For Against Against Romance

Being in a relationship that your lizard brain doesn't like Sucks, Actually

I see we have Love Discourse in the substacks right now, which is the prettier, more-presentable cousin to the Settling Discourse.

The Other Porn Land

Against Against Romance

Anyway, here’s my contribution.

I was in a relationship for a fair bit of time with someone that, for a long stretch of that relationship, I just fundamentally didn’t want to be with. Deep down, lizard brain was like “nah.”

I actually came into that relationship with roughly the perspective Aella outlines here: that persistently being in love— romance— is not a reasonable thing to expect out of a relationship long term, and therefore not worth pursuing in the short term; instead you should be pursuing someone who’s a good and kind person; where there’s mutual compatibility in values and family goals and humor and sex stuff, and trying to find someone who maxes those things out, then trusting that this will be enough, whatever “enough” means.

I did this and it was tolerable. For a while. But at some point Lizard Brain started hassling me. I’d be speaking to her or we’d be on a date or something and a background voice would be in my head: “you don’t want to be here. You are, at every second you don’t end the relationship, pre-betraying her by implying you want to be here” and I’d be like “SHUT UP. This is a good relationship and bailing would be insane just because of vague recurring feelings to that effect.”

This ended up coming to a head when we started discussing marriage and, each time, a feeling of doom would wash over me and I’d dig in my heels. My ex and I had discussions about ending it, many times. This process followed a pattern: she would point out that my expectations of having any specific feelings were foolish; and she would point out that if I ended things with her it was quite likely I would simply sabotage every future relationship I ever have by inventing some reason I couldn’t stay in it, and that it was quite likely I would never find anyone “better.” And that if I left I’d have stolen some number of precious fertile years from her. And that I was kinda destroying her by having these conversations repeatedly. And that perhaps a therapist would help me see these things and be happy with what I had. And these points all seemed at the time— and indeed still seem!— very true or at least plausible, so (after several hours of emotionally-intense argument) I would stay.

Until, eventually, things would boil over again in six months. Repeat on a loop.

She’d occasionally ask for flowers or whatever and I’d dutifully do the thing, but I generally didn’t do them on my own because each time I’d do it, it felt like a lie. A lie that I couldn’t stop telling because to stop telling it would be to break up, and we’d already agreed I shouldn’t do that.

Anyway. We went through this cycle of attempting-breakup multiple times and eventually I left for reals and it felt so, so much better. I no longer felt as though I was in a constant process of pre-betraying someone I care about; I could actually do fun and worthwhile things and not feel as though they were just a distraction from addressing the horrific, central, gut-wrenching wrongness at the center of my life.

(As an aside— the way I actually ended up ending things was by calling her from a couple thousand miles away while on a trip to visit college friends, delivering the news, and having said friends standing next to me to give me the kill-signal on when it’s time to forcibly end the conversation, which meant the whole thing took about two minutes. They also did heavy work on the breakup logistics. I think it is not a coincidence that this was the only one out of maybe fivish breakup attempts that actually stuck.)

It’s possible there’s a gap: that there’s a possible situation where I’m not in love with someone as such, but lizard brain is also not screaming in horror at the prospect of a life with them; where I am simply content. I have not personally observed this gap yet in myself, but it could happen.

I’m not currently in love with anyone at the moment. If it happens it happens, and I’m fairly invested in building a life where in some loose probabilistic way it does happen; but on my own internal tier list I put “being in a relationship I’m not super into” as a much worse outcome than “single.”