Enjoy!
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| Not the moving service we used, but close enough. |
In case you’ve noticed the absence of a column from me in
awhile (or a blog post for that matter), let me tell you a little story about
relationships…
I’ve been living with my girlfriend for a couple years now.
About eight months ago, I relocated with her from Orange County California to
Orange County Florida. Anyone who has tried to move somewhere with someone, you
know that aside from the primary function of relocating all your things, moving
also seems designed to causes stress, fights, and costs a ton of money. Since
my girlfriend and I are both very thrifty women, the costs only added to the
stress and fights.
We survived the cross country move but then, at the
beginning of March, we moved across town from an apartment to a house, which
caused one of the rarest and most intense kind of fights a couple can have, the
dreaded: we’re moving out, so we
don’t have to worry about our neighbors hearing our argument. In an empty
apartment, we had a proper screaming at each other match. That’s not entirely
accurate, technically, she was screaming at me, and I was intentionally getting
under her skin in a much quieter way. From the outside, it probably sounded
like she was screaming me silly without response, but let me say, I am a master
of messing with people without seeming like I’m messing with people. If I ever
had an argument with myself, I would probably end up slapping the hell out of
me. To my girlfriend’s credit, she only yelled.
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| Ah, traditional marriage. |
We’ve been together for several years, known each other even
longer, and we’ve never had a fight like this. More specifically, she’s never
had the out of control reaction she had, and it scared the hell out of her that
she was able to get so angry. The combination of stress from moving, the huge
amount of money we were spending, and her need to take on absolutely every
responsibility she can get a hold of, finally caught up with her, and then I
started needling her with bitchy comments because I’d felt like she hadn’t
listened to me enough that day. I totally earned the screaming at, and I told
her so, but that didn’t make her feel better since she was a little freaked out
about the rage reaction.
As women, we’re socialized to internalize our anger. We’d
rather take stuff out on ourselves than externalize it onto the people who probably
caused the anger. In the rare occasion when we do externalize our feelings, it
is usually accompanied by a lot of guilt and shame. I have no doubt in my mind
that if I was straight, and I managed to get my boyfriend that angry, he would
have punched a hole in the wall of the apartment we were leaving and we would
have lost our deposit; yay for being a lesbian! We all have those emotions at
those intensities in us. It’s a human thing, not a gender thing. So, while it
freaked her out because she was still thinking in the socialized terms that
women aren’t supposed to have that kind of anger and we certainly aren’t
supposed to show it, I wasn’t surprised, shocked, or appalled to learn my
girlfriend was an emotionally vivid human being. Having anger is normal,
expressing anger is healthy, internalizing anger because that’s what you’ve
been socialized to do is damaging.
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| The intemperate sex indeed. |
The relationship moral to this story is two fold:
- Firstly,
and most obviously, understand that moving with your girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever-nomenclature-you-prefer
is mind bogglingly stressful. Give each other a break, learn to take breaks
from each other, and accept that arguments are almost certainly going to arise
no matter how much you love each other.
- Secondly,
and perhaps not so obviously, outward expressions of “unsavory” feelings like
anger, jealousy, contempt, etc. shouldn’t be looked down upon. I put unsavory
in quotes because there aren’t “bad” and “good” emotions, only “preferred” and
“not preferred” emotions; calling these emotions bad is where the guilt and
shame over feeling them comes from. Anger isn’t a bad emotion and so expressing
it doesn’t make you a bad person. Trying to destroy or suppress a perfectlyhuman emotion like anger is what’s actually bad for you. Within a relationship
you don’t just have to understand your connection to these supposedly negative
feelings. You have to understand your partner’s relationship to the feelings
both in how they experience them and how you express them to your partner. Knowing
Nikki had that kind of anger in her didn’t scare me, didn’t make me rethink the
relationship, or think less of her; it let me know she was human with a very
human need to express her anger sometimes. The really scary thing would be if
she never showed me anything but a happy face.
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| Happy endings involve sunsets and rainbow flags. |
