Now that the divorce is behind me, I’ve noticed that there are habits that I need to unlearn.

Habit 1: No buts.

I have become irrationally averse to the word “but”. Ever since Eric said that me saying “yes but” (rather than “yes and”) was a major issue, I fixated on that. I had something concrete, something I could work on! And now I am watching my language all the time, getting anxious whenever I use the word “but”. I rephrase my emails when I see the word. I know it’s ridiculous, but it makes me anxious.

Habit 2: No opinions.

I was conditioned to think that if you love someone, then you don’t voice a different opinion unless your opinion is explicitly asked for.

I stopped voicing opinions. Then I stopped having opinions. One day I realised I didn’t even know if I actually didn’t have an opinion about a question, or had trained myself to suppress it, because it would only lead to hurt.

Adrian has called me out – “well, what if it was just you, what would you choose?” and I am pushing myself to have opinions.

Habit 3: Follow.

If you love someone, you walk half a step behind them. Me walking half a step ahead of him was me “being controlling” and “always needing to set the pace”. I learned to never do that, so now I can’t even walk side-by-side with a friend or colleague; I reflexively hang half a step behind, which makes things awkward.

Habit 4: Books.

There are books I have never dared to read because he admires them. I didn’t dare read them, because I knew that I would for sure not be as enamoured as he was. And he was sure to ask for my opinion afterwards, and I can’t lie and and say I loved the book when I didn’t. So it was safest to just not read them.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens was one example. Once he shared some section of the book because it related to what Ingrid was studying in history at school. I was not entirely impressed. I didn’t even say anything particularly harsh, didn’t claim that the author was wrong or stupid, just “that seems a bit simplistic, I’m not sure I agree all the way.” He immediately started defending the book: “Well, that was just a short section!” and sounded hurt. It was very telling, looking back – a mild critique of a small part of something got interpreted as a total rejection of the whole thing, and since he liked the whole thing, he identified himself with it, so a rejection of the thing was a rejection of him.

I can now read books that he likes, and maybe manage it without getting anxious about his reaction to my opinions. Although some, such as Sapiens, are probably tainted forever.

If I ever consider another romantic relationship, then three things must hold true.

We must both see the other as equal, from the start.

We must agree on some fundamental philosophical truths.

They must have a healthy self-esteem that can stand on its own without constant external support.

They must be emotionally mature, aware of themselves, able to give and take feedback and have difficult conversations.

At one point I had a moment of insight.

If everything I do, and all the love I give, is mistrusted and rejected, why should I continue to give?

I am not going to beg him to please accept my love if he doesn’t want it, or is unable to accept it.

I’ve been trying for years to make him see me for real. If I haven’t succeeded by now, then I never will. If by the age of fifty he hasn’t reached the kind of emotional maturity I need from a partner, then he never will.

I don’t want to waste the rest of my life banging my head bloody against this wall.

Why did we not try to fix things, you may wonder. Get help, get counselling, solve your problems together!

We did. We attended many sessions of counselling. After the fact my verdict is that it was at best useless.

Usually we spent each session talking about something that had happened that had bothered us. How did that make us feel? What did the other really mean when they said X? What was the other feeling when we did Y?

In my mind, I thought of this approach as “find something that hurt and then really inspect it”. It was like going to the dentist every week, for a dental cleaning. Uncomfortable, over and over again.

I thought: this is painful, but it’s worth it if it makes things better. And I thought so because I believed that this process was an initial phase of understanding the problem, and at some point we would start working on doing something about it.

At one point I said, “what are we going to do about [negative thing]?”

The therapist’s answer was: “Oh no, nobody needs to change themselves!”

What is the point, then? I wondered. She said that for other couples just hearing the other’s feelings often resolved things. That may be true. But she actually never made sure that this was the case for us. It appeared that she never had a plan for following up progress, or for fixing things; she just hoped they would improve on their own due to us talking about them. She sounded so wise and caring and insightful in each individual session, but she had no overall plan.

