1. Asking for help is OK and normal;
2. Saying “no” to that is also OK and normal.

Unfortunately, in my adult life, I’ve been finding out — often to my own detriment, and sometimes with irrevocable damage to relationships — that a lot of people seem to believe the exact opposite. They never ask for help (except perhaps to their close family, and even then they feel terrible about it), and become shocked — and offended, and/or hurt — when asked.

Apparently, when person A ask person B for help, person B has two choices: either feel terrible for not helping, or feel terrible with him/herself (and resent the other person) for not being strong enough to say “no”. There are no other possibilities, it seems. Helping is something terrible, which harms the helper immensely, but saying “no” also makes the would-be helper feel like a monster; therefore, the asker committed a hideous sin just by asking, as if he or she ignored an unspoken rule or protocol: “thou shalt not ask”.

Am I so weird for believing that there’s nothing wrong with either asking or refusing? That we’re all in this together, that there should be no forbidden subjects between friends or more, that if one can’t or doesn’t feel like he/she should help, it’s perfectly OK?

I’ve seen this phenomenon for more than a decade (hi, ex-wife), and even this week I’ve talked to several people who absolutely and completely disagree with me (asking is infinitely wrong and even abusive, because it “forces” the askee to either sacrifice him/herself or feel like a heartless monster, and so on). Is this widespread? Or just a part of Portuguese culture? Anyone from outside Portugal want to share their thoughts?

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The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Now, in one way, this makes a lot of sense, to me. I’ve always valued honesty above almost everything – not just honesty to others, but to oneself –, and I’ve always thought that lying was a kind of cowardice: if you’re not afraid of the truth / reality, you don’t lie. I also enjoyed that the author of the movement, himself, doesn’t turn it into a religion-like absolute “commandment”, and uses a popular example to show what he means:

“I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie.”

However, the examples used by both Blanton and the article writer are, for the most part… how shall I put it? It seems that, to them, being honest amounts to simply being a jerk, and only lying prevents them from acting like complete assholes all the time.

Tangent: this reminds me of a common claim by religious believers: that non-believers are inherently immoral because, without belief in a god, there’s no reason for one to be moral. I find this both offensive and revealing: what they mean is that they see no reason to be moral, except for the desire of heaven or fear of hell. To them, without fear of God, we’d all be lying, cheating, raping, pillaging and killing each other. Maybe that’s what they’d do. The fact that other people are not like that is unthinkable to them. (Note: I’m not claiming that all believers are like this; in fact, many of them – probably the majority — find this argument as offensive and stupid as I do).

This is similar; both the author and Blanton seem to be implying, at least from their examples, that we’re all self-centered, self-absorbed, thoroughly unpleasant jerks, and only by lying can we act “nice” from time to time.

Can I be the only one to think that, you know, maybe, somehow, we can once in a while be genuinely nice?

One example the author gives is when an older man who had just lost his wife sent him some poems and asked him for his opinion. The author found the poems boring and below average, but didn’t have the heart to tell the old man so, and lied (“they’re very good, you should think about getting them published”). Yes, that was dishonest, though understandable. But are there really no alternatives other than to tell him “your poems suck, don’t quit your day job”?

What about telling him – honestly – what was wrong (and right) with the poems? How he should try to improve his writing? Suggest some classic examples for him to read? Tell him which part you thought was more promising? You know, actually be helpful without being either rude or patronizing? Maybe I’m weird, but that’s what I’d do (unless I really didn’t care about that person, but it’s obvious that the author did).

Or maybe I’m being naïve. Maybe brutal and complete honesty would turn most people into unbearable jerks. Maybe it’s only the constant white lies that allow people to live and function in society without either isolating themselves or getting at others’ throats all the time. But I still don’t think that’s the case, at least with most people.

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Being still in love with someone who has long left us and moved on with their life is something most of us have been through, or are still going through. I can’t claim any special “wisdom” here, but I’d like to talk about what worked for me. Your own solution surely was or will be different from mine; still, I hope you may be able to use something from here, even if in some way I can’t anticipate.

As I said in the post, my solution wasn’t easy; I had to erase — as much as possible, and in a brutal, merciless way — something that had long been a part of me, and which is a part of everyone, to different degrees: wishful thinking. The books I mentioned helped a lot, in different ways: Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" and, especially, "Atlas Shrugged" made me realize that wishing doesn’t make it so, that I had to develop, above all things, and with the utmost urgency, a "worship" of reality. The more your thoughts and beliefs are in accordance with reality, the less you are a victim of yourself due to your own self-deceit.

This is harder than it sounds. After all, you may ask, isn’t “make-believe” for children? Don’t we, as adults, live in the real world? But we grow up with a tendency to easily believe in what we wish was true, no matter the facts. We adopt that belief as a part of us, something to be cherished and protected, even in the face of contradictory facts. And the more we resist reality, the more we tend to resist it in the future, because we’ve invested more and more in our comfortable fantasy, whether it’s “deep down, she really loves me and will one day realize that and come back” or “there is a good, all-powerful being who loves me and watches over me”. Both are exactly the same: wishful thinking. You want it to be true, therefore you believe it.

