sometimes, blind reliance on "process" is the wrong answer
matthew has a philosophy that i've always thought seemed prudent: "It's not a question of whether or not you can trust people; it's a question of what you trust them to do." sometimes, you can trust people implicitly, even if it's only trusting them to be true to their own natures in the face of repeated contentions that their natural behaviours are hurtful to you.
once again, my issues with matthew's time management abilities raised their ugly head last night and today. an explicit expectation that he shaped with me himself failed to play through as expected. the usual confrontation occurred, with a notably different outcome, finally.
i have been trying to force a change in matthew, one intended to assuage my needs rather than his, one that addressed my wants and concerns while totally attempting to obliterate whatever underlying need was driving his behaviour in the first place. his frequent tendency to fail to communicate changes in plans, even small ones, that impacted my explicitly shaped expectations (generally around issues of scheduling and timing) has been a bone of contention between us for the duration of the relationship, and issue for him long before i came along, and something his friends warned me about in no uncertain terms. it has, in time, become a primary touchstone of our own internal power struggle: he wanted (wants) the freedom to operate without having to pay attention to a set schedule, to not have to curtail his activities when he's having fun or trying to solve a problem for someone. i, on the other hand, wanted (want) to be able to trust his word when he sets and explicit expectation regarding scheduling with me.
even without adding the depth of trust issues that go with introducing this kind of issue in a poly environment, this was an issue between us on the work and general social fronts for a long time. over time, we've introduced and tweaked all kinds of communications processes designed specifically to increase the accuracy of time estimation, increase the form of initial communication of schedules, increase of refine the process by which changes in expectations and plans would be communicated. it was all an effort to teach an old dog a new trick, only to result more often than not in my being frustrated, hurt, disappointed, or outright angry when an explicitly communicated plan failed to execute as i had been lead to expect. matthew has one golden rule for our dating other people, and that is, "No surprises." unfortunately, it has become something of a double-standard in which it was a bad idea for me to surprise him, but absolutely okay for him to surprise me (differences in the scope and impact of those surprises not withstanding; i made a couple of huge errors, he's made a significant number of smaller ones. as i said in a previous post, the risk of losing the finger is as great with two large knife cuts as it is with dozens of smaller cuts).
last night after the most recent confrontation on the topic, i realized a number of things:
matthew isn't going to change. if three and a half years of trying to communicate my need hasn't had any effect, nothing will, unless and until he chooses to change for his own sake. and since i have seen no sign of that happening, i must conclude, however unwillingly or unhappily, that it's not going to change, period. i instead have to change *me* and my expectations. matthew simply will never be someone i can trust to adhere to any schedule set by me, set by anyone else, or even set by himself. he will choose, in the moment, to follow whatever internal schedule his needs-of-the-moment tell him is appropriate for him to follow.
and i have to accept that odds are good that schedule-of-the-moment will NOT be one that takes my needs into account, or makes them a high priority to manage first. in short, i'll get whatever information he chooses to communicate on whatever schedule he chooses to operate on, and there's nothing i can do about that. i'll have no way o knowing whether he's even taken my needs into consideration, because i can't trust him to communicate with me in a timely fashion either way.
so now i have to let go of my expectations there. matthew is not someone i can depend on for maintaining a schedule, even if he himself is the one to define it. and let me tell you, as someone who is facing the necessity of depending on him in a one-car, differing-schedules kind of life for the next few years, that's not an easy admission to accept.
having reached this internal verdict last night, it made no sense to continue to bludgeon him with my anger and disappointment. i was cool with feeling it, but accepting that he's not going to change, is apparently incapable of making that change, was like being angry at the dog for shedding fur like a dog. it's not a situation that's ever going to change, it simply is a condition of the nature of the beast. that made it easier to separate "feeling angry" from wielding that anger like a blunt instrument in an effort to make matthew hurt as much as i did. one good strike against the power struggle. sometimes, one partner has to accept that there are things in the other partner that cannot be forced to change, and will not likely change on their own, either. it's okay to not like those aspects of the partner; it's not okay to assume that we have the right to continue trying to force change o occur unnaturally.
the question becomes, is this a deal-breaker kind of issue in the relationship?
we communicate so well on other levels that it's damned near impossible to understand why we fail so consistently in this one area. matthew himself doesn't know why he is the way he is on the issue of schedules. but consistent (which is different, please note, from constant) failure in one area in turns makes our successes in other areas suspect: "I don't know why things work so well in Area A, but fail so spectacularly in Area B; if the process is the same, why does one work but not the other?" when matthew and i finally sat down to talk tonight, i had already come to the conclusion that i was giving up the fight. i was done, tired of beating my head against the brick wall of his unchanging behaviours. if NOT communicating changes in expectations and plans was going to be his unchanging pattern of behaviour, be it; i was done confronting him about it.
