Let's Do this thing 2: Why do we pick who we do to have a relationship with? What is Healthy?

Over the years, I've read MANY books on relationships.  Probably some of my favorites are by Terrence Real, his last three are excellent.  I learned a lot from his books, but the biggie is this.  We grow up watching and participating in our parents' marriage (or lack of one) and make decisions about who we will partner with based on that marriage.  What we know about relationships we learn from our family of origin.  We subconsciously choose a partner that will give us the opportunity to heal the central issue of our parent's marriage that we've internalized as "what a marriage is" (which, for most of us, is what we DON'T want in marriage).

That's right: we're doomed to repeat the patterns we saw in relationships growing up until we can heal and move past that pattern in our own relationships and we will gravitate to the person who can help us do that.    It's a paradox, we don't want what they had, swear "It won't happen to me", yet we will choose someone with whom it is inevitable we will get there sooner or later.   And if we don't heal the issue in that relationship, and it ends, we will go find another person and start all over again.**

Case in point.  You know that feeling of "home" when you fall in love with someone?  When I fell in love with my husband he felt like "home".  It felt familiar and safe and NOT like my father.  Guess what?  3 years in, we fought (or rather, didn't fight) like my parents.  I dated many men, rejected many, had relationships with a couple.  One was a great guy, but despite dating and sex for several months we never fell in love.  When it ended we both felt like "if we were going to fall in love, we would have done it by now".   He was a wonderful man, but he wasn't the one I could get to that core issue with.  That's why we can never fall in love with the guy who looks awesome on paper or the nice guy.  Subconsciously, if he can't engage in our core relationship healing we will pass him by.  It's a paradox, but true.

My dad worked a blue collar, unionized job despite his college degree.  He was somewhat OCD and very ritualized.  He carried certain things in certain sides of his pants pockets, drank so many glasses of wine each night, was slightly paranoid, and had very concrete ideas about being a man (which is to say he wanted sex a lot more than my mom and I have no idea how I know this).  He had a lot of trouble adjusting to change and spent his career with one company.  No sense of humor.  He would fly off the handle and get very angry over minor things ( I perceived him as irrational): you never knew when it was coming or what it was about because it was all in his head.  Family dinner usually ended in a fight: my dad would get mad, yell, my mother would cry or withdraw in response, dinner would be finished in silence and we would all go off to different rooms in the house to do our own thing.  Vacations went the same way, only we were stuck with each other wherever we were.  He was intense, and I was afraid of him until I was a teenager.

So I choose men who are creative, appear to be able to go with the flow, not angry and who make me laugh.  The first one I lived with ended up being too ambitious and very intense.  My drinking escalates during this relationship and ends with sobriety Round 1.   Several years later,  I marry another creative man, only this time I make sure he is laid-back.  I marry him in sobriety, which clearly means I've made a wise, clear headed choice.  WHOOPS!  Jokes on me.  Within 3 years I discover he is NOT laid back, he's actually pretty intense.  The difference is he withdraws and stonewalls when he is angry.  I got my wish, there is no overt fighting, but plenty of anger and passive aggressive fighting.  Charged silence which could last for days: it felt like all the oxygen was sucked out of the room when we were "not fighting".  And guess what?  My drinking escalated, we stay married and stymied for ten years, until we are both so miserable that I quit drinking to either shit or get off the pot with the marriage.  We married in sobriety, so I had to be sober to figure out if we could make it or not.

Let me just be clear here that I don't blame my husband for my drinking.  One sunny day I decided that maybe it was ok for me to have a beer since it had been 9 years since I had and I was a different person than who I had been and I could handle it now.  Uh-huh.  The disease grabbed hold and progressed as the disease does, and that had nothing to do with him.

As an alcoholic, I have little notion of what a healthy relationship looks like.  So I read.  A healthy relationship is one is which each person wants what is best for the other person.  Each person can identify what they want and need, express it, and the other person has effective boundaries that allows them to figure out if they can support/give/live with that need.  A healthy relationship is one in which, if a person is hurt, the other apologizes, regardless of whether or not they agree they caused the hurt.

What constantly amazes me is how most of us will be more kind, considerate and courteous to strangers than we will our mates.  Let's say I am holding a hot cup of coffee and a stranger jostles my arm and some spills on him.  I would apologize, swipe ineffectually at the spill with a wadded up napkin, he would say don't worry about it, and that would be that.  If the same thing happened with my husband, I'd  wonder why he wasn't watching what he was doing, accuse him of wasting my coffee and wonder if he secretly did it to piss me off.  He'd wonder why I made my coffee so hot, why I was standing in his way, why didn't I have a lid on the cup, and secretly think I did it on purpose to piss him off.

How could something that was right and safe and wonderful for the first 3 years turn into such a squabbling, stupid, painful mess?  Blame.  Let's go there next.

**For the record, Terrence Real is not the only author to write about repeating the patterns of relationships from our childhood.  Beverly Engel writes about it in The Emotionally Abusive Relationship calling it the Repetition Compulsion and quotes Judith Viorst (Necessary Losses):

"Whom we love and how we love are revivals--unconscious revivals--of early experiences, even when revival brings us pain...We will act out the same old tragedies unless awareness and insight intervene."