How much information do we owe our families about our lives? I don’t have any deep thoughts about this at the moment, only a bunch of unanswered questions. There were times during my sisters’ recent breakup sagas when I hesitated to offer pieces of advice, or carefully reworded sentiments I would’ve rather shared more freely, because I didn’t want to come right out and tell Youngest Sister that I understood some of her problems better than she could guess. Doing so would’ve meant revealing things about my own marriage that I didn’t want to discuss.
Throughout Tom’s premature midlife crisis, which again consumed more of my time today than it deserved, I’ve felt like telling her ex things that would’ve required candor about some of my former partner’s issues. If I knew that whatever I said would never make its way back to my sisters, I might’ve felt more comfortable. But she’s close with Youngest Sister, and maybe one day she’ll be close with Tom again, too, and for various deeply personal reasons I don’t want to risk putting my ex back on their radar.
I’ve known T.E., as we’ll call Tom’s Ex, for over a decade now; we met just a few weeks after my ex left. Our relationship has never been as effortless as T.E.’s friendship with Youngest Sister, and some of it was due to personality differences (I suspect she’s convinced I’m a robot, while I was sometimes alarmed by her whimsy). But mostly it was because I didn’t like who Tom was with her.
As you may have gleaned from previous Tom-centric posts, and from cryptic comments about the reasons for their breakup, Tom has a monstrous sense of entitlement. She’s always been comfortable helping herself to what’s not hers. It was something that could’ve gone either way when she was younger, and if she’d outgrown it everyone would laugh about it today. Instead she found an enabling partner who unfailingly prioritized Tom’s wants above her own needs.
At first, T.E. was a trophy, prized by Tom for her looks. It was the second time in a row Tom seemed more concerned about appearances, and whether others would envy her, than she was about the relationship itself. There’s more I could say about her shallowness, and the problems it eventually caused with T.E., but I’m not sure this is the time or place for that. What’s important is that over time, Tom picked at T.E.’s self-confidence until little of it remained — and then chided her for having a low self-image.
That’s a ‘been there, done that, bought the postcard’ thing for me, and I wish I were less cowardly and could be brutally honest with T.E. about it. This afternoon, she told me that she went on a dating app for validation after realizing how warped her self-esteem had become. She didn’t intend to date, she just needed to know she wasn’t the worthless ogre Tom seemed to think she was. My heart ached for T.E. in ways she would’ve found quite surprising, not just because she deserved so much better but because my ex had also taken a machete to my self-esteem on her way out the door. I knew exactly what she was going through.
I, too, once conducted an experiment to see if I was really as emotionally and physically repulsive as my former partner seemed to think. Like T.E. and countless others in similar circumstances, I quickly realized things weren’t that dire. My hope remains that she refuses to reconcile with Tom, who I expect will pull out all the stops to get her back once she realizes what she’s thrown away. Tom’s only hope of personal growth at this point, as she approaches her mid-thirties, is to finally learn painful lessons about boundaries, limits, and consequences, and to experience shame and guilt without anyone taking pity on her and bailing her out.
The next time someone shares some of their vulnerabilities with me as matter-of-factly as Tom’s ex did earlier, I hope that I can overcome my resistance to exposing vulnerabilities of my own in return. If I hadn’t kept so much from my family to start with, maybe my sisters would’ve learned a thing or two from my mistakes.