Bad habits

You remember that one of the things Debbie said she thought I should work on, or spend time in therapy to understand, or whatever .... was the question what emotional habits I got into while married to Wife.  The thought was that if I learned to see some of these habits, then I could learn to break free of them.

You probably also remember (unless it counted as "TL;DR") that my first-pass assessment of the things she said was that yes, I really do have some of those habits but they mostly pre-date Wife.  Rather than forcing me to develop them, my marriage to Wife simply called them out as tools that I already had.  There were times I actually thought "It's a good thing that Wife married me and not somebody else, because at least I have the skills to deal with her ...."  OK, I was young and foolish when I was saying that, but still.

But last night I found myself thinking about this briefly, and realized what should have been obvious.  It doesn't matter where I got my bad habits.  A bad habit is a bad habit.  Simple as that.  So there is something to be said for doing an inventory of myself, to figure out what bad habits are lurking there before I let myself get into another romantic relationship.

I must have given the matter a full five minutes of thought last night, after a couple of glasses of rum, and this is what I came up with:

• Idealizing my partner.  I definitely did this with Wife when we first got together, hard as it may be to believe it from this distance.  You were witnesses to my doing it with D; you would have seen it with Debbie too except I wasn't posting as often then.  It used to drive Debbie nuts.  I would say something doting about how specially wonderful she was, and she would get uncomfortable and have to dispute the point.  OK, maybe she could have benefitted from accepting it graciously; but the bigger question is, why the hell did I insist on idealizing her in the first place?  Why do I assume, when I start to fall in love with a woman, that she is just naturally better, wiser, more self-actualized, more interesting, ... more whatever ... than I am?  Why do I automatically assume that she is greater and I am lesser?
• Along with this comes my tendency to set my priorities aside for her.  From the time I moved into my apartment last May until after Debbie left me, I never unpacked my boxes of books.  Really?  Was it that hard to do?  No, but I just didn't think about it: Debbie would want to do something this weekend, or we were on the phone for hours that weekend, or something came up somehow.  But whatever happened, the thing I didn't do was to say, "Look Debbie, I love you and of course it's always great to spend time together, but I've got books to unpack. Why don't we give the other plans a rest until I can get caught up with the basic processes of moving in?"  Probably would have been a good thing to do, though, because honestly how unreasonable can that possibly be?
• As I explained already at far too great a length here, I don't say anything when I am ashamed of my own behavior.  Instead, I just beat myself up in silence, which looks from the outside like I am fuming mad.  Not a big help to communicating clearly.
• And I'm reluctant to call my partner on it when she is being unworthy of herself.  I posted any number of arguments with D (often about money, for example) where I was hopping mad with her but cushioned it with elegant phrasing because I couldn't let myself just get mad.  Debbie never pushed me to that point, but there were times that she would be grousing about some petty thing or other and I really wanted to say, "Gosh, it's great to see how Buddhism has stopped you from clinging at little things that are too trivial to deserve it!"  But I never did.  This is partly a virtue -- politeness -- but there has to be a middle ground that lets me express what is truly in my heart at times like that without being a thoughtless boor about it. 

I have to be somewhere in about three minutes, so I'm going to sign off now.  But I want to think about this some more.