I Killed All of My Marriages With These Four Flaws
Self-sabotage was my specialty
There are few things more discouraging and life-altering than a failed marriage. Or three. We can study trends and track statistics on this subject, but spreadsheets do very little to explain to each individual person why their marriage went down the drain.
Anthropology, sociology, and many other -ologies are certainly valid tools in examining the human condition and all its outcomes, but — to coin a phrase — what about individuology?
I have experienced the heartbreak of marital implosion more than once myself. As one inevitably gave way to another, I began to notice four things within myself that forced me to admit that maybe — just maybe — I was contributing to the outcomes.
I was living in the past
When I was in college, I went through what I now realize was a fairly garden-variety breakup. She was my first love and letting go was super hard.
I acted out in embarrassing ways in the wake of that coupling. This behavior caught the attention of our Dean of Students, who ordered me to the campus counselor for a headspace tune-up.
A classical psychotherapist, he dragged me back to my childhood to discover the roots of my attachment issues. Within minutes, he had me explaining that I was raised without my biological mother. We camped on that issue for weeks without discussing any other experiences in my life.
This became my excuse for every action, reaction, thought, word and deed in each adult relationship I recklessly ran into from that point forward until I was much older.
I failed to do the hard work of evaluating each potential partner on their own merits before deciding to commit to them in marriage. I simply threw them into the mother-sized hole inside me and became increasingly frustrated when they could not fill it.
As one marriage failed and the next began, that hole inside me became larger and larger as blaming Mom gave way to blaming exes.
I did not take the time to really get to know the person in front of me, which was caused by my second internal issue.
I did not know myself
The most unfortunate result of those therapy sessions in college was that I walked away from them with a go-to defense mechanism.
Blaming others for where I was in life became a defense mechanism that excused me from examining my own attitudes, actions, intentions, and culpability.
When my first wife cheated on me, I looped her back around to the fact that my biological mother cheated on my father. I wrote her off with a crass label to describe her decisions and enjoyed the sympathy of those around me who were all-too-willing to hold me up as a victim.
That gave me a comfortable distance from where my mind really should have been in that situation: why was our relationship so bad that she felt stepping out on it was perfectly acceptable? She owned responsibility for her choices, no doubt, but it is not likely that she made them with absolutely no provocation whatsoever.
I was far too comfortable for far too many years with ignoring my own mistakes. This stunted my ability to grow. To learn. To heal.
I had a long, detailed memory of the actions of everyone in my life — except my own. I did not know myself because I did not want to know myself.
Any person who truly lacks self-knowledge is, quite simply, lying to every person they ever show themselves to. You cannot allow someone to truly know you like this.
That takes time.
I was not taking my time
I have always been in a hurry. Impatience drives me at times in ways that are unspeakably unhealthy. Where relationships are concerned, I have only recently come to realize why I was always in such a hurry.
I was afraid that healthy courtship timelines would expose me before we could commit.
To my previous point, ignoring my own internal baggage was me lying to myself. Lying to myself meant I was lying to everyone else too.
The longer I spent getting to know someone, the longer they had to get inside my head really dig around. I now realize that I was unconsciously aware of this to the point that I was zipping through dating processes to avoid laying my true issues bare for someone that might decide to dip on me because of them.
The laughable part of that, looking back, is that they ended up leaving me anyway once they realized they had dated my shining and upbeat representative, only to marry the miserable truth about me instead. It turns out, people do not like being misled.
That sword cut both ways, too. I allowed myself to be misled by not taking the time to get an accurate picture of the people I was committing to, either. Fast-tracked courtships are a bad idea.
Marriages thrive on love, commitment, devotion, respect, and mutual consideration. The key to developing those things is rooted in the courtship that precedes marriage: time.
I was ridiculously lazy
I certainly had role models for how to act in marriage when I was growing up, but I am going to take full ownership of this one. It has always been easily the most fixable of my issues in relationships, but for some reason I just rolled with it. I wondered why partners could not just love me for who I was pretending to be.
I have never been Mr. Fix-it. I am not a mechanic, general contractor, carpenter, or any other type of skilled laborer. When something went wrong in the house, I would call someone to come address it.
That got really embarrassing the time I had to call a father-in-law over to figure out why the a/c wasn’t cooling our house. It turns out, you have to change the air filters more than once every decade or that tends to happen.
The real problem with this in my relationships wasn’t what I didn’t know. You can only know the things you have learned, and I had never been taught how to perform routine maintenance of everyday items. I had never had to build a deck with my bare hands or replace the alternator in a car.
Where I stand guilty on this subject is that I did not care to learn. Cars come with manuals and car parts stores have detailed books on how to do almost anything you need to with a car. I have uncles who know what I don’t know that would have been happy to explain simple things to me (along with the inevitable insults to my manhood, of course).
I was just too comfortable with being man-stupid and defending that fact by constantly self-extolling all my other virtues — none of which did us any good when things blew up and needed to be fixed.
My laziness ruined more than one good relationship, which was so unnecessary.
The good news about all of these issues is that it was not too late to address them and make some wholesale, necessary changes in my life.
I have filled the mother-sized hole in my own life by simply forgiving her. Grace makes a wonderful caulk for the soul.
I sat with a more carefully-selected therapist in my more recent adult years and, rather than confronting my parents or my exes, instead confronted the one person that was really causing all this damage: myself.
He and I still have work to do, but we are in a much better place now.
I travel a lot, which has given me the sweet nectar of time to journal about my past, my mistakes, my unhealthy thoughts and choices, and the resulting present. I am learning that I am not nearly as far gone and irreparable as I once thought. Thank you, Time!
Oh. And I now have YouTube on speed dial. It took me two hours the other day, but I totally changed the headlamp bulb in my wife’s car!
