Have you ever had a relationship that started out really, really bad but ended up good? Or has this been the case for anyone else you’re close enough to know that your understanding of it is accurate? What happened?
There is SO much of this in pop culture, and obviously what prompts me to ask is my current situation, so I’m just wondering if this is something that ever actually happens. It drives me crazy to hear it over and over again because my gut feeling is that it is extremely rare IRL, and then I got this crazy dude trying to convince me otherwise (and he is *so *convincing).
I’ve told him I believe people can change and mature and all that (we met at 21/25; now we’re 30/35), but I think they usually find functional relationships with other people, not drastically change the patterns of their established dysfunctional relationship. Am I wrong? I want to be wrong, but I just don’t think I am.
The closest I can think of would be people who had a horrible relationship and got divorced, and then each person matured and changed individually, and they discovered they were now better suited for each other and got back together.
I’ve also known some people who went to couples’ counseling to work out specific issues, or for general stuff like learning how to communicate better, but 1) I wouldn’t say their relationships were all that dysfunctional to begin with, 2) I think there’s a big difference between actively working to make a change and just staying together and expecting things will get better, and 3) it didn’t always work.
what makes you think it’s ever going to change if it’s happened so many times already?
Do not listen to relationship advice from movie makers. It is their job to show success stories born from impossible odds to distract us from the depressing drudgeries of our everday lives. If things worked out that way in real life, why would anybody need to watch those movies?
I’ve had workplace relationships that started off badly and turned out pretty well. But a personal, romantic relationship that played out that way? Never heard of it.
No, not the Saudi Arabian! The Saudi Arabian and I would have even more of a culture clash than this fellow American and me, which is saying a lot.
We just can’t get along. I’m not sure how it would go if we met now, but 9 years ago he was horrible, and now we have so much baggage from our past. I think it can’t be overcome and he thinks it can.
I’ve seen one case like this. It was unusual. The couple were messing up their lives with drugs and alcohol. Then she was in a car accident. This caused both of them to straighten out, and they’ve lived happily ever after. That’s not the usual circumstances of relationships.
That’s all you need to know, right there. It can only be overcome if you’re both willing to put work into it. You’re not, and the fact that he’s basically dismissing your feelings on the matter says to me that he’s not either. Sorry.
I am willing to if I think there’s any realistic chance of it working. Just doesn’t seem likely to me. But I’m not so good at relationships, so what do I know.
Oh, I get that. I didn’t mean to imply that you should be willing. If you don’t feel it’s going to work, then you’re absolutely right; there’s no sense in working on it.
Out of curiosity, what are his thoughts on the matter? Does he agree that you guys don’t get along? If so, does he think he plays a role in that, or does he feel it’s up to you to get over the past? Does he have any ideas about how to make things better, or does he basically say, “Don’t worry, eventually this will all work out.”?
OMG yes, it’s so obvious that we don’t get along that nobody could doubt that. He knows he plays a role in it but he thinks my role in it is bigger than I think it is, because I’m “bratty” and act like a Seattle white girl, etc. And those are triggers for him to viciously scream at me. He admits he shouldn’t do that, but says it would be easier for him not to if I didn’t act so bratty, blah blah blah.
He has tons of ideas for how to make it better. We talk for hours and hours and hours about it. I don’t know, he gets me thinking maybe I do have more of a role in it than I realize. I do definitely have issues with relationships. He wants to have screaming matches and then just get over it and all is well, but I don’t scream back (which makes me “cold”) and I don’t just immediately get over him being mean. Some couples do fight like that just to blow off steam or something I guess, and then get over it, but that’s not me and never will be.
So he says I need to stop being bratty and act more like Claire Huxtable and he needs to stop being mean and act more like Cliff and then all will be well. He is dead serious about the Huxtable stuff too.
I think people who are bad for each other don’t tend to start being good for each other. By “bad for each other” I mean that they bring out worse characteristics in the other than the average person does.
My sense of a good relationship is when people bring out the good in one another, that they can say, “I like myself when I’m with you.” A bad relationship is the opposite, where people are worse around the partner, worse acting or worse feeling, than they are by themselves.
Not to derail the thread but “bratty”? Is he somehow in a parental role here?
As for a “Seattle white girl” - I assume you are a “white girl”, are you in fact from Seattle or just a wannbe poser? I can see how that could drive a man nuts. “You’re from Laramie, girl, DEAL with it already!” And if you are from Seattle, please fill me in on what kind of a stereotype there is for a girl (particularly the white ones) from Seattle. I really don’t know. (Apparently they’re, or you’re, prone to brattiness?)
