Vol. 1, Post #37 Stay or Go?
Good but not great, so now what? My ongoing sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.
Last week, when I was scrolling through IG, I came across a new reel from @therapyjeff that caught my eye. You can click through below to watch the whole thing:
Basically, here was a quickie eight question “quiz” that anyone could take to determine whether or not a perfectly fine relationship, was, well, perfectly fine. I jumped to it.
After I looked over my own results, I realized I wanted to toss this out to my Dear Readers. I love that Jeff asks his followers — as I ask you as well — to be as brutally honest as possible, in answering the following prompts that I’ll summarize below.
Do I feel more relief/comfort or sadness/stress when I think about my relationship being over?
Do I feel valued, loved, and supported most of the time?
When bad moments happen, are they isolated incidents or a more of a pattern?
Can I fully be myself in this relationship?
Do we share the same values and goals?
Am I staying in this relationship because I’m in love or because I’m afraid to be alone/start over?
If nothing changed in my relationship from this point forward, could I be in this for the rest of my life?
What does your gut tell you that you should do, stay or go?
The reason I liked this series of questions so much is because Jeff worded it very carefully, and also gave credit to this book, Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship, which looks like a good one for any Dear Reader who is grappling with more than these eight points, regarding their next move.
“Good enough” — we’ve all heard that before. “It’s good enough.” “I like him/her/them enough that I want to see what happens next.” “Listen, no one is perfect and they have plenty of good attributes.”
Who could blame you, Dear Reader, if you are one of the people who owns up to the fact that sometimes a relationship just has to be “good enough” at our Young Old age, when, we’ve all got our own baggage, predilections, and nonsense? As illustrated in last week’s post, I’ve sure got mine.
But at the same time, there is that fantasy view of relationships that still haunt some Young Olds, almost to distraction. In my world, one of my pals spends far too much time indulging in it (that fantasy) comparing and contrasting it with their marriage. I’ve been there too, that hell of comparison.
With this friend (and I’m being purposefully obtuse with details and pronouns as to respect my friend’s privacy), those skanky yet sexy cigarettes and leather jacket nights out doing ridiculous things like getting fucked in the bathroom or blowing someone at the local park near their kids’ school, nag at them constantly. You can almost hear Peggy Lee, singing in the background, as my pal waxes poetic about one wholly risky scenario after another and all the insanely stupid (AKA fun) stuff they get up to with various inappropriate lovers, contrasted with the easygoing and sweet (AKA boring) life that my pal is living with their spouse. And even when we (our posse) jump all over this bullshit as a way of deflating the bubble and redirecting our friend to reality, it’s always the same question, as Ms. Lee so perfectly asks…Is That All There Is?
No one would argue or claim that my friend is not sabotaging their life. That’s a fact. Maybe it will subside, that self-sabotage. But then what? Is “good enough” enough of a glue to stay cemented to what most people would say is a solid marriage? Forget the outright fantasy, which is basically breaking up a marriage to ride motorcycles down lonesome byroads with someone who you know might one day be just GONE when you wake up in some crappy hotel room is the stuff of heady “torn between two lovers” novels, like an old favorite, Velocity by Kristin McCloy (I still get butterflies in my stomach that Kristin has become a friend over the last decade; this was her debut novel and I read and reread it as I was grappling with leaving the Wrong Boyfriend after college graduation, knowing we were going nowhere but still drawn moth > flame.) And forget optics — my amour fou friend completely understands that were they to leave their marriage, they would be shunned by most of their community for their idiocy, including their kids. Does it stop them in their tracks? It does not.
It’s a funny thing, getting older. Realizing you should know better but in fact, don’t know shit. And that’s where I think that Jeff’s questions become even more poignant.
SO…let’s see what you Dear Readers and quiz participants have to say after taking these questions to heart. For background, I not only put the call to answer questions up here on Substack, and emailed my subscribers, but I also for volunteers on various social media platforms. The response was ENORMOUS!
I received 82 emailed or DM’d answers: here’s the breakdown in digestible language. Keep in mind that I’m not a statistician — that reminds of the opening of the Erykah Badu live version of “Tyrone” in which, if you own the album, she tells the audience ahead of performing the song, “Now, keep in mind Imma artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit.” Here we go:
The eight questions are really more like 12 questions, when you consider that two of them have choices within the questions themselves. Question #1 asks “Do you feeling more relief/comfort or sadness/stress when you think about your relationship ending?” and Question #6 asks “Am I staying in this relationship out of love and commitment or fear of being alone and starting over?” And likewise, “What does your gut tell you to do?” is not a yes or no, but rather a stay or go.
Of the 82 responses I got, 12 participants indicated they would feel relief if their relationship was over and likewise, 18 participants said what kept them in their relationship was fear of being alone. We’ll circle back to two of those participants in a few paragraphs below — ^^^the ones who indicated relief and fear.
Oh, and responders were made up of 79 women and three men.
The average rating was six yes’/two no’s, with most of those no’s being around “patterns” in Question #3 and “values” in Question #5.
