Relationship Troubles

It Just Wasn’t Enough

Posted by: DivineCaroline.com Filed in: relationships
4:00PM, Sunday November 15th 2009

I’m suddenly reminded of a quote from a book I read long ago. The book is titled Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (you may remember the movie of the same name starring Kevin Spacey). “Truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I know.”

Perception is a funny thing; it causes people to construct their own personal truth. You see, the entire world perceived that I was one half of a perfect Generation Y relationship. Too many friends saw hopes in their own romantic future just by being around us. We were young, in love, had our own home, and over the course of three years, had built a solid life with a bright future. It was a comforting thought; giving my own cynical girlfriends a hope that decent men were out there, waiting to be discovered. Read more ...

comments

kalibrooke
wrote on November 15 2009 @ 05:50 pm: [report]

i know in my former long-term relationship, i felt like the long-suffering (and somewhat faultless) girlfriend, and it’s taken time and some perspective to realize that i was (just as?) responsible for the tension as well.

i can appreciate what the writer went through, and this comment is not meant to discount her portrayal of it. breakups are never easy, but the tale is one-sided. perception IS a funny thing.

sabotagekatt
wrote on November 15 2009 @ 11:57 pm: [report]

Funny that the last sentence she wrote: “Without work, love is nothing” - I read that the other way around as in “Without love, work is nothing” - meaning I’m just coming out of a relationship where I loved this guy a lot, but he didn’t see me in the same way. It still hurts, but thanks for making me feel less alone.

bogart4017
wrote on November 16 2009 @ 07:12 am: [report]

The most important lesson in this piece is relationships take work—from both parties.

draymond
wrote on November 17 2009 @ 02:12 am: [report]

A really cautionary tale. A lot of people, particularly young women, have this image of a fairy tale relationship where everything is nice and problems nonexistent. The wind up thinking that they have hit the ideal when in fact they have an extrordinarily fragile situation where not only don’t they have skills to handle a problem they don’t have the ability to see that there is a problem to be addressed.

Honestly I have the impression that if when it started they had the skills to address their issues (or the wisdom to get some mutual help) the relationship could have been saved.