Is It Getting Better? Or Do You Feel The Same? Will It Make It Easier On You Now, You Got Someone To Blame?

--"One", U2

We were at The Cheesecake Factory over in Santa Monica sometime in 1999. It was supposed to be a quaint, little lunch at one of my favorite restaurants at the time. That particular Cheesecake Factory had been the first one I had gone to when I had first started driving myself around and it had also been one of the first few places I had gone on for first dates. Granted, this particular time wasn't the first time DeAnn and I had gone out. We'd actually been dating for a year by then, but it was the first time I had ever taken her to that restaurant. I still considered it a place filled with good memories and I had been hoping to add onto that catalog.

I think the trouble began as soon as we had been handed our menus. I saw her eyes move to the pages with the sandwiches listed on them. Great, I thought, she was going to order the club sandwich like she did in every restaurant. To think of it now, it seems like such a small thing, but back then it was a big deal. I've never been one to tolerate small annoyances graciously. I've always let the small things bother more than they should. Her audacity to order a club sandwich at every single place we went to was starting to border on feeling as an intentional slight against me. I know I had mentioned it to her before as a "friendly suggestion" that she might think of branching out when it came to ordering. I told her that broadening her tastes was, indeed, a good endeavor and would lead to us being able to go to a wider range of places to eat. I thought my pep talks had gotten through to her, but, time and time again, when the waitress would come to ask us what we wanted she would always answer with the same exact words.

Club sandwich.

It annoyed the fuck out of me.

It annoyed me so much that by that day in Santa Monica when I seemingly innocently asked her what she was thinking about ordering, I was almost daring her to say a club sandwich just so I could unleash holy hell on her. You could say that I was tired of her limited scope and felt almost embarrassed that this was the person I was choosing to spend the bulk of my time with. It was a total elitist attitude, but I think my motivations ran deeper than that.

When I told her there was no way I was going to let her order what seemed like the hundredth turkey club for the month, I honestly don't know why she didn't laugh it off. Or maybe she did and I was just so pissed that I took that as a sign of her mocking me. Like you can already guess, I wasn't exactly the most rational person in those days. However the sequence played out and whatever was said when, the end result was that I made it abundantly clear to her that under no circumstances whatsoever was she to get the club sandwich on that day. I gave her explicit orders to try something new for a change.

I think on the surface my motivation was to assist her, to make her into some ideal of a better person, a more well-rounded person. Yet below the surface, it really boiled down to a power struggle. As DeAnn pointed out to me many months and years later, she really was my first experience with a day-to-day relationship. Everyone else I was with we had hung out two or three times a week, but DeAnn and I would go weeks at a time where I was either over at her place or she was over at mine. She was my first taste of what it was like to be in some sort of committed relationship. On one hand, it was kind of nice to have so much access to another person's life and to not have to worry so much about scheduling and priorities. On the other hand, it led to a sense of entitlement that to someone like me was inherently dangerous.

Never before had I had a girlfriend where so much of my opinion she took to heart. Never before had I felt so influential in making someone else's decisions. It was both of our faults really. She wanted someone to look up to in terms of being firm-handed and intractable and I willingly made myself into some sort of all-knowing guide for her. Eventually, many months after we had broken up, we saw our relationship for what it was, borderline emotional abuse.

It's not a pretty description, but its a very apt one.

Never moreso than at that Santa Monica Cheesecake Factory.

We argued over her right to choose her own meal, which sounds ridiculous, but we went into the debate like it was regarding the fate of the entire world. Back and forth we lobbied over the merits of individual choice, which she was in favor of, and the merits of expanding one's horizons. I explained to her that somebody had to bring her out of her comfort zone, otherwise, she was just going to remain the uncultured and unrefined person I had first met. I don't know why it was so important for me to always want to improve her, but that was one of the many disguises I hid my stubbornness and desire to inflict my will and my standards upon her. It's always easier to tell someone you're doing something horrible to them for their own good; it allows your mind to remain guilt-free even while you consequently put someone else through hell. It's always easier to tell someone you're the only one who knows right from wrong, and that the way they've been doing things is completely ineffective. Once you have that moral or authoritative high ground it's very hard to give up again. That's the situation we found ourselves in that day.

Somewhere deep down I knew I shouldn't have been making such a big deal over her ordering the same meal again and again. I think what bothered me more was the fact she was daring to argue with me. It's like if she had just seen my point, I might have been okay with her having her way. It's the idea she wanted to contradict that made me fight so hard.

Or maybe I was just an asshole.

There we were arguing fairly loudly. I wasn't willing to budge an inch, but over time I started to wear her down. I could see it in her face, those big blue eyes of hers, that she couldn't comprehend why this was so important to me at that particular moment. She couldn't comprehend why I had decided to make it into a big enough scene that the people at the tables and booths beside us were all looking at us. She couldn't comprehend that the ordering of the club sandwich was periphery. What was really at stake was the idea that she knew better than me. What I was really fighting her for was control, control over her choices, control over who got to tell whom what to do in the relationship.

In the end, it didn't take much longer after those first ten minutes of arguing. The waiter came back for what had to be the fifth or sixth time to ask us what we wanted to eat and that's when she finally relented. She very meekly ordered the four cheese pasta and I felt a small twinge of vindication.

I had won.

I see it now. Somewhere along the way I had started thinking of her as less and less of a person. I saw her as partly someone who was an obstacle to our happiness as a couple and I saw her as partly someone who could be blamed for everything that was wrong with the two of us being together. It's like I had this perfect picture of how we could be like as a couple if only she accepted my word as law and my opinions as facts, which she never was going to do. And when we had our fights and our disagreements I always came into the scuffles with a chip on my shoulder. To me our fights weren't about ascertaining who was right and who was wrong; they were always about my trying to convince her of just how right I was.

I thought it would be easier to live day-to-day with someone I supposedly loved, but in reality it was probably a task I wasn't ready for. I just wasn't ready to put up the effort to see what it was like to actually compromise and see someone else's opinion as being equal to my own. That's what annoyed me the most, I think, the idea that I had to cede any control over what I wanted to do.

When she started crying after the waiter went away, I was used to it. Our fights often ended with her crying because she had come to the conclusion that it was easier to let me win than try and fight me all night. That's what our fights come down to, my being more stubborn than she could be.

My first indication that this wasn't just an ordinary squabble was when she didn't stop crying when our food arrived.

Another indication was when she was literally crying when she was eating her pasta.

The final indication was when I was asked by the table next to me to take her outside and calm her down.

I had fucked up again and the worst part was I was content to let her cry through the whole meal as long as it seemed like it was only affecting me. But the instant it drew the raised eyebrows of someone else, suddenly I was embarrassed enough to remedy the problem.

I took her outside and we talked. I did what I always did, what every asshole control freak boyfriend always does. I apologized and I swore that I would never put her through such emotional torture again. I told her that she didn't have to finish the pasta. I told her I would go inside and pay the bill, then take her to wherever she wanted to eat. I tried to make up for a mistake in judgment that should have never come up in the first place.

That seemed to placate her and for the time being we were back to being okay again. I had fixed the problem for now.

But it was like trying to put a shawl on the shark at the end of the swimming hole, as Breanne says. It may cover it up for awhile, but in the end it'll still come to bite you in the britches. I didn't start becoming a better person until I realized I had a control problem.

But by then it was too late. We were already broken up and we would never be put back together again.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers