hating with a passion

What strikes me as really odd about "love relationships," "being in love," or "romantic relationships," is how closely hate walks with love, or follows hard upon the loss of love sometimes in that context. I think of love more generally as relatively reliable, supportive and desirous of the highest good and/or happiness for the loved. But romantic love brings with it so many opportunities for hatred, for jealousy, resentment, fear, selfishness, loss of self, confusion, bad faith behavior, dishonesty and wounded pride. It's almost like the secret agreement between two lovers is that they are oing to set out to bring out the very worst in each other and destroy each other in the process.

What it's like when it works

When the ex and I first got together, I had already decided that my sane and sound ideal for a future partnership was a long term, poly, non-monogamous set of agreements, with some bottom line non-negotiables. This is important to me because I do want a long term partnership but I do not naturally sustain monogamous commitments over long periods of time. I had had enough of the suffering and downright misery that I created for myself when I did try to adhere to the exclusive dyad. The ex and I talked about this when we first got together. She agreed to what I thought was a very clear set of agreements that felt mutually supportive and idealistic but also practical. I felt like I was adulting in a whole new way. We called our attempt at a new and different kind of partnership "rocket science." 

At couples counseling the one time that the ex and I went, one of her astonishing claims was that she never wanted our initial agreements and that she only assented to them because she was "in love" with me and would have "agreed to a lot of things." She also characterized my desire for a non-monogamous partnership as a reflection of me "always wanting an out" and "never putting her first." 

You could have shoveled my jaw up off the floor. Three reasons for this, at least: 

1). It turns out the entire set of agreements on which the partnership was based were always just  derived from her secretly dishonest assent

2). She was basically accusing me of being duplicitous and having ulterior motives for our agreements while at the same time informing me for the first time that she never felt like I put her first-- the first time in 5.5 years. 

2). She had two sexual relationships with intense romantic elements while we were together and I never had any. Not in person anyway. There were a few hot internet flirtations-- but those exchanges are sub-real and more fantasy than anything. 

This revelation was one of the reasons I did not want to continue couples counseling. Why make time and space to engage in what the counselor called "reflecting and empathizing active listening exercises" when it quickly became apparent it was going to be a chance for the ex to revise our whole history together and re-frame it as problematic from the start? 

She also related during this session that she "always had to drag me into things." That it seemed to her that I only reluctantly entered the relationship, agreed to move in with her, etc. This is partially true. I don't think caution regarding these decisions is unwarranted. In fact-- dear reader-- does it not seem to you that a fuck of a lot more caution was called for? 

Looking back a month or so, it's also true that, if she had stated a desire to reconnect and try to salvage our partnership, I would have assented, even in the face of her critical revisions, her forming a romantic and sexual relationship with my first college roommate in spite of my deep aversion and her silent treatment of me for the entire month of February. I want to learn from that willingness I would have had to salvage the partnership. I really want to get that sick, codependent, smarmy, "yes dear" taste in my mouth long enough to get to know that part of myself as well as possible, make friends with it and give it a safe and non-operative place to live forever. 

Anyway, I honestly outright fucking hate my ex right now. I also intensely hate her new paramour. I don't do well hating people. I don't like carrying them around with such passion. I don't enjoy the physical sensation of tightness in chest and stomach. I don't sit well with the toxic, poisoned feeling that hate casts over my entire consciousness like a chemical spill. I can't stay in it very long or I powerfully erode my program of recovery and it ends up hurting me so much more than it hurts the object of my hate. In fact, because I am so self-destructive rather than violent toward others, usually, my hate doesn't even affect the people I hate in any way at all. They either don't care or are oblivious. 

But the plain and simple fact for now is I honestly do hate both of them. It's not some small negative affect like irritation or annoyance, or even legitimate anger at having my boundaries violated, it's not the even more astringent and heart-stabbing realm of sexual and romantic jealousy (although that's in my guts as well), it's not tempered in any way right now. It is flat out, pure, unalloyed and truly vicious hatred. 

I am incredibly fortunate to have tools to ameliorate this hatred. If I do not, it will kill me. I would rather live and find resilience. So, even though it makes *no fucking sense to me*, I am constantly repeating a modified 4th step prayer like a mantra: 

"These are sick people just like myself. God save me from being angry and hating them. How can I be helpful to them? Thy will be done." 

I have to admit that, *in spite of it making no fucking sense to me* it does help. The continuing inventory work is helping as well, especially finding my own role. Especially seeing the ways I have done to women exactly what the ex is doing to me now. How I have done to partnerships what the new paramour has done. Seeing myself in their defects or, at the very least, turning my attention to their suffering rather than my own, begins the arduous, counterintuitive, humbling and incredibly annoying process of letting them off the hook, Which is, in my direct experience, the only way I myself become free. When I let them off the hook, I'm off *their* hook. I stand *outside* the situation, which is the reality that simply is right now. I'm safe and protected and can even sometimes take a neutral stance.  

Getting back to love is hard work. Or it is the easiest thing of all. Not sure.