How does love turn to anger?

(more personal than usual for this column)

I can blame it on my evil divorce lawyer, but I was complicit. For 5 months, I played a role — cold and bitter, consciously manipulative — in an effort to get my lovely wife to concede custody of our daughter. Then at the end of one of our endless mediation sessions, she acceded to a separation agreement. I didn’t get custody, but I won on all the monetary issues that (my lawyer’s strategy) I had been using to force her hand on custody.

I remember getting on my bike for the long ride home from the mediation center. “What have I done?” I cried all the way home. I had browbeaten this woman, the mother of my children, my bed partner for 20 years. All I could think on the way home was, “How can I ever make it up to her?”

Happily, we were able to repair our friendship, I was able to restore to her the money I cheated her out of during the negotiations, and we’ve been a model wasband and fife for two decades.

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I have always thought that the best face of love is empathy beyond empathy, putting another’s welfare above one’s own. I want you to thrive. I want your soul to blossom. I want the best of you to grow and find your expanded place in this world.

The worst face of love is jealousy. If I can’t have you for my own, then to hell with you.

In my 20s, I remember expressing an indignant jealousy, spitting in my lover’s face when I learned that she had been with another man. At some point, I resolved that, though I may experience jealousy, I would not make a home for it in my soul. I have sought to let it go; when I catch myself in jealous thoughts, I recognize them for what they are, I cry if I can, scream if I am in an appropriate setting. I don’t deny the feeling, but regard it as a part of my response that is not supporting me, and I want to let go of it.

Three months ago today, I let go of my partner of 15 years, and wished her joy and fulfillment in her new relationship.

The best face of love

After my divorce, the first time I fell passionately in love was 2007. The relationship lasted for an intense and blissful 10 days. Then she abruptly stopped communicating, returning my calls and emails. What was I to do?

What was love to do? I asked myself.

Feeling devastated and broken-hearted, with no story to tell, no understanding of how this could have happened, I reached out to her. I sent packages and missives, poems and songs and gifts.

I aspired to expressions of unselfish love, but this was not what I was doing. Rather, I was keeping the flame alive, hoping and dreaming that one day she would come to her senses and we would live together happily ever after.

I heard she had the flu. I made soup, and left a bottle in her kitchen. This was closer to my aspiration.

Only two years later was I finally able to let go of the fantasy relationship with her. We were then able to be friends, sharing deeply but very occasionally, among long stretches without communication. She has lived in New Zealand for the last 6 years.

The second time was in 2013. This relationship was even less grounded in reality than the first, but it lasted longer because she was an ocean away for 3 months. I counted the days, boarded a red-eye to Toulouse full of hope and expectations, rented a car, wandered through town asking directions in broken French. I arrived at her doorstep and she told me immediately that she had changed her mind and didn’t want to be my lover.

I was devastated, though a part of me was not surprised. I took refuge in being a kind and caring friend. Back in the States, I served on a committee for her non-profit, received her phone calls and listened to her thoughts and concerns, negotiated an agreement for her to purchase the house she was renting. I was transmuting my grief into the satisfaction of service as a loyal and supportive friend.

I can see my “other cheek” in two ways. The worse view is that I am not taking care of myself, acting the role of the martyr from a passive aggressive psychological stance. The better view is that this is the face of unselfish love, the love that I can embody regardless of outside circumstances. I have a deeper need to love than to be loved, and this can never be taken from me.

Never? She rejected the advantageous agreement that I had negotiated on her behalf and took the advice of an officious lawyer, accepting a deal that ultimately cost her hundreds of thousands more.

I am presently repeating the same pattern in a non-relationship with a woman I have fallen in love with just a few weeks ago. Am I deluded? Am I perseverating? I’ll keep it up as long as I feel good in this role.

The worst face of love

Over the years since my divorce, there have been women who fell passionately in love with me, and none of them fell into the role that I have called either passive-aggressive or unselfish.

One of them was my New Zealand friend, during those first, blissful days. I don’t understand her. I don’t understand why she set her sites on me, invited me, hypnotized me, drew me in. Then, just ten days later, she wrote to me that she believed that “being in love” was a psychological disease, and she was working on curing herself with all the psychological techniques she knew. In a mirror image of the strategies I had used to push jealousy out of my thoughts, she had done the same to push romantic feelings out of hers.

