I've been thinking when it’s time to leave.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I've been thinking about this bit of wisdom from the wonderful Nina Simone: You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.
My client was the eldest of three daughters when her parents divorced and she was court-ordered to spend certain weekends with her abusive father. Even as a ten-year-old, she learned to protect her younger sisters by taking him on so he would be rough with her but not with them. On one occasion, when she was eleven or twelve, she pissed him off so he chased her down the hallway, grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her against a plate glass door, shattering the glass. She wasn’t cut, but her soul was deeply lacerated and she never recovered from the trauma.
I met her as a client when she was in her mid-thirties; she told me this story about her father, whom she hadn’t seen in years, and went on to describe her failing marriage and her husband’s thoughtless treatment of their two children. Perhaps a year into our therapeutic relationship, in a conversation about repairing wounds from her past, I asked, Do you think it might help if you made contact with your father, to find some way to have a relationship with him now? Her eyes flashed, her throat tightened, and in a voice as jagged as the broken glass of the shattered door, she said, No! And I don’t want you to bring that up again. Ever. In the two years after this that she was in therapy, we never spoke again about her father.
As I look back on my conversations with her, I realize she had figured out what Nina Simone is talking about: At some point you’ve got to end a relationship in which love is no longer on the table.
So why do we stay?
Perhaps the easiest of these recurring relationships to understand are the most painful: those that involve physical abuse. For children or wives and girlfriends of abusive men, leaving elevates the danger. If I even suggest that I might leave or, worse, tell people about his behavior, he will certainly pound it into me that this is a terrible idea. As painful as it is, it can be safer to stay. Leaving abusive relationships is fraught with legal, financial, and emotional complexities, and deserves far more attention and consideration than this short column allows.
Other circumstances in which people stay are more difficult to understand.
When a couple comes to see me about their troubled marriage, I listen to each of them tell me what the problem is. Virtually every couple begins by saying, in very articulate terms, that they have a communication issue. When I point out how well they’re communicating right in front of me, I nudge them toward whatever deeper conflicts are sucking the love out of their marriage.
For example: unlike his nurturing, stay-at-home mother, his wife runs her own business and does the heavy lifting as a mother of three. He’s correct, she has little left for him; still, he cannot explain to her, or to himself, why he seems perpetually disappointed.
Or: despite his ample income, he doles out money in dribs and drabs. She grew up with generous and affluent parents and took for granted that she had whatever she needed. She’s never realized that her anger at him is because he isn’t free-spending, like the parents she grew up with.
It often takes quite a bit of time before each stops blaming their partner and begins to look at their own contributions to the conflicts. He can recognize his need for nurture, she her need for generosity. When each of them can say, following a flare-up, This was MY stuff that I was dealing with, not yours, I become quite hopeful.
They clearly want their relationship to survive, and if they’re willing to do the work to make this happen, couples can recover. They can learn to be more self-aware, to spend more one-on-one time together, to be more transparent in their conversations, and to be fresh and playful lovers again. Frankly, even these renewed marriages seldom recreate the bliss with which they began; the scar tissues from their conflicts are persistent reminders of what went wrong. But at least when they remember their own contributions to the pain, they can develop a more workable, somewhat satisfying marriage.
The same is not true with other couples I’ve seen over the years. They continue to live in marriages that have already died but which they are unwilling to bury. They often say they’re staying together for the sake of their children (though even young children recognize the stench of death), or that they’re bound by the vows they exchanged that promised ‘Til death do us part. They aren’t dead yet, but their marriage is, and in an act of marital necrophilia, they drag around the corpse of a relationship that is empty of the life it once embodied. As Nina Simone suggests, it’s long past time for them to leave the table.
And what about friendships that die? Television producer Norman Lear once said that we have only two kinds of relationships in our lives, wet and dry. Wet relationships are those in which the conversation and time together water our lives with the pleasures of trust and affection. Dry relationships are those in which the conversation and time together leave us feeling as if we’re sucking sand down our throats.
There have been relationships where I have been cut off by people whom I loved. Did I become the sand they were sucking down? I know they said to me, "I'm done" in a way that clearly signalled I could no longer be a part of their lives. Leaving the table can be hard, but being left is exquisitely painful. Thankfully, over time, it pushed me to look at my role in destroying the relationships, and to figure out how to stop being sand in peoples' throats.
In recent years we’ve heard about and perhaps experienced friendships and family connections that have been severed by cultural and political differences. Certain people can no longer tolerate the contrary positions of long-time friends or even family members; they no longer speak, no longer show up to the same gatherings, no longer try to work their way through or around their differences. The life has leaked out of their once-robust connections.
Despite this misery of sucking sand, it is difficult to quit, to acknowledge that you no longer have the hope or the energy that makes it worth it to keep trying. But it’s probably time to give up on such friendships, even with certain of our relatives. Yes, there may be a sense of abandonment; both of us might feel the sense of rejection that comes with being turned away. But there is also a sense of relief and liberation when we’ve cut ourselves loose from the perpetual frustration and pain of a relationship that can no longer thrive.
You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.