Relationships Are Messy

Relationships are messy, but also chances to learn about ourselves

By Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette


Relationships are tough, but they let us learn about ourselves. You can't offer your heart to another without at least some dim awareness that it might be broken, can you?

And if it does end, chances are the relationship will end badly -- in a muddle of ambivalence or of mistakes and missed chances, of bad behaviour, of one person trying too hard or both not at all, of one loving too much and the other not enough.

Nearly everyone who has ventured into a relationship has a messy breakup story. Depending at which end of the barrel we're standing, we are sad and bitter and full of recrimination or else we are hugely relieved. And even if what we feel is relief, still we are plagued by guilt and by disappointment -- in ourselves, in the other, in what happened.

Disappointment is the thread that unites a fine and affecting new collection of true stories about love gone wrong.

"We're disappointed at ourselves for having had such mediocre judgment; we're disappointed at other people for being so cruel and mediocre," Neal Pollack writes in the foreword to the aptly titled, Love is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts (Plume, $20), edited by Michael Taeckens.

"And, most of all, we're disappointed at the world for not caring enough, for not giving us better options, for leaving us to ponder the void with only a string of disastrously dead relationships to show for our troubles on Earth."

Pollack observes that what he calls "our current human situation" has produced an abundance of breakup literature. Could be that we live in a society so fragmented that it is difficult to actually connect with people, he suggests. Then again, "the human heart has been continually broken since the first one began beating."

Elements in these stories made me so uncomfortable I squirmed as I read. Cringed. Winced. And nodded -- as I recognized my own stories in theirs.

Wendy McClure wrote of saying "I love you" to her boyfriend, not knowing whether it was even true, but saying it because, as she explained, "I wanted to see if it needed to be said." I knew before I got to the line "Our doomsday was just a matter of time after that" that her admission was a death knell.

I did that once, told someone I loved him when I wasn't entirely sure I did. Actually, I was pretty sure I didn't. I wanted to hear how it sounded, mostly, and how he'd respond. He'd said "I love you, too. Really." Later, he'd said that the "really" was a sign he hadn't meant it at all. But then, I hadn't either. The messes we make.


"Toward the end," Don Kennedy writes, "I was a jerk, she was a jerk, we were jerks to each other -- nothing too terrible, but we were always punctuating a point by slamming a door. We were always raising our voices and feeling like we weren't heard. Maybe because we had to make it clear to ourselves why this couldn't work. And then, one random Tuesday or something, you both get tired of the smoke, and somebody finally yells fire, and it's over."


Desperation figures frequently. "Nights went by when I called his number repeatedly, letting the phone ring dozens of times," Michael Taeckens writes. "Was he there? Was he punishing me? Was he alone?

"I'd tell myself, 'Okay, I will let the phone ring 20 times.' If he doesn't answer, it means that he truly doesn't love me anymore."

Margaret Sartor writes of being stunned at the sheer intensity of her heartbreak when the high-school senior with whom she'd fallen in love as a sophomore broke up with her - through an intermediary, no less. "The shattering of trust, the brutal sense of loss and sudden awareness of my heart's true vulnerability, like a tree branch snapping off in an ice storm."

Happily, though, there are the lessons we learn -- about love and, more important, about ourselves.