As I’ve described from several angles now, a core problem in our relationship was him labelling me “negative” in a very general way. That was problematic in and of itself, but it was also a sign of our differing world views, which bothered me more and more as time went by.

I generally think well of people, especially those whom I love. Eric is much more inclined to, for lack of a better word, think badly of people.

If someone behaves in a way that I don’t like, I make an effort to assume the best. Their behaviour can usually be explained by a combination of circumstances: the situation, the person’s knowledge and skills, etc. Perhaps they were tired, or had a bad day. Maybe they didn’t realize how they sounded, or (especially in the case of children) maybe they didn’t have the skills yet to behave better or express themselves better.

Meanwhile, when Eric sees behaviour he doesn’t like, he tends to generalize that to “this person is [negative adjective]”. He assigns labels to people, and then lets those colour his future interactions with them.

I find my philosophy both more useful and more respectful. A label sticks forever, and none of the involved parties can do anything about it other than be annoyed by it. Whereas a situational approach empowers you to prevent the problem from reoccurring, or to alleviate it. I really didn’t like hearing his negative labels about the children, like s/he “doesn’t care about others”, or how s/he is “messy”, “lazy”, “distractible”, and much preferred making an effort to understand, prevent, explain, teach.

I’ve since learned that this is a whole debate in psychology, known as “person vs situation” or “trait vs state”.

One big problem in our relationship in recent years was that we both felt that we were not allowed to make mistakes.

He said he couldn’t make mistakes because I would immediately correct him.

I felt I couldn’t make mistakes (express myself in a less than perfect way) because I was then immediately labelled as “negative” and “the cause of all problems”.

That naturally felt bad for both of us.

Maybe I’m just finding excuses here, but to me, there’s a fundamental qualitative difference between these two.

One is being told “you were wrong about this”.
The other is being told “you are a bad person”.

One you can agree or disagree with, accept or reject.
The other is an attack on your whole being.

A big part of what Eric perceived and described as my “negativity” was me correcting him.

I know I used to correct him (and others) when I knew they were wrong, more often than they liked. I worked on it, trained myself out of the habit. It was not enough.

I let him be as wrong as he wanted without saying anything. He can call plants by the wrong name, and I say nothing. He can order “hot cold milk” from a menu written in Italian, and I say nothing. He can say we’re walking east when we’re going north. Whatever. It’s never worth saying anything.

If I still corrected him EVER then I could see him immediately shut down and get quietly furious. And I did correct him, in two specific kinds of scenarios.

One was when the discussion topic was specifically about facts, for example if Adrian asked about how something works. I mostly let Eric have center stage in those conversation (see later post) and only added my bits when he had had time to shine. The only time I stepped in and corrected when he was unequivocally wrong about some essential part, and I didn’t want Adrian to walk away with entirely wrong information. I made very sure to express myself very politely and diplomatically, wrapping the correction in soft phrases. None of that was acceptable. He just could not accept me correcting him.

The other scenario is in particularly stressful situations. Factual errors stress me out when I’m already anxious in a stressful situation. If we’re navigating public transport in a foreign city, or we’re barely on time for some important-ish appointment and someone calls a street by the wrong name. I know it doesn’t matter at all, but it just makes my anxiety worse. Correcting people in that situation is a reflexive action, not even intentional – it’s almost like batting away a wasp hovering in my face. It’s rare, literally happens no more than a handful of times per year. (I have grown to be hyper aware of each time this happens.) But even that was too much, and Eric reacted strongly every time.

Maybe it is all my fault. Maybe my behaviour twenty years ago traumatised him to the extent that even the slightest criticism now is unbearable. I don’t know, but I accept that it is possible. If that’s the case, then we’re in an untenable situation – if he can’t forgive me (for lack of a better word) then we’ll never get past this. The only thing to do then is to accept that and for both us to move on.

Someone once said that love is an action verb. That resonates with me.

Loving someone means more than feeling warm feelings. Loving means saying loving things, behaving in loving ways, but also seeing the other with loving eyes.

To love is to interpret the beloved’s actions with extra love, grace, and forgiveness. In my mind, if you love someone, then you make an effort to interpret their words and deeds in the most positive way that you can.

Eric’s view and behaviour towards me has turned into the opposite. He is unable to love me, for my definition of love.

“Love thy neighbour as thyself.” I’m not a fan of the Bible, but that guideline is a good one. I am pretty sure that I love a random stranger in the street – in the sense that I look at them with more forgiving eyes – than Eric looks/looked at me.

Eric had a thoroughly negative view of me. Everything I did could be interpreted negatively. And if there was no way to interpret it negatively, then he assumed I didn’t mean it. This could happen with even the most positive things.

I asked him how his day was. He dodged the question because he didn’t believe that I was interested for real.

