I think I got distracted and failed to respond to this at the time, but on re-reading it there's still something I want to say.
>> I learned my parents' fighting style, but that didn't work so well between me and my ex, so it got modified. Then that style in turn was a disaster when I moved in with Russ -- it heterodyned badly with his style and just made matters worse -- so I had to adapt again.<<
Wow. I admire your flexibility.
What you see as flexibility, I see as recognizing that if I didn't do something about the situation, nothing was going to be done. And an awful lot of that is because women are expected to do all of that kind of work in a relationship, which isn't right but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
With the ex, I never thought about it in those terms because I hadn't yet learned to see the water. And I'm not really complaining because my parents' style of fighting wasn't very healthy and it was a good thing that I modified it; I just wish that I hadn't been the only one seeing and responding to the problem.
With my current partner it's more complex. He's got some long-lasting emotional damage from a less-than-ideal childhood, and some of those patterns are fucking set in stone by now. I have managed to initiate discussions on a few facets and get him to re-think his attitudes, but there are still a lot of areas where it's just an inescapable fact of life that if something has to change, it's going to have to be me because I can. And in the long run, he's worth the effort even if I have occasional twinges about it.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2017-01-03 06:26 am (UTC)>> I learned my parents' fighting style, but that didn't work so well between me and my ex, so it got modified. Then that style in turn was a disaster when I moved in with Russ -- it heterodyned badly with his style and just made matters worse -- so I had to adapt again.<<
Wow. I admire your flexibility.
What you see as flexibility, I see as recognizing that if I didn't do something about the situation, nothing was going to be done. And an awful lot of that is because women are expected to do all of that kind of work in a relationship, which isn't right but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
With the ex, I never thought about it in those terms because I hadn't yet learned to see the water. And I'm not really complaining because my parents' style of fighting wasn't very healthy and it was a good thing that I modified it; I just wish that I hadn't been the only one seeing and responding to the problem.
With my current partner it's more complex. He's got some long-lasting emotional damage from a less-than-ideal childhood, and some of those patterns are fucking set in stone by now. I have managed to initiate discussions on a few facets and get him to re-think his attitudes, but there are still a lot of areas where it's just an inescapable fact of life that if something has to change, it's going to have to be me because I can. And in the long run, he's worth the effort even if I have occasional twinges about it.