navy

We were taught in the Navy, when disgorged in astounding numbers from ships in unsavory or foreign ports, to ‘Buddy Up’. The buddy system. It works. Take a buddy along, and three-fourths of the stupid, ill-conceived and ignorant notions get a laugh, instead of jail time or worse. You have someone right there with you, and most of the time the ‘is this really going to be worth the risk?’ shenanigans just don’t happen.

What they told us was that buddies help ward off the predators looking for lone, lost, single victim-candidates. The Buddy System almost completely solved that problem, too.

For civilians, too.

What reminded me of the buddy system, is that it applies to social situations in civilian life, too. For reducing the number of bad choices to avoiding predators, the Buddy System is pretty effective.

Friends vs. Dating Stupid

lisaq on LookingForLisa writes today on “Friends Don’t Let Friends Date Stupid“. Lisaq advocates calling friends on sour relationships when their partner encourages them to dump friends. Wait, that sounds tangled up. Suppose your friend is seeing this guy, and she starts dumping friends - She needs a reality check, because that is one of the harshest red-flag signals of an ego-destroying, emotionally damaging relationship. You *have* to confront the friend.

What bothers me most about this scenario, is that it comes so very late in the sequence. By the time you notice the dumping, the friend has already invested heavily in this new relationship. It is no longer a matter of observing facts - you have to seduce the friend away from the new guy in order to raise a question about the values the guy represents. That is a long and fragile path to helping your friend. Good or bad, no one appreciates interference in their love life.

Buddy Up!

I think you need several good, trusted friends before you are allowed to date. But let’s consider a Buddy System for dating.

The scenario: You have already suffered one or more EUM (Emotionally Unavailable Man) relationship, or know someone that has. You are aware that EUM’s are habit forming and bad for your health, well being, and besides the jerks are disrespectful.

The problem: What to do? You want to avoid getting sucked in by the wrong type of guy - a guy that won’t be part of a healthy life, will not be interested in a long-term relationship (just an endless date).

One approach: Buddy up!

The strategy

1. Designate your buddy. Sit down with one or more of your best, trusted friends. A trusted friend is one that will be the Designation Driver or Designated Conductor (when taking public transportation), and you never, ever doubt she will stay bone-dry the entire outing. Someone you would ask to drop your boyfriend off somewhere, and she returns talking about what they talked about, instead of traffic or why she has a dreamy look in her eye. Trusted, respectful, and aware of the world around her.
2. Establish that you will go cruising, shopping, taking time off, attending parties, etc. together - most especially and most firmly, at any event that there might be guys, or alcohol.
3. Any dates will be double dates, with your buddy. There will be no understandings, no ‘ditching’, no private moments.
4. Establish that you are trying to avoid a specific predator. You want to practice sane and healthy social experiences, while avoiding anything approaching “Emotionally Unavailable”.
5. Agree that either of you can throw a guy out of contention, for displaying one of these red flag signals:
   1. Disrespect - of himself or others
   2. Deceit - shady acts, oily-smooth arguments, dubious morals
   3. Threats - any feeling of danger, of hostility, of temper - of lack of discipline. Tantrums are for two year olds. After age four, it takes a state penitentiary to turn it around, and only works for 15-20% of them. (Note: These numbers are Dilbert Stats - made up, since made-up numbers are 78% as useful as actual numbers.)
   4. Great date - way too experienced at pickups, making you feel comfortable and intimate (or even aroused) way too soon. People that get too experienced at winning bed partners keep doing it all their lives. Is that what you want from your next (last?) Significant Other?
   1. Agree that no one will explain to a guy being dropped about the reason. A simple, “Thanks for the evening/event/time together, but I don’t care to see you again.” And go No Contact Rule (per Baggage Reclaim rules) on the guy (that is, the predator you detected).
   2. Your buddy won’t have to report to the Chief why you didn’t make it back to the ship, too. Be sure that you let your buddy know you are depending on them to save your life.

   Be vigilant! and Be Safe Out There!

   This may seem stringent, or silly, or paranoid. And maybe you can be your own buddy. But do please keep yourself safe from the predators out there.

I love that snappy ditty, Gloria Estefan’s “Go Away”, from her 1992 “Greatest Hits” album.