I’ve been there. Admitting that my ex-wife really didn’t love me anymore, never would again, and, not only that, she had changed for the (far) worse and was no longer the amazing, wonderful, brilliant, loving person she had been five years ago, was one of the most difficult, most painful times of my life. It was also what saved that life, in the long run.

Incidentally, Douglas Adams’ “The Salmon of Doubt”, or, more precisely, this interview with him, included in the book, similarly forced me to painfully abandon another cherished belief, because it contradicted reality, and, rationally, one must never put anything above reality, no matter how comfortable; that way lies only self-deception and powerlessness. So, after more than two decades of Christianity, I was suddenly an atheist – and, since then, I’ve never felt more free, because I wasn’t deceiving myself anymore. But, at the time, it was hard.

I realize that this will probably not help most people in this situation who may read it; I am suggesting fighting the wrong emotions and wishful thinking with reason and love of truth, while I guess most people would fight emotions with other emotions, or alternatively would just surrender to them (“I’ll always love her, no matter what, and I won’t ever love anyone else”). As I said, this is what worked for me. If I had simply tried to “drown” my lost love by trying to replace it with someone else, I’d probably still be, almost 10 years later, waiting for my “true love” to “come to her senses” ("any day now", I’d tell myself), while being alone and miserable all the time, and with absolutely no self-respect or self-esteem. Sorry, but I’ll take reality – no matter how harsh — above comfortable, apparently pleasant wishful thinking any day. I really hope this post, while not solving anyone’s problem, at least leads someone to look at things from a different angle; sometimes, it’s just the little push we need.

And for any religious readers, I’m sorry if this post offends you — it shouldn’t, because we shouldn’t confuse ourselves with our ideas or beliefs, but I know it happens a lot –, but that wasn’t my intention; I simply wanted to give an example of defeating harmful wishful thinking through "reality worshipping" in my life that wasn’t related to love and relationships (to show how it applies to other areas of life), and that was the best one available.

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When last we left our hero, he had just admitted – a realization less than a week old – that he had unconsciously sabotaged every serious relationship he’s been in – not counting the ones he didn’t even allow to start – for the past 10 years. Can our hero defeat the twirling moustached villain and rescue the princess, living happily ever after? Or will he fall prey to the curse from the wicked fairy… again?

Ahem. Sorry about that, but I have to insert some (attempt at) humor here, to prevent this series of posts from getting too depressing. The previous one’s ending was bad enough.

Anyway, ancient history: check, and realization-that-I’ve-ruined-my-own-shots-at-happiness-for-10-years-not-to-mention-having-made-other-people-suffer: check. Where does that leave me?

In the here and now, I guess. I still don’t know exactly what I want from life, but being alone is certainly “not it”. I have nothing against open relationships or polyamorous relationships as a choice, but I don’t think I’d want them for myself, at least at this point in my life. Being “wild and free” has its attractions, certainly, but perhaps I’ve been there too long… I don’t know; it’s not that that has brought me a lot of real friends… or a lot of sex, for the past few years.

Yes, sex matters to me. A lot. I love it, and want more and more of it. Many people would be ashamed of admitting this, even with it being absolutely true for them, but I’m not. I don’t see anything dirty or “sinful” about sex, and loving it and wanting a lot of it (whether with multiple partners or not) doesn’t make one “superficial”, “dirty” (again), “of dubious morals”, “of low standards”, “a whore”, “a sex maniac”, or any other idiotic descriptions. Yes, this applies to women as well – and it’s a pity that society is still so prejudiced about sexuality, and that so many people still think having consensual sex without it leading into a full relationship “diminishes” them in some way. I love sex, and I’m not ashamed to say so, or to admit that I think about it a lot, and that I think about “getting laid”, and act on it, without having any problem with the concept. (Incidentally, what I don’t do in order to “get laid” is lie to people, or deceive them in any way. That’s just wrong; sex under false premises is almost non-consensual, in fact.)

Unlike many, I fully separate sex from feelings, and, again, I’m not ashamed to say so (unlike so many people who claim – truthfully or not – that sex, to them, “must be part of something special”… as if sex by itself was worthless, insignificant. Sigh…) That means, however, that having sex doesn’t fulfill my emotional needs. And I do have them.

And this means that I miss having someone “special” in my life. Of course, there are some potential problems here. One of them is that it’s not easy; I’m shy, with somewhat peculiar tastes and knowledge, and I’ve gone way past the age where it’s easy to meet new people of the opposite sex (meaning, studying somewhere). Working with computers, a male-infested field, makes things even worse. There are certain other methods of meeting new people, some of them online… but none are easy for someone like me.

Another potential source of trouble is that the fact that I realized and admitted what I’ve done for years doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m “cured” of it. I can look for signs of that in the future, and stop myself before it’s too late, of course, but one can never be 100% sure.