Maybe the “just talk about it” approach works for some people, but for us it was nearly useless. Yes, it gave me better insight into Eric’s thoughts and feelings, but not in a way that actually had an impact. It didn’t improve our communication.

Now years later I also note that our therapy sessions didn’t uncover any of the problems that I’ve been writing about in this series – not a single one. It remained superficial, at the level of “how did that make you feel” rather than questioning things in depth.

Even after being told that nothing needed to change, I changed one or two things on my own initiative, when I realised that they were causing problems. That actually made things worse, I think, because I sacrificed my own needs for what I thought was good for our relationship. I stopped speaking Estonian when Eric was around, for example, and I grieved and resented it ever since.

We considered giving counselling another try, with a different therapist and a more practically oriented approach. But by the time we had gotten there, I had already realised that we didn’t have any kind of foundation to build upon.

Maybe we would have had better results if we had tried earlier, with a more suitable therapist. But on the other hand, some of the fissures were so deep and fundamental that I don’t see how they could be mended at all. (See my earlier posts about love, trust, and negativity, for example.) Perhaps effective therapy would have uncovered them earlier and saved us both years of frustration.

I learned about the self-expansion model of relationships from Ingrid’s high school psychology course materials. (I haven’t read up any more on it since then, so this is an extremely simplified version.) Very briefly, this model says that we seek out relationships with other people so that we can expand our own selves, through acquiring new experiences, capabilities and knowledge. This model immediately struck me as very relevant to my life.

I want to experience new things. I want to see new places, or old places in new ways. I want to experience new music, art, food, nature. I want to try new things within my hobbies. I’m not an extreme novelty-seeker, and the new experiences don’t need to be exotic or extreme, but it is important to me to experience the world.

He and I used to do so many things together, especially before the kids – concerts, movies, museums, walks, road trips. Then he stopped.

I took all the initiative, and even then he rarely joined. I did more and more on my own. Concerts, walks, restaurants. His life was work + home + screens.

I want to experience the world for real, not just read about it on screens. I want my relationships to enrich my life. Not only that, of course, but that is an important part of relationships.

I want to share experiences, to experience things together, and then later remember them together.

If I’m doing everything on my own anyway, and he only expresses polite interest afterwards, what is the point? Do we even have a relationship, or do we just happen to exist near each other?

I wonder if he even liked me. It was pretty clear that towards the end he didn’t like spending time with me. Whenever I asked if he wanted to join me for [whatever] the answer was almost invariably “no”.

We used to have fun together, ages ago. I naïvely lived in the dream that we could still have that if we made a bit of an effort.

I remember our 12th (?) wedding anniversary. I’m not sure about the exact year, but Adrian could speak clearly enough that he could be understood by others than us, and could thus be left with others. I had arranged for my mum to babysit, so we could have a date night. Eric came home after work and I told him that we could go out, just the two of us, thinking that it would be a positive surprise. He said something like “unless you have an actual plan, I’d rather not”.

I covered up my hurt. “Of course I have a plan,” I told him, because I did. I had a restaurant booking and everything. Looking back after the fact, I couldn’t help thinking that his response showed how much he valued spending time with me. I didn’t make any more attempts at an obvious date night after that.

It was always me buying flowers for our anniversaries. It was always me finding things for us to do together. Ballet evenings were the exception, he made those happen. But for him the ballet was the important part and I was also there, rather than the opposite. When we did go out for a concert or something, he switched to reading his work email as soon as we got on the train home. I was just… also there, in the background.

When the kids were old enough to be safely left to their own devices for longer stretches of time, I suggested a few times that we could set aside a regular time for just us. Something low-key, like a Sunday afternoon fika, to just talk. He wasn’t interested at all.

When we were discussing divorce, he claimed that we never focused on our relationship and the kids were always the focus. Well, speak for yourself.

Our relationship was unequal from the start.

