Distance can conceal a man's identity from his romantic partner when he is afraid of being fully known. When his dual reality collides, how can he reconcile the incongruence? His universe crumbles and he shuts down, unable to accept his own self-deception.
My ex-boyfriend and I had gotten back together after 4 years. I was really excited to learn that my MacGyver now had a social life and new friends. In our past, he would come to my city and attend my social events and meet my friends. But when I would visit him, I felt cooped up in his fortress of solitude, as it appeared he didn’t have any friends outside the couple of boys he employed and the old men in his neighborhood. Originally, I thought it was considerate of him to go out of his way to see me without asking me to make the sacrifice of visiting him; I was the one who had kids at home and other obligations that made it difficult to make the trip. It was several years before his lack of invitations felt more like exclusion.
On rare occasions back then, I would join MacGyver around fire pits with those old men and listen to them swap stories and drink beer. He never really said much, just gave a head nod or an affirming word or two. He never shared his own stories; he was a quiet introvert who only ever stood on the fringe of the group. I was barely introduced before I fell back in the shadow of his shadow, feeling out of place. But as invisible as I was, I excused it because I sensed my boyfriend’s own association was too peripheral to justify my own inclusion.
I was very surprised to learn that during our four years apart, my shy ex-boyfriend had been making friends by mingling at a bar several nights a week. It was true that part of me was envious that he had had social support while I struggled in my darkest years during covid, trying unsuccessfully to connect with people in real life. But I pushed that aside and felt that now was a chance to put that behind me and finally become part of his new life he had created in my absence.
“You wouldn’t like her,” he said to me about his best friend when we were hiking on the trail.
“If you say this girl held space for you and helped you learn to trust someone with your inner life, she sounds like a similar version of me. You’ve told me about lots of advice she’s given you that I agree with. Why wouldn’t I like her?”
He shrugged. “Well…she drinks and cusses.”
I looked at him with raised eyebrows.
“Most people drink and cuss. Did you forget that I’m not the little church girl you first met 8 years ago? Do you think I judge people’s character based on social drinking?”
He didn’t answer. I felt there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“If you mean she swears like a sailor and drinks like a fish, you might be right,” I continued. “But knowing how you feel about the alcoholism in your family, I wouldn’t think you’d choose that kind of company.”
He didn’t say anything, but I smiled reassuringly when I caught his eye.
“You know what they say, “we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with.” Because I know you, I assume I’d like the company you keep. So let me be the judge of who I might like.”
I asked him to tell me more about her since she was so important to him. I genuinely wanted to hear about the people in his life, now that he was starting to open up to me and share his world.
But the things he said were not flattering. He told me he met her at the bar he went to because she was the bartender. (I soon discovered all his new friends were female bartenders….) She had wanted to date him at one time, but he wasn’t interested because he wasn’t physically attracted to her. She was pretty but overweight. She had little kids and he didn’t want a woman with kids. Then he told me she now had a great boyfriend, but he often drank too much and was mean to her whenever he drank. He told stories about their problems in great detail, and he started to get upset like he was talking about a kid sister or someone he really cared for. She was, after all, his best friend, and it seemed appropriate that he would feel protective about someone so special.
But I had to reflect internally that I’d never seen him get so upset about my own experiences of mistreatment. He was always cool when I was hurt or angry about my ex-husband’s behavior towards me or my kids in the years I dated him following my divorce. He never acted like it was an injustice when the board he and I worked for would be passive aggressive or downright rude to me. He never said a word when I would vent about my mom’s unsolicited advice or insensitivity. Instead, he would just sit there calmly and nod. I felt jealous that he would feel so protective about this girl he was not attracted to but to whom he would share his emotions and experiences. I put that aside, accepting that we had both lived separate lives in our 4 years apart and I too had had boyfriends. Besides, he hadn’t said they dated, only that she had wanted to. And I had plenty of experience myself of turning down many unwanted suitors.
I didn’t like admitting to myself that I was jealous that she had been granted the privilege of confidant in my absence when I'd never previously been let in. Then again, maybe his definition of confidant was someone with whom he gossiped rather than shared about himself, and his boundary violations did not sit well with me for valid reasons:
1) It was inappropriate to listen to her share private relationship problems with him. As someone of the opposite sex, he was participating in the betrayal of her partner that could lead to an emotional affair.