More than once, I have had preliminary and casual contact with a woman from a dating website, after which I communicate as gently and caringly as I know how that I don’t want to continue. I am sensitive to what it feels like to be on the other side, and couch my good-bye in appreciations and blessings. But more than once, the response has been bitter and vindictive. This is from women I hardly knew. I want to understand it.

More recently, I have lost a close friend, an important friend. Over several years I’ve known her, I have had hints that her expectations for me were more aligned with expectations of a romantic partner than a friend, though we’ve never had a physical relationship. After my 15-year partner broke up with me in December, I suggested to this woman that maybe we should try out being lovers. Her response felt like a rebuff to me, but in retrospect, I realize that I was completely misreading her. When I told her a month later that I had fallen in love with another woman, she sent me an angry text and said she never wanted to hear from me again. Ouch! For both of us — this was a good friendship, I thought, rooted in diverse shared interests and attitudes, including times when we had each reached out to help the other. Why did it end this way? Is there anything I can do to rehabilitate our friendship?

In 2009, a woman who had been deeply hurt in an abusive marriage was finally ready to begin dating again, and found me on Match.com through a well-thought-out, systematic search. By the time we had our first face-to-face meeting, she was high on love. I was flattered and more than receptive to her sexual advances, but I was not feeling the passion that she was feeling. Within 3 months, she was angry at me, eclipsing her love. The only reason I could see was that I didn’t appreciate her as much as she appreciated me.

Over time, she grew to feel like a part of my family, even a part of myself. But we never outgrew the original dynamic: She was angry, and I was placating her with appreciations and with a devotion and loyalty that were not what she needed — she needed to be in relationship with a man who didn’t make her angry.

We spent 15 years together and apart, apart and together. During one of the periods when we were apart, she called me to talk about a man she was dating. I said, I want you to be happy. I want you to be in a relationship where you can thrive, whether it is with me or another man. She responded, “I don’t want you be magnanimous. I want you to be jealous. I want you to feel bad that I’m dating another man.” I didn’t know where to store this datum, or how to understand it. I still don’t. If you understand, maybe you can help me.

I have more stories, but they all follow the same theme. They are about women who become angry when they are not revered and adored the way that they deserve. I don’t mean to imply that this response is limited to women — my perspective is one-sided because my romantic relationships have been with women.

Why is it

that love can turn so quickly to anger? Why do I see the worst face of love more often than the best face?

Maybe this is something about our culture, or even about human nature. But from my personal vantage, I suspect another source. My father had a disability. My mother was an ambitious woman before feminism gave women voices of their own. My mother was angry at my father all the time, and my father was solicitous and patronizing to my mother, loving her but not respecting her. And she respecting him, but not loving him. Maybe I inherited more of this pattern than I can climb my way out of.

For years, I thought that my mother was an angry person, angry at her own father, who was mean to her, angry at the patriarchy. She was letting her anger out on her husband because he was the safest person to let it out on. Then, after 50 years of marriage, my dad died. I was afraid that without him she would be frustrated and erratic; but the opposite happened. My mother became much less angry. Is there a message there for me, and the effect I have on women with whom I couple? How am I unconsciously selecting who to fall in love with? And what messages am I sending unawarely?

Sociology

We inhabit a culture that is pathologically individualistic, where transactional relationships are the norm and trust is a scarce commodity. Divorce rates are high, and the proportion of young people who are not in partnerships is higher.

Where are our models for what a committed intimate partnership looks like? I want a relationship in which I can learn about myself and grow and change, a partner who will help to wear off my sharp edges and melt my frozen places. I want to offer the same to her.

When we look to the past, marriages were more stable, to be sure, but they were based on security and comfort, rather than mutual growth. And they were dominated by the male partner.

Collectively, we’re working out new model for how to be a couple — equal partners in a rapidly changing world, committed, flexible, always using the relationship as a means to bringing out the best in ourselves and the best in our partner.

It’s difficult, bordering on overwhelming — no wonder we’re angry. But I can think of no worthier or more fulfilling project.