but if that was the model he was choosing to follow, then it is going to become the model we *both* follow, because double-standards *ARE* a relationship deal-breaker for me. communicating schedules and changes to schedule-related expectations is about to become a far more fluid thing for us. i don't like it, in fact i hate it quite a bit, but he has consistently shown through his own actions that he won't change, and i'm out of options. as far as i'm concerned, he's won; i'll stop confronting him about my problems with his scheduling behaviours, and he can do whatever the hell he likes in terms of communicating his schedule or changes to it, to me, safe i the knowledge that i'll stop fighting with him about it. trying to get him to work my way has netted me nothing but anger and disappointment and frustration, so now we'll try it his way. he says it doesn't feel like a win; he say he doesn't like to feel like he's failed, but it's hard to see how being validated in your behavioural patterns and getting to get your own way in the end can be anything *but* a win. yes, there's a loss of respect, but the easing of the regular point of confrontation should more than make up for it.
maybe it will make sense in time, when i stop being more than a little bitter about feeling like *i* have to be the one to change, again, while he gets what he wanted all along. (that's a self-indulgent sense of wallowing in loss there; the emotional content is real, but the self-centredness is just that. take it with as large a grain of salt as needed.) right now, we're both seeming okay with the potential risks the gap in communications will bring; the big test will be in seeing how well i can unhook my historical expectations for accurate and *dependable* information from the communications that i *will* get from him, going forward from here. it's important to me to try and accept the new paradigm, because my only other avenue of recourse is to play the emotional blackmail game of, "If you loved me enough, you'd change for me", and that's not an acceptable answer. it's a game that has no winners, because it's compromise, not collaborative solution (not that our current situation seems any more collaborative, but at least it's not subversively manipulative ether). if matthew will not choose change because he values the change for itself, and or himself, then forcing him to make the change for my sake is simply asking for an undercurrent to simmering resentment to develop over time as he tries to fight down whatever internal needs are driving his current patterned behaviours without addressing them somehow to get them met. that's just asking for trouble all around. sometimes, one has to yield ground to gain ground. maybe choosing not to continue to fight this fight with him will give me back that repeatedly-lost energy to apply somewhere else, in a more productive venture.
i can see i'm going to spend a lot of evenings taking the two hour bus ride from night class (ending at 10, home for midnight) or work closing the store at the mall (closing at 9:30, likely still not getting home till midnight), simply because sucking up the two+ hours on the bus hurts less in many respects than the risk of waiting for him to remember to come and get me on time.
once again, my issues with matthew's time management abilities raised their ugly head last night and today. an explicit expectation that he shaped with me himself failed to play through as expected. the usual confrontation occurred, with a notably different outcome, finally.
i have been trying to force a change in matthew, one intended to assuage my needs rather than his, one that addressed my wants and concerns while totally attempting to obliterate whatever underlying need was driving his behaviour in the first place. his frequent tendency to fail to communicate changes in plans, even small ones, that impacted my explicitly shaped expectations (generally around issues of scheduling and timing) has been a bone of contention between us for the duration of the relationship, and issue for him long before i came along, and something his friends warned me about in no uncertain terms. it has, in time, become a primary touchstone of our own internal power struggle: he wanted (wants) the freedom to operate without having to pay attention to a set schedule, to not have to curtail his activities when he's having fun or trying to solve a problem for someone. i, on the other hand, wanted (want) to be able to trust his word when he sets and explicit expectation regarding scheduling with me.
even without adding the depth of trust issues that go with introducing this kind of issue in a poly environment, this was an issue between us on the work and general social fronts for a long time. over time, we've introduced and tweaked all kinds of communications processes designed specifically to increase the accuracy of time estimation, increase the form of initial communication of schedules, increase of refine the process by which changes in expectations and plans would be communicated. it was all an effort to teach an old dog a new trick, only to result more often than not in my being frustrated, hurt, disappointed, or outright angry when an explicitly communicated plan failed to execute as i had been lead to expect. matthew has one golden rule for our dating other people, and that is, "No surprises." unfortunately, it has become something of a double-standard in which it was a bad idea for me to surprise him, but absolutely okay for him to surprise me (differences in the scope and impact of those surprises not withstanding; i made a couple of huge errors, he's made a significant number of smaller ones. as i said in a previous post, the risk of losing the finger is as great with two large knife cuts as it is with dozens of smaller cuts).
last night after the most recent confrontation on the topic, i realized a number of things:
- if matthew had wanted things to be different, he would have chosen and acted differently.
- the fact that he *consistently* chose not to communicate changes to me as promised in similar, consecutive circumstances, pointed to the likelihood that he valued the patterned behaviour above and beyond whatever value he assigned to my repeated statement of need for more consideration and self-adherence to his explicitly-defined schedules.
- this wasn't a behaviour that was directed personally at me; this was a pattern of behaviour that pre-dated me by a very long time, and therefore seemed very unlikely to change no matter how many times i tried to push the rope uphill. (see previous note, re: if matthew wanted things to be different, he would behave differently).