2) He was sharing her business which wasn't his to share and which certainly wasn’t mine to hear. Whether he was venting over a situation he felt powerless to fix or wishing he could rescue a damsel in distress, neither were within his sphere of responsibilities.
3) Breaking her confidence placed doubt in my trust that he would respect my private information. Now I wondered if he might go running to her about problems we had in our relationship.
4) He had a history of under- or over-labeling relationships. Her perception of their status might not match his. He, like others, create fantasy relationships with people in their heads. I wondered about her version of their story. Maybe it could explain why he ignored my requests for contact info to coordinate things with her.
5) Something felt "off" about his lopsided portrayal, emphasizing all the unflattering things about his best friend. It wasn't that I thought he was doing anything wrong, just that his over-explaining gave me reason to pause. Was he strewing breadcrumbs to throw me off the trail or talk himself out of romantic feelings he had for her? It just seemed a little weird since he did say that she had wanted to date him, and he was a very non-committal kind of man in the past... Things just weren't adding up right.
His tales didn’t get any better as he told me about his other friends. When I asked him to tell me about them, all he could offer were stories about alcohol use and misbehavior. Since when had he become the gossip king? He knew very well how much disrespect I had for the men on my street who gathered in their garage-man-caves and drank beer while talking crap about our neighbors.
I guess I never really thought he was one of them because he just sat there on the sidelines. But I thought about the cyber bullying and passive aggression in schools, and how people just stand by and let it happen, hoping if they stayed in the shadows, they wouldn’t get pulled in as a target. What’s that quote? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
MacGyver had always been good at dodging and looking the other way. It may have helped him stay safe as a teenager when his mom and sister would fight, but it prevented him from ever having healthy friendships. Trust is not built on taking sides (or avoiding sides) but on building bridges. He was no longer passively allowing people to make inaccurate judgements; he was now actively planting seeds of disapproval.
I wondered if this was how he talked about me to others, painting me out to be terrible too. (It was beginning to dawn on me why his family...that he hid me from all those years...didn't like me either.) This was triangulation, a subconscious self-sabotaging attempt at self-protection, creating a buffer between his two worlds. Maybe "evil" was too harsh of a word but the subtlety of his tactics was insidious. He may only passively rant about the injustice with which the boyfriend treated the other girl, but I was certainly not going to sit there and continue listening to him gossip about his friends. If he wouldn't stand up for them, I would.
So I did stand up for them. I confronted the bully hiding behind the innocent Nice Guy act.
“You said you wanted me to share about my world; you wanted me to tell you about my friends. I was trying to connect with you, but when I did, you chastised me,” he said defensively.
“I can see how you would feel punished for sharing,” I admitted. “And maybe talking badly about your friends is the only way you know how to connect. But I don’t like gossip. I would rather you tell me about your experiences with these friends. If you want me to like your friends, tell me good things about them, not all their faults.”
It seemed like he had to really reach to find positive things to say about his friends. The way he talked about his friends reminded me of the way he vented about his best friends' boyfriend's abusive behavior, and then defending him with a sweeping general statement, "but he's really nice when he's sober." (Funny, that's what he would say about his alcoholic family member.) I wished he could see how he was painting them, but instead he counter blamed me for judging them.
It wasn’t until much later that I decided maybe MacGyver couldn’t tell me about his own experiences with his friends because he didn’t actually have any. Considering that he hung back as a bystander rather than a participant, maybe the only stories he had were their stories through which he lived vicariously. It is common to imagine connection just by association, and we call our fantasy connections “friends.” Isn’t that what facebook-friends are?
People who are afraid of intimacy (getting emotionally close to others), have a subconscious behavior pattern of fault finding. In order to keep their distance, they start to focus on all the things they don't like about their partner or all the things that could go wrong. This is not limited to romantic relationships; the self-sabotaging thinking also protects himself from desiring to get close to plutonic friends as well. These fantasy relationships allow him to feel just close enough to satisfy the minimal need for connection, yet keep anyone from getting close enough to know him or have a chance to reject him.
Regardless of the reason, MacGyver was mishandling everyone involved. He had told me that I wouldn’t like his best friend; he had told her the same thing about me. (Again, triangulation...) We had both told him that making that judgement for us wasn’t his call. Despite the fact that he had already poisoned my impression of his new friend group, especially his best friend, I decided that most people were usually better than the way their counterparts described them. At least, that’s what I found about those who spoke poorly of others...
