A History

She never was secure in her father’s love, ever looking for his approval, even into her adulthood. Any earnings she made went to them – 90% of her wages for years. Meanwhile, she counted slices of bread and shared a one bedroom apartment with five other young pre-professional women working hard for their break into the corporate scene. The idea was that the parents were using the money to invest in her future. (It was always more about investing for the future – for a better life… in the future.)

She eventually found a man who wanted to marry her, devote his life to her. He crosses the ocean to be with her, ringing in his ears the voices of disapproval of his own family. She went for it: got married. It’s what people do.

But her father didn’t seem to welcome this new person in his daughter’s life. This new person curbed the daughter’s attention for her father. The father had his own wife, but he never fully surrendered himself to it, always hanging on the outside of his own potential life. His wife, the mother, was loving and devoted – although at times, she wasn’t sure why – but he kept her at arm’s length: the power of this love was just too much to handle, too much to reciprocate. A daughter’s devotion, on the other hand, can be modulated, manipulated.

The father expressed his disfavour for the daughter’s husband: he was of ‘low-birth’; his business wasn’t white-collar; he didn’t provide his daughter the lifestyle she was entitled to. And perhaps, on some level, he recognized in this man the same limitless devotion he saw in his own wife. It’s something to distrust and fear. It’s something one cannot rely on. Money. Material goods. They are secure. You can rely on them. They’re what will get you through life.

The daughter wasn’t strong enough to withstand her father’s blows to her life. She starts to turn on her husband, the one who left everything just to love her. She became a ruthless critic herself. Nothing he did could ever be good enough. He becomes despondent: is this where my faith led me? Is this how faith disappoints in the end? Faith, he learns, is a lie; it’s not rewarded. He turns angry. He fights back in his not-so-passive ways. The marriage, after only a few years, is obliterated. The possibility for repair is completely unforeseeable.

They have kids. It’s what people. Having beautiful children will provide the façade of peace and satisfaction. But the wife and husband are still at war. Now they have ammunition between them. Or territory to claim. I’m not sure which.

In one, ultimate blow, she seizes the territory as her own. He has very little hope of regaining it now. He had been demonized. He had failed them. So according to the wife’s rhetoric, she had every justification for taking the children away from him. ‘I saved them. Therefore, they will have to love me more.’ They were going to live with her father and mother. Her father approves of this. Finally, he can correct the bad habits formed in them by their low-class father. He will get to teach them all the things that life is about, like obedience, discipline, and academics. ‘The children’s father is about all play and no work. I will show them that virtue is in a life of all work and no play,’ the grandfather tells himself.

Almost 30 years later, the grandparents have passed on. (The grandfather had a lonely, emotion-less funeral; the grandmother had a very populated, laudatory one.) There is very little trace of the woman’s family. The bonds are tenuous. Except for the woman, each of them is in a new family of their own. She lived for her parents, her father’s approval. But now they are gone and she is left with very little else, much less a sense of herself.

Taking Another For Granted - and - Passive Aggression

Passive aggression is sometimes the direct response to an even less apparent form of aggression. Passive aggression, which can often take the form of withdrawal from the other, refusal to participate (sometimes seen as laziness), uncooperativeness, and even adultery, is the person’s reaction to the feeling that they are being aggressed. It is retaliation for the subtle hostility they detect from the other person.

For example, a couple has been together for many years before one half of the couple decides to move to a city 800 miles away from her partner in order to be with her sister who seems to be in need. What she sees as the preeminent responsibility to her sister supercedes her feeling of responsibility to her partner and to their relationship.

Let’s imagine that the partner who was left behind has already been feeling insecure about his partner’s devotion to him. He is under stress of his own (he is struggling to pursue his dream of establishing himself as a musician). Having an insecure professional life cannot but cause him to feel insecure in other areas of his life – Does she truly support my pursuit of this dream? Would she still love me if I failed? Is she leaving me because I am failing?

So, the woman moves 800 miles away to be with her sister. Her partner of so many years can’t help but perceive this as an affront to him and to the relationship. He can’t help but feel that his partner will find things to put before him/Them. The relationship seems to be of secondary, rather than primary, importance to her. He lets her go without expressing his feelings because he has taken her action as a form of communication about her esteem for the relationship.

The woman moves to the other city, under the assumption, however, that they will maintain the relationship over the long distance since there was no discussion about ‘breaking up’.

To assume the faithfulness of her partner while she moves away is the act of taking her partner and his love for granted. To take someone or something for granted can only be done in the absence of love. Although this act of aggression by the woman would not be apparent to most onlookers, the man has been caused to feel taken for granted by the woman in a not-so-subtle way.

The man then proceeds to have an affair with another woman (who, incidentally, strikes him as identical to his former partner, only ‘less complicated’).

Upon learning of it, the woman and onlookers are in an uproar – how could he cheat on her after all their years together? How could he do something so indulgent and superficial at the risk of losing something so profound, so stable?! The man is vilified as the cause of disruption in the relationship.

They both concede that they want to get beyond this incident and continue to be together ‘somehow’. However, there remains an underlying lack of satisfaction: the man feels his protestation for the aggression he has received has been misread and he will continue to be misrepresented in the relationship; the woman feels that there is some discontent under the surface but is unwilling (out of fear) to contend with it head on.

Taking-each-other-for-granted had begun long, long before any of this had happened. Although they were physically and psychologically ‘together’, they had forgotten to truly love each other. They had assumed that a love continued to exist between them without actually loving between them.

(By the way, what I deem the most common and most insidious form of taking-one’s-love-for-granted is “workoholism.” And a common and insidious form of passive aggression is to over-spend the other person’s money.)