19th July, 2009
Question
I broke up with my girlfriend about 8 months ago. The reason I broke it off was, firstly, the relationship wasn't sexually satisfying. And she is quite a strong personality, which sometimes left me feeling that the relationship was overpowering and suffocating. But it was very difficult to break up as we get on so well and have the same sense of humour. I have never felt more comfortable and more myself with anyone before. I felt loved, liked, confident and safe.
I avoided telling her how I felt about the sex and the sense of being suffocated for a long time as I didn't want the relationship to end. I also didn't want to hurt her. And I was afraid I wouldn't ever meet someone again with whom I felt so comfortable.
My girlfriend was upset when we broke up and I felt awful. For the next six months or so we really spent just as much time with each other, apart from not sleeping together, and joked about meeting someone else, without actually doing anything about that. Basically we were behaving just like we were before. She wanted us to get back together and I think that made me feel wanted. We were comfortable.
My ex-girlfriend then joined a number of groups in the hope of meeting more people. While we were a couple we had spent all our time alone, just the two of us, which was part of the reason why it felt so suffocating. I never pretended during those six months that I wanted to get back with her, and encouraged her to do all this stuff and to try and meet someone else. She did, and I felt completely jealous, abandoned, and full of a sense of real loss. I didn't want to lose her as my best friend and didn't want to lose my position of importance in her life. She then suggested we get back together, but my feeling was that this person she had met was a good match for her, and that she was coming back to me as she knew me and it was comfortable. She was also, I felt, a little unsure about starting something new with someone else.
I feel the only way to keep her in my life is to get back together with her as a proper couple. In many ways we would be happy. I don't know if we can resolve our sexual difficulties, but perhaps we can. I don't seem able to think my way out of this problem.
Answer
I hesitate to state the obvious, but you do know, don't you, that you haven't mentioned love, haven't said anything, really, about caring for this girl, wanting her to be happy, desiring to do the right thing by her? Oh I know you didn't enjoy hurting her, but that's just being a decent human being, which you clearly are.
You do talk a lot about comfort, primarily your comfort. You even went so far as to walk away from the relationship, rather than suffer the discomfort of confrontation. That's how important comfort is to you. You felt suffocated because the two of you spent so much time together, but you didn't challenge such tight togetherness. You felt overpowered by a strong-willed girlfriend too, but you didn't challenge that either, didn't ask her to back off, didn't assert yourself. You avoided the hassle.
You didn't dodge out of fear of actually losing your girlfriend. After all, you eventually broke it off with her. You left issues unattended because you lacked the skills to state your case, fight your corner, or deal with your distress by asking for things to be done differently. You didn't know how to negotiate. You felt powerless to alter anything. For you there were only two
choices, either put up or shut up.
You could kill off the relationship, but you couldn't fight for it, couldn't handle the unease of dealing daily, in open discussion, with the differences you had with your girlfriend. That's how important comfort is to you. And no, I'm not criticising. Countless marriages have foundered on exactly the same issue. When people walk away it's not because they are powerful. It's because they are powerless, or think they are powerless, to bring about change. And look what happened. You ended the relationship, and your girlfriend is still around. You ran scared, and discovered that you were important enough to her to hang in there.
Sadly, so far, you don't seem to have learned the fundamentally important lesson in that experience, namely that you have room to negotiate. You have room to challenge her behaviour. You can change things. She's prepared to listen. Sex doesn't have to be your battle-ground either. You don't have to be out of her bed in order to carry yourself with quiet confidence as a man.
Or perhaps you just don't love your girlfriend. In which case none of the above is relevant. Because then you're simply indulging in selfish dependency, clinging to a comfort blanket like a baby, rather than setting a loving woman free to find real happiness. Think about it.