What his narratives about his friends actually did was destroy his own character in my eyes. His unfavorable portrayal of them weaken his credibility of himself being a good friend. In fact, I was mad that he had wronged them by gossiping to me about them. This was not a trait I had known about him before and not one I found flattering.
I loosened my judgement of his friends and agreed to meet them at their favorite dining place. The bar and grill was one of the two bars where all the women worked as bartenders. Most of the significant others were there and they, like my boyfriend, seemed to observe quietly while the women boisterously mingled. Both men and women talked about glory days of getting hung over, pulled over, stoned, or otherwise in some trouble or another. I sat quietly and observed them vaping and drinking like I was watching a high school party through a window, the din muffled by the glass wall.
“I was impressed with how you handled yourself,” MacGyver said afterwards in the truck.
“What were you expecting?” I asked.
“I thought you would be tense and uncomfortable,” he admitted.
“I told you that I changed since you knew me four years ago. I can hold my own. But I’m glad you stayed next to me and didn’t ignore me.”
“So what did you think of them?” He asked me.
“They seemed nice; they are entertaining at least. But I can see why you would be afraid I wouldn’t like them.”
I told him the truth, even if he didn’t like it: I didn’t dislike them; I just wouldn’t choose to hang out with them. By their appearance and behavior, I guessed they were about 25 or 30 while my boyfriend and I were in our mid-40s. I would have chosen an older crowd who discussed things they learned about themselves or life in general, how their perspectives changed or what inspired them to move in a certain direction. I really didn’t want to be surrounded by people who reveled in stories about drinking and getting into trouble.
That night, we proceeded to the next bar where the girls also worked as bartenders. I had met MacGyver originally as my first dance student when I was a beginner dance instructor at a studio in my city. We had a long history of dancing together, including dancing at this dance hall in his town when I came to visit. Despite my conservative upbringing, I had loosened up a bit over the years and had occasionally shared an alcoholic drink with him in our past. In the last month, he seemed to obsess over this drinking issue and I was getting tired of him judging me as judgmental of others' habits. For fun, and a gesture of good will, I asked him to order me a drink that night too.
The dance floor was my comfort zone, no drink needed. However, my boyfriend was only ever relaxed when he drank. But even with the drink and the best dance partner, he acted self-conscious and stiff. Eventually, he loosened up a little. But his friends were all in the smoke-filled room adjacent to the main hall, playing pool. MacGyver and I were the only ones on the dance floor, and eventually he got tired and wanted to go home. We were both the sort to say Irish Goodbyes, but he wanted to make the farewell rounds, and it was odd to be hugged by strangers and praised by his female friends about what a hot ass I had. Maybe I was a prude after all, but I admit I was aghast at the crass way the women talked. So again, maybe he was right, and the sailor mouth I joked about was spot on.
More than that, meeting his new friends showed me that I had judged him wrong about who he was. It explained a lot more about why he kept me away from his real life. I didn’t fit in at all with who he was when he was not with me. Perhaps he was not a participant, and he only observed and stood on the periphery so he could feel like he was part of this group. But it was still a group I myself wouldn’t want to be a part of. As I had said to him earlier, we are the sum of the company we keep.
Who was this man who lived a dual life? He was not the same guy in his city that he was when he would visit me in my city. He had said he didn’t think I would like his friends or that they would like me. He had even admitted that he had been ashamed of himself and was scared I would disapprove of his friends if I met them. So he did purposely keep me from seeing his real world. He was right that his people were not my type. But the bigger issue was that the real version of him wasn’t my type.
And what was so bad about that? If we had decided we weren’t a match, he could just find others who better suited him (which he did when we were broken up for four years). Why did he waste our time in fantasyland, pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and then resenting me for not feeling like he could be himself? Why trick someone into falling in love with a false version of him? He told me I was the girl of his dreams. But loving me sounded more like living a nightmare.
If the man with the double life wanted the version that was a lie, he would first have to let go of the real one and start becoming honest. Only then could he become the kind of man that lived the one of his dreams. But to become the man he wanted to be took courage that most men lacked.
If a woman wanted to live an authentic and connected life, she would first need to stop waiting for others to be who they pretended. Only when she could discern the lie could she let go of false dreams holding her back and be free to move forward without them. But to accept the lie for what it was also took courage most women lacked.
“Tell the truth. But at least don’t lie.” --Jordan Peterson
See the lie. But at least, don’t be blind. –Julie Vogler
Comments