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Key points
- Relationships often change over time.
- You have to accept a relationship for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.
- Holding onto false hopes can hold you back.
- What works for someone else may not for you.
Larissa, who’s in her mid-40s, had been involved with Gil for five years. According to her, they loved all the same stuff—old movies, the Sunday crossword (which they did together in bed), cooking Chinese. It seemed as though they were made for each other. Larissa assumed it would go on forever.
But Gil had a history. After an early marriage and divorce, and his first appointment as an assistant professor, he’d won a fellowship to North Carolina. Mostly, he did research, but he also met Mary. She was no scholar, like Larissa, but she was kind and listened to Gil and made him forget his troubles. When the year ended, they parted but kept up sporadically. When Gil’s life seemed complicated, he’d call Mary. They’d talk, he’d feel better, and he’d get back to business. He even told Larissa about her, sort of how you’d recall a high school sweetheart. No big deal. Except until it became one.
Gil and Mary had been talking more lately, since Gil was deciding whether to send his son to a school for “troubled” kids. Gil had talked the problem over with Larissa, and she gave him what she thought was good advice. But Gil said he needed more. He said he could open his heart to Mary, who knew the whole story of his marriage and divorce and had helped him deal with the pain. “Gil told me,” said Larissa, “that it was just different with Mary. He said she understood him better than anyone.” Larissa was hurt. How could this woman from fifteen years ago suddenly matter?
Gil tried to mollify Larissa. How, he asked, could she worry about someone in North Carolina whom he hadn’t seen in years? Besides, things seemed to have returned to normal.
At least for a while. A few months ago, Gil told Larissa that he was going down to see Mary.
What? Though Larissa was aghast, he said he knew his own heart. He acknowledged that over the past year or so, as he and Mary spoke, the past came rushing back. He said he couldn’t escape the feelings that Mary aroused in him—a kind of peace, a sort of wholeness where nothing in his life was missing or out of place. He flew down three days later, and spent five days. When he came back, he told Larissa that while he still loved her, he hoped they could be best friends going forward. Larissa was stunned.
So, for the past few months, Larissa has been at loose ends. Gil sends her cute notes, as he always did, asking her out to dinner. He calls her late at night, and wants to talk politics. Everything’s the same and yet everything’s so different. Larissa knows that when Gil hangs up the phone, he calls Mary. She knows because, a few weeks before Larissa came to see me, Mary came to see Gil.
Larissa tells me that if Gil were immature and running from commitment, she might understand. But he’s not. So, she thinks this “turn” (which is what she calls it) is for real. What she doesn’t understand, however, and thinks she never will, is how Gil can blithely offer friendship in place of all they’d shared. “How can he just say ‘Well, it’s all the same—just no touching.’ That totally floors me.” She says that Gil is being cruel, whether he knows it or not. She feels humiliated. The problem is whether to kiss off some guy who broke her heart or suck up her pride, admit that life is unfathomable, and accept his terms.
The unwilling passage from Lover to Friend is hard. Whenever you’re near the person in question, your shared past obtrudes itself—unbidden but implacable. You can’t pretend, you can’t stop. Love just seems like the natural response; friendship feels weird, a constraint instead of an option. So, after a few “phony dates” with Gil (that’s Larissa’s term), she told him that it hurt too much. She would start seeing other people.
But that didn’t last. Larissa told me that while accepting Gil’s terms made her lose respect for herself, rejecting them left her bored, listless, unable to enjoy things. So, she went back to being his friend. Sort of, because now she’s seeing me, asking how to be happy in this miserable state of affairs.
I asked Larissa whether, over time, she might get used to friendship with Gil or whether it would grate on her forever. “It’s his blitheness that really hurts me,” she said, “the way he acts like everything is just the same between us when it isn’t.” She said she’d always resent how he’d gotten just what he wanted: Mary on the one hand and her on the other. “Why should he get it all? Why should he get away with it all?”
As we kept talking, Larissa said that she felt addicted to Gil, and couldn’t give him up. But, for that reason, she said she would try to go cold turkey—“I’ll have to give him up now and forever, though I’m going to experience withdrawal symptoms.”
Larissa is weighing so many factors, determining which will affect how she feels, what she does, how she can sustain herself. In the context of love, the irrational counts (as it surely did for Gil). We can’t simply make rational choices. Larissa found that while she’d prefer to hang out with Gil on one level, at another level she’d feel distraught if she did. It was that other, deeper level, that matters to her most.
Moreover, friends are supposed to care about each other. If not passionately, like lovers, they’re still supposed to support us. At least, they’re supposed to make us feel good. Larissa didn’t feel good around Gil anymore.
I thought that a main ingredient in Larissa’s progress would be time. That is, after a while Gil would fade from memory. But look at Gil and Mary. Some people stay with us. The difference is that unlike Gil and Mary, Larissa is trying to forget Gil. Perhaps he is irreplaceable, but Time + Someone Else is very good medicine for a broken heart. As we grope towards happiness, we must accept that we can’t let the best to be the enemy of the good.