What is wrong

Only, like so many songs, the story is awful. A parody of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways (To Leave Your Lover)”, “Go Away” lists some of the many ways for an arrogant woman to dismiss her lover.

Instead of the simple, “I don’t want see you again.” She skips the end of the relationship.

I guess that is supposed to be ‘obvious’ - it is implied. But she is ending the relationship (in the song) without actually stating, “I need you to be out of my life. Whatever my affections or feelings toward you, I can not afford to have you in my life.”

Bindings

Baggage Reclaim has a theme of women trying to deal with a specific type of bad relationship. The guy is Emotionally Unavailable, and many of the women that visit are bound into a cycle of picking one Emotionally Unavailable Man (EUM) after another. Part advice, part education, part sympathy and support, Baggage Reclaim is a reasonably safe place for those caught in this frequently co-dependent web, this frequently abusive relationship, to find help.

Several recent stories from comments at Baggage Reclaim have been especially troubling. EUM’s are also bound into a cycle - they have soured their relationship with disrespect, with deceit, and with abuse, and they don’t know any different. And EUM’s don’t change. The afflicted lady has a single chance of escape - to recognize that he is the Unsolvable Problem in their relationship, and that she has to leave for her own sake. Those women looking for help discover at Baggage Reclaim the tools, such as NML’s No Contact Rule and war stories from others that are suffering or have escaped the EUM degenerative cycle, for escaping their individual cycle of hell.

Lovefool

Then there is this cute, needy, desperate little obsession ditty by the Cardigans, from their “First Band on The Moon” album. With lines like “Pretend that you love me”, and “Just don’t go”.

NML asks today “Why can’t men and women break up?“.

Let me count the ways*!

1. People are hard wired to addictive behavior. Like a good work ethic, staying with someone is more comfortable than leaving, until things get really horrible, unless ..
2. The only people that learn to break things off readily are way too experienced in beginnings and endings to be a good mate. Most of us never learned how to begin or conduct a relationship, or end a bad relationship. We have to be taught, as individual, in the School of Hard Knocks (life experiences).
3. We never learned how to tell when a relationship has gone bad.
4. There are times a relationship demands things that are harmful. We haven’t learned to tell when those things happen in time to avoid them, or to end the relationship in time. We haven’t learned self-defense (a good offense!) in the midst of a relationship. The closest most come to ‘training’ is locker room sniggers.
5. With all the examples around us of couples that split, we still misunderstand when to go and when to stay. It is apparent that this is true for many, many people.

* - Umm, this is a list of things that come to mind.

Trapped

For those caught up in a bad EUM relationship, there is usually an ego dysfunction - we feel that if we give more, if we avoid angering our partner, or if we try to be more compliant or more submissive, that our partner will come to treasure us. We invest so very much of our attention and effort into accommodating a dysfunctional partner (usually disrespectful, often abusive and / or deceitful) that we narrow our perspective. The world focuses on existing within the confines of our partner’s relationship - we cannot see anything outside that focus. We don’t see that we are responsible for defending ourselves. We often acknowledge the pain and weariness of our lives, but we fail to acknowledge how damaging our romantic life has become to our emotional life, to our ability to function in family and community. Not only do we suffer, by example we put children and others in our community at risk. Those around us suffer by our withdrawal from a healthy community.

And we can’t see it.

Why don’t people end a bad relationship? All too often they can’t see anything but to drudge on.

On the other hand

NML mentions the way people drag things out, or act out to make their partner be the one to leave. I expect most of the time this is false pride, disrespect, and inexperience. And sometimes standing and waiting is misunderstood - waiting is actually wanting to fix things and not a clue how to proceed.

Sometimes, it might not be the end, if you try something different, get some assistance, or try harder.

Ah, hope (and desperation) springs eternal, and the clearest answers often aren’t all that clear at all.

Very few of us are trained psychologists, to assess whether out partner is dysfunctional or merely making mistakes from inexperience and ignorance. Some few trusted authorities, including the body of wisdom at Baggage Reclaim, do have ways for the interested person to tell which is which. My notion is that picking an honorable partner, and living a moral life, will avoid the worst of the dysfunctional problems.