The ring

Time for another posting on the difficulties of communication within a relationship.

Having extremely negative emotions is understandable, we all do it, we are all so consumed by them now and again, that we even lose a little control. Its called being human.

What we don't expect is for our nearest and dearest, our loving partner, to carefully label this button and press it whenever they are angry, in order to guarantee an induced emotional state when they see fit.

This expectation is flawed.

I understand that my relationship was a disastrous one, and that many people do not have the same problems that I had, nor will they ever get them, but bear with me here, I'm offloading as much as I am educating, yes I'm biased, but I want a permanent record of my "recovery".

To give an example, before I married my ex-wife, we were engaged for a number of years, during this time, she had an interesting habit that developed over the first year of the engagement. This behaviour developed as a direct result of my reactions when the first outburst occurred.

What is the behaviour you are talking about...

My ex had the habit of falling out with me about something or other and refusing to sleep in the same bed, she would then wait until I was soundly asleep, storm in, switch on the light, rant and rave at me for one or two minutes while I was waking up, and then in a final flourish would throw her engagement ring across the room, or more occasionally at me.

Just to so we are on the same page, here is what's wrong with this behaviour:

1. Waiting until your partner is soundly asleep, then getting your say while your partner has not even woken up then flouncing off. Your partner can form no memories other than confusion and possibly anger, they certainly are not going to get the finer points of your argument, and of course it means that you certainly are not going to get an apology, your partner couldn't form one if they tried.
2. Throwing the ring, this is not a full-stop flourish that turns your anger into an exclamation point, this is a declaration that the proposed marriage is over.

So we have a method of allowing my ex to vent her anger, while guaranteeing a compromised state for me, thus ensuring that I cannot respond in any way, and just to make sure that I know how angry she is, in my semi-addled state, she throws her engagement ring away.

Obviously the first time this happened, I had no idea what was going on, so I lay awake all night trying to work out what had happened, what I had done and what I could do to rectify it. Chalk one up for the ex there! I had fallen into the trap mentioned in earlier posts of reevaluating my entire previous life in an attempt to determine what I had done wrong. I still hadn't learned the correct response.

I was so distraught over the tossing of the ring, that my ex very carefully labeled that button, and pretty much once every month or two I could be guaranteed a similar occurrence.

Silly bloody me!

This behaviour only stopped when I made it quite clear, that I would no longer put up with this crap, if the ring was ever taken off in anger, the engagement would be off, but from my end not hers, and the same went for the "Wake up the sleeping man" tactic too. I enforced this by carefully hiding the ring and not giving it back to her for several months, and even then she only got it back because she found it after a careful search and I came home to find her wearing it, so in fact it could be more realistically described as me letting her keep the ring rather than me returning it!

conclusion: Don't display your upset at such extreme events, or if you do, be prepared to dole out some pain of your own in retribution to make it stop when it invariably comes back to haunt you with ever increasing frequency.

-- Sermon ends --