Power and what passes for love

My highly significant other (HSO) a few days ago indicated that she was aware of a power imbalance between the two of us and it's become a huge, huge and I do mean huge thing looming over my mind. A dark cloud, a troublesome swarm of locusts, a spine in my right atrium. Not to be dramatic or anything, oh no, not I. 

The specifics are unimportant. The larger epiphany for me is that I do not think about power dynamics when I am in a romantic relationship. I just do not. I have been unconscious of this reality for many years, I guess since my first girlfriend broke my heart way back in 1978. So, having just completed a sex and relationship inventory in AA, I'm suddenly going back over it in my mind and reframing a pattern I've been in for years. It feels like this is going to be a massive revision. 

Basically, the pattern has seemed to be to go big and vulnerable with "dangerous" women (that is, at least how I used to frame it, women I allowed myself to care about, women who could hurt me) and get gutted and then go comfortable and safe with safe women and try to protect my heart. I always saw it as a strategy I had used to alternate the rush of intensity and thrill with the comfort of emotional distance and quasi-Platonic companionship. I'm sure that's true as far as it goes. Taking a risk, stabbed to death; playing it safe, bored to death. Nice. 

Now it looks though like it has always been about who has the power. On a much more raw level, I have either been willing to surrender my power to a woman or I have not. This feels so much more Machiavellian and not at all nice or romantic, or, frankly, "loving." It feels ugly, opportunistic, painfully fraught, humiliating and shitty. It feels like I have either been the wide open fucking idiot Fool completely baring my heart and basically giving a woman the dagger to slice it open or I have been the self-centered, selfish, niggardly Hermit, performing only the outward shows of so-called love but making sure I have the power, I hold the cards, I am basically invulnerable. 

How could I have missed, for 40 years, the reality of how power operates in romantic love? It has hit me like a fucking bus. I speculate right now, although I do not yet really know, that it *is not nice to deal with power*. And *I am a nice guy*. I bet this blind spot that is as big as the state of Montana just goes back to my nice guy bullshit. The taboo against being real about power dynamics goes so deep. Pretty much everything toxic about me that runs that deep goes to that Nice Guy idiocy. So I bet this does too. 

The universe must think I'm ready to face this head on, since my counselor and I had the following exchange last Thursday:

Me: "Well, you know, in CoDA they say don't get in a new relationship for at least a year and/or until you've done all your step work."

Counselor: "How do you think your HSO would respond if you set that boundary with her?"

Me: "Oh, she's already offered it, a while back. 'If you need a year, go ahead, you take whatever you need to be well.'"

Counselor: "Wow, she really has all the power in this relationship doesn't she?"

Me: "wut blink blink."

I muttered something like huh I guess you're right I'll have to think about that and we moved on. I had not seen her offer as a sign of power imbalance at all. I had been surprised by it, and had felt honestly, I would not be able to offer the same in return, probably. But I didn't see it as an assertion of a power imbalance. 

Then maybe two days later HSO herself said "There's a power imbalance in my favor."

And I. Well. Here I am. 

There's also this CoDA promise:

I learn to see myself as equal to others. My new and renewed relationships are all with equal partners.

Since I started going to CoDA last March, that promise has never really made clear sense to me. Equal financially? Intellectually? Equal-- wtf does that mean? Now I know what it means. It means with a balance of power. 

I realize two people can't maintain a complete balance of power at all times nor remain reliably in a completely equanimous peace without any power dynamics at all times. But I gather the idea is to aim for that as a goal.  That would be...nice. But hey you know, we're dealing with humans here. Ugly motherfuckers. 

And maybe not only my Nice Guy bullshit but also my basic nature of being an aesthete and hating ugly realities has blinded me. Because power in the midst of romantic love just looks ugly to me. Misshapen, cynical, fear-based, selfish and territorial. But, well, it sure looks REAL also. 

And this reminds me, cynically, of the nuclear weapons policy of the US during the Cold War (and still): Mutually Assured Destruction. Because make no bones about it, romantic love seems to have the power to destroy me repeatedly and has for my entire life. Or it looks like I have made sure I have all the power and then I cannot be destroyed, but it sometimes destroyed the other person. The best romantic relationships I have been in, we just fucking went to town on each other and were both left bleeding out, cut to shreds and full of impotent fury. Those were the best. 

To many of you, it might seem cute that this is only now dawning on me. "That Percy sure is funny, seeing the goddamned obvious for the first time in his 6th decade, haha." But for me, it's like I've been looking out over a landscape with about a 190 degree view and someone finally turned me around so I could see the rest. It looks like a charred battlefield carpeted with smoking bones, at the moment. 

An acquaintance of mine has a saying: "The only functional relationship is reciprocal mercy." I thought that was a pretty cool aphorism but didn't really understand it. 

Now I do.