Q: I’m 25 and with a man who has promised to get a divorce for three years, but keeps saying he doesn’t want his children put through a trauma. He thinks I should “compromise” and just let things be as they are. Why doesn’t this FEEL like a “compromise”?
A: Because it’s not a compromise. Not really. It’s a decision he’s made that you’re being forced to agree to.
I have a lot to say on this, so bear with me.
Webster’s defines compromise as “a settlement by consent reached by mutual concessions.” When we’re talking about who cleans the kitchen or feeds the baby or walks the dog, we figure we’ll haggle till fair deal is struck. But being with a man who loves you but is still married to someone else and plans to be for some time is no doubt a deal you never dreamt you’d make, and staying with him a grueling compromise that takes you right to the edge of your desire to continue being in the relationship. Staying may be a “yes” to a deal, but it isn’t a deal you really are consenting to. Like other deals you wouldn’t agree to, you feel had. I know a woman who swore: “I’d walk out if he had an affair.” And now finds herself crazy in love with a “wonderful guy” who just happens to be unfaithful to her. And she’s not walking out the door.
These are the deals we make that are hard to take. The man with a violent temper. The woman who drinks too much. The man who swears he’ll stop gambling.
And there you are: The relationship you thought you were in is not the one you’re in. The deal you thought you made–even agreed to on paper–bears no resermblance to the deal you’re in. What you do now has nothing to do with a “compromise,” since “settlement by consent” is not applicable, and “mutual concessions” irrelevant. You have to call upon never-before powers in yourself–alone–to decide what you’ll do for love. You’re finding your own bottom line.
Do you risk everything for love? Or walk?
Let me give you two killer examples of women who had to make such a choice.
Ellen was 39 and divorced when she met Todd, fifteen years her senior, also divorced. He had four grown children. She, never married, had none. They fell in love, and everything was heavenly, except Ellen wanted to have a child. She hadn’t said so in advance because she felt a little silly. “You can’t be almost forty and start talking babies to a guy who’s about to become a grandfather twice over without knowing you’re in a weak position,” she says. But when they decided that their next step was marriage, she asked whether he would be willing to try to have, or to adopt, a child.
“Todd nearly fainted,” she says. “Really, he was horrified. No way did he want another kid, and I completely understood his reasoning.” Her “compromise” in this situation? There wasn’t one, really–not in the true sense of the word. She literally had to choose between two dreams that were mutually exclusive: The love of her life, or the possibility of becoming a mother. Ellen chose Todd.
Now, some of her friends say she made the only wise decision; that she chose something real and present and available (that would be Todd) over a mere and possibly risky fantasy. Others believe she sold out. That she could have found a man later. That she should have followed her maternal pull, and to hell with his grandparenthood. “Everyone has a nice answer to how I blew it or didn’t blow it,” Ellen says. “But I know I did the right thing. And still there’s this part of me that whispers, ‘You should have just gone and done it. You caved.'”
What’s a little harder to live with than the mere sacrifice, she says, “is that sense I have that we didn’t make the decision together; that I was sort of left alone with my conflicting desires”–that she was denied the consensual process of compromise.
Maria and Thomas started going together in college. Soon after they both graduated, they moved from California to Paris, where Thomas landed a coveted position in government; Maria an equally great job in photojournalism. Thomas is Parisian, all his friends are Parisian, and for a number of complicated reasons he wants to stay in Europe and not move to the States. Ever. Maria, a California girl whom he adores and wants to marry, is growing weary of being without her friends and family and has begun to ask, “What about me? What about my love of America? I want to live there again, and raise my kids around the people who love me.” Thomas promises her a life as wonderful as he can make it–but in Europe, not back here. “I’m scared,” said Maria. “We have a great relationship, and he’s negotiable on absolutely every other issue. So what do I do? Keep watching his jaw tighten as I try to negotiate for just a year or two in America? Do I leave him? Pray he changes his mind and follows me? Or do I stay?”
Thomas’s refusal to compromise may nevertheless be the relationship deal-breaker here. Maria (like Ellen) feels shut out of the negotiating process. She wants to bargain, even fight; she wants to feel the process of arriving at a satisfying deal. “There’s something so rigid and controlling in his refusal to budge that I’m beginning to hate him for it,” she admits. “I find myself searching for telltale signs of future unfairness, as if it’s inevitable.”
For now, the only thing Maria can do is carefully weigh her conflicting desires; think through every possible outcome, and probe her soul to determine what most matters to her. Deprived of negotiation, robbed of interaction, she has to toss a coin and imagine, when it lands, how she’d feel if the outcome were real. The answer to “My man or my country?” is one a novelist could spend years on, and Maria is trying to cut it short. “I’m giving it six more months,” she says. “Enough time to see if he’ll budge, but not so much time that I give in by default.” At the moment, Maria feels inclined to return, alone, to the states, on the theory that if she doesn’t her anger will grow deeper than her love will. She senses that taking a stand on where she lives is just as important as with whom she lives. And that losing Thomas is less soul-damaging than complying with what feels like a very punitive life plan.
That’s what I mean about finding your bottom line–when you’re stranded, left on your own with your conflicting desires, or your principles, wondering whether you’re about to feel extraordinarily generous or simply defeated. The very nature of “mutual concession”–that idea that through compromise your relationship grows durable and smooth as fine antique luggage–changes drastically once the “mutual” is excised. Because while love thrives on decisions made jointly, it withers under the weight of one-way donorship. The donor unwittingly violates the integrity of the person on the receiving end, too: She lets him be the heavy. And the heavy always feels a little guilty and defensive and mean-spirited.
So how do you know when you’re about to be hurled into self-betrayal? You can feel it in your stomach, where dissent so often makes itself known; you can feel it in anger or crankiness that seems to have no source. I’ve learned to trust my gut when my brain has no answers; I can feel it there when I’m on the verge of selling out. Doris Lessing said about compromise that “It’s not poisoning to do without something one really wants….What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is really first-rate.” Like pretending any relationship is better than none. Or pretending that you can do without that which you know you need–whether it be a baby or a country; fidelity or respect; honesty or sobriety. Like being with a man who cares enough about you to get a divorce from the woman he no longer cares about.
Like pretending that compromise is yielding–and getting nothing in return.