I asked about a difficulty I knew he was having. He turned my question into a joke.

I asked for a hug. I got a stiff, perfunctory one, because he didn’t think I meant it. How do I know? I asked, and he said so himself.

This last one was actually the final trigger that made me realise that our relationship was dead in the water. I was so hurt. Here was my most heartfelt offer of and request for intimacy, and he just rejected it with “nah that’s fake”.

I felt not just completely unloved, but also not even respected as a true and honest person, which I felt was so incredibly undeserved. I have done nothing to deserve that kind of distrust. Honesty is a cornerstone of everything I believe in. I even struggle to tell white lies to not hurt others’ feelings.

Understanding just how little Eric trusted me, how little he thought of me, broke things irrevocably. If there is no trust, then there is no foundation for any kind of relationship. There is no point in us talking to each other if he doesn’t believe I am telling the truth. There is no point in attending counselling if he can’t trust what he hears.

You might argue that I should have worked to rebuild his trust. But I never did anything to destroy it. It’s not like I had done something dishonest to deserve his distrust, and then needed to work my way back. If decades of honesty and truth has not been enough to prove myself, then there is nothing more I can do.

Not only did he kill my belief in our relationship, he also lost my trust entirely in that moment. Because if that’s the kind of assumptions he makes about me – that I could be faking everything at any time, and that what I say can’t be trusted – then how can I expect him to be different? If this is the way he thinks people are, then this is his “normal”.

Over time, hearing Eric’s very consistent opinion about me made me doubt my own judgement. He kept telling me I am negative, and while I could sometimes agree with him, in many cases I couldn’t see anything negative in what I had done.

One aspect of the negativity he perceived in me was that he kept assuming that I was irritated, or annoyed, or didn’t like this or that. He kept interpreting perfectly innocent behaviours as signs of irritation, specifically that I was supposedly irritated with him.

I left the kitchen when he was emptying the dishwasher, because I am sensitive to loud noises – he took that as me being irritated with him. I moved his bicycle in the garage a step to the left so that I could fit mine in next to it – he took that as me being irritated with him.

For me, that was just a neutral way of solving a minor problem. There was no irritation involved, because why would there be any? These were just small things.

I could assure him that there was absolutely no irritation involved, but he didn’t believe me. In the end I started doubting my own emotions. Perhaps I acted in an irritated manner, without being aware of it? Perhaps I could have expressed myself even more gently? Perhaps I really was irritated, how could I not notice it?

I was often in a constant state of low-level anxiety when he was around – about how I was acting, how I was talking, how he was perceiving me. It was stressful, to say the least. Towards the end of our relationship, I was relieved when he was not around, because I could stop second-guessing every single thing I did or said.

He must have felt something similar, if he thought I was always irritated, no matter what he did.

The difference between our situations was that he “owned” the problem. He could have asked me when he felt unsure about my feelings about something, and he could have trusted my answer. Whereas I had no power over the situation at all.

Over the years, Eric repeatedly told me that I was negative as a person, and too critical, and I took it to heart. If someone I love and respect points out my flaws, then I work on fixing them.

I was definitely less diplomatic and more “things must be done the right way” 15–20 years ago – I am well aware of that. If something was clearly incorrect then clearly it needed to be corrected. And I usually went about it in a straight and no-nonsense way, without much thought for diplomacy.

I was also anxious as a parent when Ingrid and Adrian were small. I felt very responsible for everything that happened or could possibly happen to the children, so I double-checked things that Eric had done, which of course came across as me being critical of his way of doing things.

I learned. I understood that that was an unsustainable approach. I polished away all my edges, and then some.

I hold back from correcting other people. If other people are obviously wrong about things, however egregiously, I mostly say nothing. I accept all kinds of mistakes these days, and don’t let them bother me.

I learned to express myself carefully. If I do suggest something or correct someone, I couch everything in soft words.

That wasn’t enough, and Eric still saw me as negative, so I kept at it. I became cautious about even just disagreeing with anyone, and my instinctive reaction now is to support every idea and proposal. In a discussion about opinions, I mostly don’t even bother to voice mine unless it’s really important, or someone specifically asks me. Even then I make sure to tone down my dissenting opinions. Just go with what everyone else likes. Because I have been “trained” to view everything else as “negativity”.

None of it made a difference. I still got to hear that I am negative, as much as before. I felt like Eric wasn’t seeing me, the real me, at all, and was stuck in an opinion he formed when I was literally a teenager. Now I was being “punished” for being immature decades years ago. Eric’s view of me remained unchanged, no matter how much I changed myself.

I realised that I was in a hopeless situation. He is fixed in his opinion in that I am a negative person, so this is what he continues to see. And in this context, he has all the power. There is absolutely nothing I can do. I can’t convince him, I can’t prove a negative (haha). So I gave up.