When we met, I was 19 and he was 27. He had about ten times more experience of adult life than I did.

I was mature for my age, taking more responsibility than most people my age, and was generally not impressed by boys my age. I liked that he was more mature than them.

(Looking back, I can’t help but wonder what he saw from his side. What could a twenty-seven-year-old see in a teenager?)

He took on the role of “the authority”, and at the time that worked out well for both of us. It was nice to live with someone who had all kinds of life skills that I hadn’t had time to acquire yet.

Over time, though, it became an unhealthy dynamic. Or maybe it was unhealthy from the start? In any case, this initial dynamic set the tone for our relationship forever. Him expecting to be the authority, whom I am expected to look up to.

The thing is, I have learned and I have grown. Grown past him in some areas. I no longer want to be the subordinate partner.

I’m guessing that this is why our relationship worked in the past but no longer does: that unbalanced relationship fit his needs, and it doesn’t fit mine. Hasn’t done so for years now.

I don’t want to make myself small to fit into the relationship.

I wrote earlier that he didn’t love me based on my definition of love. I also couldn’t love him based on his definition of love.

For him, I’ve concluded after years of observation, love means validation: me telling him and showing him how great he is.

In particular, he wanted to be validated as the authority. He needed to be told and shown that he is clever/wise/well-informed/knowledgeable/intelligent.

His role was to be the authority. My role was to be the “dispenser of validation”. His participation in our conversations often seemed to focus on saying things that would lead to me validating his contributions. Pull lever, get validation.

I didn’t have room to be an equal partner in conversations. I had to make myself smaller and stupider than I am, in order for him to be happy. He was happiest when my thoughts didn’t take too much place, and when I instead focused on validating his thoughts. His role in a conversation was to say interesting things; my role was to say “how interesting” and “I hadn’t thought of that”.

It became especially obvious when he shared things he found online. If my reaction wasn’t 100% enthusiastically positive, if I questioned anything about the thing, then I was being negative. It was as if anything he shared became a part of his identity, and any response that wasn’t mainly made up of admiration was a blow to his ego.

I can do that with cute cat photos – don’t think, just say “wow that’s cute!” – but he didn’t share cat photos. He shared stuff that I was supposed to be intellectually impressed by, but not engage with for real. I found that kind of fake engagement very difficult, and often failed.

It was a confusing contrast. He shared links to in-depth articles, informative graphs, videos analysing some aspect of current affairs, much of which I was truly interested in. But I had to watch out and not actually engage with the content for real or start having my own thoughts about it. So on the one hand he shared things that would make him be perceived as an intellectual authority. But my response needed to NOT be on an intellectual level. I needed to be uncritically positive, like a mum responding to a five-year-old: “look at that, how pretty, did you draw this all by yourself”. If I didn’t, he was immediately hurt. Except unlike the five-year-old’s drawings, this wasn’t stuff he made, just links he found – which he then identified with to such an extent that questioning any part of them was a rejection of all of him.

One time I was reading an article about orcas, and decades-long observations of them pushing dead salmon around. I read some bit out loud to Eric, since I found it fascinating. He said something like “seems difficult to control a dead salmon through water with just your head”. I replied something like “Yeah, I wonder what orcas would think about us if they could see us: it seems difficult to carry things around, what with all that gravity.”

He didn’t like that. “I meant that there is water resistance,” he huffed. I’m like… yes? I got that? and I replied to your thought? The problem was, I realised, that that was not what was expected to do. I should simply have said “oh, I hadn’t thought of that”. My role was not to participate in the conversation, to have my own thoughts – I was expected to just admire his.

I’ve been doing my best to cater to his fragile sense of self. I’ve been consciously standing aside in family conversations whenever I thought the topic was something he knew about, to let him shine. It’s gotten to the point where Adrian thinks I don’t know anything about anything, because I stay quiet and don’t participate.

I finally got tired of making myself small so that he can feel great.