Among those no’s — where quiz takers said bad moments were more of a pattern, not isolated insidents (that’s what makes the answer a “no”), and likewise, where quiz takers said their partners were not entirely aligned values (another “no”) — almost all* of these participants still said their gut told them to stay in the relationship. One participant wrote that “I’m staying and it’s not because of the kids or our home that we worked hard to own, but rather I know what it looks like when I get distracted by fantasies, like mind-numbing sex. I know that does not last.” Good point, Dear Reader. I hope my hell-bent pal who I referenced above is considering this right now.
In Question #4, almost all* the participants also checked YES on this one. Even when other answers were no’s, all said the ability to be themselves was present in their relationships.
You’ll notice that above, I put an asterisk* by the words “almost all” in response to a few questions — one participant was entirely no’s on all the questions. I emailed a bit more with this person and understand why leaving is not an option, but it goes without saying — IF ANYONE READING THIS FEELS LIKE THEIR RELATIONSHIP PUTS THEM IN DANGER/COMPROMISES THEIR SAFETY, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH WITH SOMEONE, even me if you need don’t have a support system in place. In fact, especially me. I’m here to help.
Three participants indicated that their answers were evenly split — 4 yeses and 4 no’s. One of those participants decided to read the book that Jeff referred to in his post and it helped them decide to stay, regardless of the challenges. That’s a pretty great endorsement. I just ordered a copy because I want to see what I can glean from it myself, not just in the way of research but because while I’m happy in my relationship, I recognize that I have occasionally stayed too long in other past partnerships, and I want to know more about that. I’ll report in at some point.
Question #2 was an interesting question. At least five participants wrote that feeling supported was different than feeling loved, and two of these people — how fascinating! — wrote almost identical comments, which were, in summary, “Feeling supported depends on both our moods, what’s happening in our family, how work is going. Basically, we seem to take turns being supportive for better or worse. So, I wouldn’t say ‘support’ is a given, but that’s mostly OK.”
Let’s go back to those two participants^^^ who said they would feel relief if their relationship ended and who also said they stayed out of fear of being alone. Neither of these participants mentioned abuse (I felt a responsibility to ask) and neither of them said they thought their partners were cheating or that their relationships were particularly “bad.” One said they were perpetually bored with being married and living “an expected” life and didn’t see a way out other than an imaginary windfall of money that could transport them somewhere else, and the other said they felt unattractive and undesired and unable to muster up the courage to date again. For both of these people, their current life was “good enough.”
I also asked both of ^^^those quiz takers the same question: “What do you think would need to change for you to be happy?” And even though they are very different people from what I can surmise, they had similar answers, which was this in a nutshell: I’m not sure I’ve ever been truly happy.
This is the same response that my cigarettes-and-leather-jacket pal often gives me when we talk about why they continue to torture themselves with their own behavior, or fantasies of behavior from the past: “I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy.”
And there it is, Dear Readers. Happiness. Nowhere in Jeff’s post does he use the word “happy.” For that matter, can you think of many therapists or online coaches, dating or otherwise, who use the word “happy?” Deeply subjective, HAPPY is a polarizing word.
But I think we can actually believe in happiness…and along with that, understand that for many people, “good enough” IS “happy.” “Good enough” is NOT settling if, at the end of the day, you fall asleep in peace, and conversely, awake to the same. Ya feel me?
Because, of all of the hard-learned lessons that come at you, full bore, in middle years and onward, realizing that there is often grace in “good enough” is one of the most difficult to digest. For some, it’s not possible to equate that feeling with happiness. And for others, it’s a piece of cake.
I haven’t mentioned Question #7 from the quiz until now. If nothing changed in my relationship from this point forward, could I be in this for the rest of my life? Dear Readers, with the exception of the one responder who answered all no’s, this was nearly unanimous, the most yeses. And unlike on Jeff’s IG account, which is populated by followers of every age, I know that those who answered the questions for me are squarely in our demographic. Do you think these Young Olds are settling, or do they just “know” themselves and their foibles better and, just as importantly, are they able to see the “goodness” in what sometimes just feels like “good enough?” And similarly, do you think that my quiz kids have found happiness in other places which takes some pressure off of the relationships they are having? I do. My relationship is pretty lovely but without my own passions around music, art, writing, learning things like tarot and having the room to really dig in deep, along with carving out very necessary down time to be alone, I’d be bored and restless as fuck. No one is going to “finish” me at this point in my life — I don’t think anyone really could’ve done that for me when I was younger either. I’m just smart enough to know it now.
If you’re inspired to take the above quiz* and comment below or email me at whatsshovegottodowithit@gmail.com, I’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re of a different POV. *I should note that I got six more responses after I finished the edit on this post, which were four 7/1 (yes/no), one 6/2 (yes/no), and one 3/5 (yes/no — and, as noted above, all six of these answered Question #7 as yes).
So naturally, we’ll close with these Golden Oldie, released in 1982, when I personally was, cough, 14. How old were YOU?
I feel like questions 1 and 8 are qualitatively different from the rest, and also the most important, because they represent feeling states and the body doesn’t lie. A relationship can seem to tick all the boxes, but if you’d feel relief if it were over, or if your guy tells you to go, that’s your answer, no matter what the other responses say.
I feel so lucky. Other than having the messiest partner, he is my balance, my love, my heart. I went from the worst marriage ever to the best.