Still, the worse problem is perhaps this: that I still don’t know exactly what I want. It’s not necessarily a serious, monogamous relationship; one shouldn’t do something just because “everyone does it” and “it’s expected”. On the other hand, I still don’t know of a better alternative (for me), and that may well end up being my final choice. But I don’t know yet. And I don’t want to “experiment” using other people – with feelings – as guinea pigs.

Goals:

To find out what I want from the relationships part of my life, and to get it.

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And what had changed? I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, but, looking at my past actions dispassionately, I can theorize. What happened was this: the last couple of years in my “big” relationship were pretty bad for me; a side of me knew that I wasn’t really loved anymore, but I refused to admit it to myself (that wishful thinking thing again, mixed with a good old dose of sunk cost fallacy); even the sex itself (which is a very important thing to me) had gone down, both in quality and quantity. And yet, despite all odds, I was always faithful to her.

And it ended up pretty badly, as you know (from reading the previous part).

My guess, with the advantage of hindsight, is that all of the above unconsciously “taught” me something: that it’s not worth it to dedicate all of yourself to just one woman, to be faithful in every way to her, to love her above all things… that “romantic love” doesn’t really work. Note, I never thought this consciously; it was, I guess, simply an unconscious thing. I didn’t begin to think, say, that cheating on a girlfriend was perfectly acceptable, or that relationships are a waste of time, or that I should just look out for number one. Consciously, none of that happened.

Unconsciously, however… and this is a recent realization, which was one of the hardest things in my life to accept… I began to sabotage my relationships.

Looking at it now, there were many times when I was in great, healthy relationships with someone I loved, relationships that made me happy and fulfilled… and, yet, as time passed, I always met someone I was “curious” about. That someone might have been less interesting and less attractive than my current girlfriend, might not even be available or interested in me… but the curiosity was there.

And, since cheating on a relationship was basically anathema to me (though I can’t claim to having never done it…), apparently my unconscious self found a “solution”: ruin the current relationship. Sabotage it. Make problems up, invent causes of stress, create arguments, increasingly worse, until the inevitable “let’s give it some time/space” or “this isn’t working” or “we’re much better off as just good friends”.

Only now do I realize that I’ve done this for the past ten years. There wasn’t a single relationship I didn’t unconsciously “destroy”, just because I was curious about someone else… or perhaps, in some cases, because of a simple, calculating (though unconscious) “what if I can do better?” The worst time, usually, was when I met her (female) friends; that always gave me a feeling of “whoa! there’s all of this out there?”

And not only is this the reason I’m alone now, but it also makes me feel like a really horrible, despicable person, worthy of contempt. A part of me wonders if I deserve to be alone.

(to be continued in part 6.3)

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Ahem… do I have to?

Oh, right. I promised I’d be fully honest. Even here.

So… where to start?

A little “ancient history” to begin with. Due to the shyness and lack of self-confidence I’ve mentioned before, it was very late in my life that I’ve had any “contact” with the opposite sex. Not out of lack of interest on my part, but because I was simply terrified of it – and by “it” I don’t mean just sex or physical contact (actually, despite my complete lack of experience, that part wasn’t that scary… much the opposite), but everything that had to do with those incredibly weird but also incredibly fascinating creatures commonly called “girls”. Oh, and besides the lack of self-confidence and social skills, I also had absolutely no sense of style or fashion. Not that I’m much better now , but at least I have some (basic) sense of it now; these days it’s mostly a question of laziness and lack of money, instead of “whaddya mean this doesn’t look incredibly cool and stylish?”, or even “you mean… appearance is important?!?”.

Anyway, this is why, even though I was interested in girls at 11, my first kiss was at 18. Go on, laugh.

Between 18 and 21, I had a few “actual” relationships (without sex, though – I think I tended to attract people who were as inexperienced as myself, so there was always no hurry, not to mention a little apprehension), which felt to like the most important things in the world at the time, but which, looking at them now, were no more than “children playing”.

And then there was the “big one”. I won’t give any real details here, as I promised I would respect the privacy of everyone in my life except my very self, but let’s say it was a 5-year relationship with “meeting parents”, “plans for the future”, living together for almost a year, marriage, and… divorce. That’s what happens when you get married and the relationship with the “bride” is already in its death throes, kids. Don’t try this at home… or anywhere else.

After my divorce, I went through a couple of years when I was sexually available – and active, in fact –, but emotionally “dead”… or, more precisely, “occupied”, as I still loved my ex-wife and harbored hopes – naïve, of course – of reconciliation. Eventually (and painfully) I opened my eyes to reality – this was, incidentally, the time when I read Douglas Adams’ “The Salmon of Doubt” and Ayn Rand’s novels, and saw wishful thinking for the cancer that it is. Wishful thinking weighs you down, prevents your life from evolving, and is a hideous, cowardly denial of reality.

But I digress.

Anyway, the acceptance of reality as it was, instead of as how I wished it to be (or dreamed it was) was the major step to being emotionally free, and complete, and able to feel and love again. However…

… and this was something I didn’t realize at the time, or even until recently….

… something in me had changed.

(to be continued in part 6.2)

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