Bad Relationship: Just Say No?
It’s hard to say no to a bad relationship. We’ve all got FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. It’s hard to deal with. If you leave your relationship, you’ll be outside, woman. Alone on Friday night. No one to pick you up if you run out of gas, or to move the refrigerator.
So you stay. But something is not going well. But what is wrong with your life as it is?
Could it be that the guy you’re with is just a problem?
Freya India, in her substack GIRLS, last week said she was tired of women psychoanalyzing their own actions when in fact they just need to get the hell of out their current relationship. In so many words: “Are you anxiously attached, or does your relationship just suck?”
Strong words from a strong woman. The fact is, and India stopped short of saying this, relationships are 10 times more addictive than heroin. Now, I just made that up, but I wasn’t kidding. Not only is it really difficult to give up on a relationship that has some history — even six months seems like a lot when the alternative is solitude — but the seeking of relationships in the single community can begin, at times, to look like addicts cruising trying to make a score at 1 a.m. They’re in a bad neighborhood, they know it, but this is an emergency.
Consider Foreigner’s 80’s hit “Urgent.” “Your desire is insane … you can’t stop until you do it again.”
I Had Made a Bad Decision Somewhere Along the Line
Long ago I had decided, somewhere along the line, that I was going to go the distance in a flawed relationship. It was a fraught decision. Every fight, every financial disaster, and every time I asked for my reasonable wants to be fulfilled and had to mobilize my arguments as if it were Iwo Jima and not something simple like, buying a horse or a newer car.
In the spring of 2021, I watched a Netflix series that was as violent as it was poignant: White Lines is about Zoe (Laura Haddock) a woman who wants to discover what happened over twenty years before, when her brother, a rising DJ, was murdered on the Spanish island of Ibiza.
In the process, she meets Boxer, played by Nuno Lopes, who goes through the movie not unlike the proverbial ninja warrior: clubbing, knifing, choking, hitting, driving like a madman, and generally enforcing at the behest of the local-magnate casino owner, Andreu Calafat, for whom he’s worked since he was a young man. When he’s not in the sack with Zoe, with whom he falls (for him disastrously) in love.
Until the Crisis, Boxer Always Said Yes
“The problem with me,” Boxer says to her at one point, “Is that I always say “yes.” To whatever comes up.”
It was one of those moments in your life when something someone says just echoes and echoes. I used to think it was good to always say yes. But of late, I had begun to wonder.
Boxer, in other words, didn’t know how to “just say no.” No matter that he practiced standing on his head for extended periods and was a thug’s thug. Boxer had no backbone.
Ah, I thought to myself at the time. You and me both.Different lives, of course. Boxer is a bouncer and who works in a discotheque, and in his spare time he drowns drug dealers to protect Zoe from her lack of understanding that she should not steal ten pounds of cocaine. I’m just a soft-hearted woman who was, back in 2021, was having trouble getting a divorce. Still, the problem was the same. I had long been prone to say “Yes” to things that I ought to know weren’t a very good idea. And if you’re still reading, I bet you are too.
Boxer Sidebar: For Those of Us Who Admire …
Boxer (full charter name Duarte “Boxer” Silva) is played by Nuno Lopes, a Portuguese actor born in 1978 in in Lisbon, Portugal, (a city some in the U.S. haven’t even heard of). On the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, you can imagine Portugal as either the most remote part of western Europe, or the closest, longitudinally speaking, to the Americas. It goes without saying that such a provenance unusual for an international acting career. Lopes attended high school at the Lisbon Theater and Film School, also studying at the École des Maîtres in France, about which information in English is limited. The school seems to have been abolished by the French government in 2013 in a dispute over pedagogy. Lopes also spent time after his formal education independently studying fencing, dance, singing and music.
Until White Lines, Lopes was most widely known for his role as “Jorge” in the drama Saint George, selected as the Portuguese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film in the 2016 Academy awards. Lopes has been the winner of numerous Golden Globes (Portugal) for Best Actor, beginning in 2012.
Lopes is a famous DJ in Portugal. Finding no personal information on Wikipedia or anywhere on the English web, I went to searching the Spanish web and found, on Celebrite age wiki, some scant details about his personal life. Romantically linked with Mikaela Lupu (born 1995) in 2018. It is possible they were married but I could find no confirmation of this except one very sketchy celebrity page which seemed to be mostly culled from IMDB. Clearly, for an actor, Lopes is a very private person. Lopes’s personal life is almost “no disponibile,” not available, although there is a note on Celebrite that he has one child.
Back to My Own Just Say No
So I declared 2021 the “Year of Just Say No.” No, first of all, to Leo, when he asked me and then tried to force me to refrain from filing for divorce. No to Bob, my son in law, when he asked whether there might be a possibility of reconciliation.
“Well, maybe” the weaker side of me might have been prone to say. “If Leo had a terminal disease. And two weeks to live.”
I needed to just say no to myself when I began to think it could possibly “work out.” Apparently, it has been working out for Leo, but the goal here was to start making life work for me.
It wasn’t hard to just say no when Leo thought he’d get another job in Texas and we’d move back there.
“Oh, no no no no.”
Don’t Keep Falling for the Same Lines
When Leo was a young man, I remember he was cute. But so are little baby alligators. And once those alligators grow to full size, it’s too late to flush them down the toilet. You’ve got to go out to the backyard and lasso yourself a full grown alligator. Which sounds pretty dangerous. Analogous somewhat to getting away from Leo.
In my memory, it’s 2021 again. “Susan please put off filing for divorce.”
No.
“Susan, can I just move back into the bedroom.”
No.
“Susan, give me one more chance.”
No.
“I’ll change, really this time.”
(No he won’t. We’re been here before. I used to say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. What if someone fools you hundreds of times?)
No. And that’s when the massive screaming fit of abuse would happen. Which reminded me of how we got to this point in the first place.
That’s when you sit back and think, “Man, what is wrong with me? What makes me always say Yes?”
Even Boxer Ultimately Ran Out of Patience
But Boxer changed. He called up his boss, Andreu Calafat, and said “Look, I can’t perform murders for you anymore. My conscience has grown this last month. I’m done.”
At the end of the show, Boxer is driving away happy, as happy as I dream of being one day. Today the year of just say no is past me, and yes, things are better.
Just Say No
Saying yes to everything seems like a good idea when you’re young and time spins out infinite before you, and you think there’s room for everything, time for making up for all the work you didn’t do yet, time for people to change and become who they should have been all along, time to catch up with deferred home maintenance after going to Mexico, California, Louisiana, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Europe.
No to all that travel too. I’ve got to get ready for a new chapter. That chapter that began with the Year of No.
Background:
“Treat your toxic relationship like you were an addict and it was drugs or alcohol.” From Recovery Centers of America.
Pysche Central: “Why saying no in your relationships is a good thing.”
No is hard. Yes always seems easy, in the moment.