- sometimes, you really can't be angry at the dog for being a dog, and trying to forgive the dog for being a dog (when it really can't be anything else) is a pointless exercise.
matthew isn't going to change. if three and a half years of trying to communicate my need hasn't had any effect, nothing will, unless and until he chooses to change for his own sake. and since i have seen no sign of that happening, i must conclude, however unwillingly or unhappily, that it's not going to change, period. i instead have to change *me* and my expectations. matthew simply will never be someone i can trust to adhere to any schedule set by me, set by anyone else, or even set by himself. he will choose, in the moment, to follow whatever internal schedule his needs-of-the-moment tell him is appropriate for him to follow.
and i have to accept that odds are good that schedule-of-the-moment will NOT be one that takes my needs into account, or makes them a high priority to manage first. in short, i'll get whatever information he chooses to communicate on whatever schedule he chooses to operate on, and there's nothing i can do about that. i'll have no way o knowing whether he's even taken my needs into consideration, because i can't trust him to communicate with me in a timely fashion either way.
so now i have to let go of my expectations there. matthew is not someone i can depend on for maintaining a schedule, even if he himself is the one to define it. and let me tell you, as someone who is facing the necessity of depending on him in a one-car, differing-schedules kind of life for the next few years, that's not an easy admission to accept.
having reached this internal verdict last night, it made no sense to continue to bludgeon him with my anger and disappointment. i was cool with feeling it, but accepting that he's not going to change, is apparently incapable of making that change, was like being angry at the dog for shedding fur like a dog. it's not a situation that's ever going to change, it simply is a condition of the nature of the beast. that made it easier to separate "feeling angry" from wielding that anger like a blunt instrument in an effort to make matthew hurt as much as i did. one good strike against the power struggle. sometimes, one partner has to accept that there are things in the other partner that cannot be forced to change, and will not likely change on their own, either. it's okay to not like those aspects of the partner; it's not okay to assume that we have the right to continue trying to force change o occur unnaturally.
the question becomes, is this a deal-breaker kind of issue in the relationship?
we communicate so well on other levels that it's damned near impossible to understand why we fail so consistently in this one area. matthew himself doesn't know why he is the way he is on the issue of schedules. but consistent (which is different, please note, from constant) failure in one area in turns makes our successes in other areas suspect: "I don't know why things work so well in Area A, but fail so spectacularly in Area B; if the process is the same, why does one work but not the other?" when matthew and i finally sat down to talk tonight, i had already come to the conclusion that i was giving up the fight. i was done, tired of beating my head against the brick wall of his unchanging behaviours. if NOT communicating changes in expectations and plans was going to be his unchanging pattern of behaviour, be it; i was done confronting him about it.
but if that was the model he was choosing to follow, then it is going to become the model we *both* follow, because double-standards *ARE* a relationship deal-breaker for me. communicating schedules and changes to schedule-related expectations is about to become a far more fluid thing for us. i don't like it, in fact i hate it quite a bit, but he has consistently shown through his own actions that he won't change, and i'm out of options. as far as i'm concerned, he's won; i'll stop confronting him about my problems with his scheduling behaviours, and he can do whatever the hell he likes in terms of communicating his schedule or changes to it, to me, safe i the knowledge that i'll stop fighting with him about it. trying to get him to work my way has netted me nothing but anger and disappointment and frustration, so now we'll try it his way. he says it doesn't feel like a win; he say he doesn't like to feel like he's failed, but it's hard to see how being validated in your behavioural patterns and getting to get your own way in the end can be anything *but* a win. yes, there's a loss of respect, but the easing of the regular point of confrontation should more than make up for it.
maybe it will make sense in time, when i stop being more than a little bitter about feeling like *i* have to be the one to change, again, while he gets what he wanted all along. (that's a self-indulgent sense of wallowing in loss there; the emotional content is real, but the self-centredness is just that. take it with as large a grain of salt as needed.) right now, we're both seeming okay with the potential risks the gap in communications will bring; the big test will be in seeing how well i can unhook my historical expectations for accurate and *dependable* information from the communications that i *will* get from him, going forward from here. it's important to me to try and accept the new paradigm, because my only other avenue of recourse is to play the emotional blackmail game of, "If you loved me enough, you'd change for me", and that's not an acceptable answer. it's a game that has no winners, because it's compromise, not collaborative solution (not that our current situation seems any more collaborative, but at least it's not subversively manipulative ether). if matthew will not choose change because he values the change for itself, and or himself, then forcing him to make the change for my sake is simply asking for an undercurrent to simmering resentment to develop over time as he tries to fight down whatever internal needs are driving his current patterned behaviours without addressing them somehow to get them met. that's just asking for trouble all around. sometimes, one has to yield ground to gain ground. maybe choosing not to continue to fight this fight with him will give me back that repeatedly-lost energy to apply somewhere else, in a more productive venture.
i can see i'm going to spend a lot of evenings taking the two hour bus ride from night class (ending at 10, home for midnight) or work closing the store at the mall (closing at 9:30, likely still not getting home till midnight), simply because sucking up the two+ hours on the bus hurts less in many respects than the risk of waiting for him to remember to come and get me on time.