Back to the OP - is this about “When Harry Met Sally” kind of story arcs, where boy meets girl, girl hates boy in no small part due to boy’s active efforts thereby, but Fate and Kismet have them spiraling towards each other like marbles whirling in a concave bowl? 'Cause I totally know a couple like that.
I suppose I should actually tell their story, since it’s bound to be asked for in more detail.
In college, my girlfriend (now wife) was very close with a girl from Russia who had moved to the US when she was about 16. Together they were at the top of their classes in mathematics at a “world class university” (in fact, both of them are now PhDs and tenured research mathematicians). This friend - let’s label her “F” - was a secular/atheist Russian Jew, whose grandparents were originally from Romania - they moved east to flee pogroms, then further east to escape the war, then got “encouraged” to relocated to Siberia in her parents’ generation before arriving in Brooklyn in the mid-1980s during the era of Soviet Perestroika.
In their Sophomore year, a young man “M” arrived at the university from Israel. He was an earlocks-sporting and yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew who kept strictly kosher. He was also a brilliant and advanced mathematics student. When he walked into the first session of an acclerated “special studies” seminar that year with about 6 students in it, he saw these two (my wife and F) and exclaimed, “This is an advanced seminar? How advanced can it be, there are women in it!”
Then it turns out that he recognized F. They had met before. Oh yes. They had grown up together as children in Siberia, before his family Perestroika’ed on out to Israel when he was 12 or 13 while “getting religion” while hers landed in Brighton Beach a few years later. And she remembered him as an “obnoxious and sexist jerk” even back then.
He purported to be enamored of her, and pursued her with lines like “You should marry me. You’re about as good as a woman can get at math, and I find that attractive.” About once a week she’d spend some time regaling my GF and me with some tale of a laughably terribly sexist gaffe he’d committed. Occasionally he even offered her gifts, which she might literally throw back in his face (like the small cake celebrating her getting the “highest score for a girl” on a test or something - second to him!).
He wasn’t an idiot, obviously. He was yanking her chain. And no, she didn’t find it endearing; she had one or two serious boyfriends while this was going on.
After college, they all three (my wife, F and M) went on to doctoral and post-doctoral programs at different schools. (I was more than glad to be done with school with a bachelor’s and went into the Real World, if programming computers counts as being in the Real World anyway.) We lost touch with F at the post-doctoral stage, about 5 years after college. About 7 years after college, my wife and I got married.
You know where this is going. About ten years after graduation, we got an invitation to their wedding. They’d bumped into each other yet again, in post-doctoral stints at the same university, and now M was more mature/serious in his pursuit of F.
Sigh. He does kind of try that, yes. Lately he’s referred to himself as my “daddy” a couple times (which I told him was creepy, and he laughed and agreed). Now I’m just sharing all my shameful secrets, aren’t I? I don’t let that fly though.
I am indeed a Seattle white girl. Let’s see, we’re bratty, yes, and passive-aggressive, fake-polite, cold, spoiled, neurotic… But yet he’s loved/been obsessed with me for a decade. Because I’m different except not except am.
Liz Lemon from 30 Rock reminds him a whole bunch of me. And he loves that but just wants me to fight my evil cracker tendencies.
It’s similar to that, but I haven’t seen that movie so I don’t know if it’s the woman inspiring the man to change. Listen to (or read the lyrics if you must) the songs ‘Never Call U Bitch Again’ by 2pac (who he thinks he’s like, so picture that: Liz Lemon and 2pac, and we even look a bit like them except different ages) or 'Scent of a Woman" by Xzibit. Those are just the first two that popped into my mind but there are SO MANY songs like that. And that’s what he expects from me. Which I’m pretty sure is bullshit.
But obviously there’s a lot of good too or this wouldn’t be happening.
Is there, or are you both just enjoying the drama and the fights and the heightened emotional state and mistake it for love or passion? I think a lot of people fall into a trap of thinking that because someone makes you feel something passionately, what you’re feeling has to be love. Kind of an “Oh, he makes me feel so alive!” idea. But if most of the feelings being engendered are negative ones, it’s more of an addiction than a good basis for a relationship.
Generally, I think people need to change before they get involved in a relationship, rather than change to fit what the other person wants to make of them.
No doubt there is some truth to that, although I’m not usually a drama queen myself (as I said, he screams at me and I shut down, I don’t scream back). He’ll always be drama, but I’m okay with that as long as he’s not mean to me. I would still feel just as strongly about him if he stopped attacking me. If he stopped being so intense, then probably not, because he’d be a totally different person.
That’s just what I was just saying to him a few days ago. Of course he had convincing reasons why that is not the case for us.
But yeah, in general I agree. If I met someone like him now, I wouldn’t give him the time of day. I don’t get involved with new drama queen men anymore and I haven’t for years. But he’s grandfathered in, thanks to my stupid 21-year-old self.