He can not accept our separation
The day after Lars's breakup, an email landed in Mia's mailbox. From him, a link to a vernissage: "Lust?" When she asked him to finally get his boxes out of her cellar, he stood in the door the same evening with Arabic appetizers. And when Mia, 39, came home the day after, suddenly there was the lampshade - the one who had not lacked a fight for the past two years: "You can not get anything baked, job, friends, and the lampshade is still on the cupboard " -, this lampshade was suddenly mounted. And Mia stood there: flat, helpless, powerless.
What happens if one separates and the other just does not join? The separation ignored. Pretend that nothing had happened. Relationship failed? - Oh, rubbish, it's not so smooth right now.
"Denial is part of the basic equipment of the psychic apparatus," explains the Berlin psychoanalyst Dietmar Stiemerling ("If couples can not separate", 19.95 euros, Klett-Cotta). "It's an elemental defense mechanism against pain and devaluation." And being left is a frontal attack on self-worth. Who likes to fail? Men, in particular, have enormous difficulties in accepting a defeat and dealing with it calmly.
"Anyone who experiences a separation has to struggle with enormous losses," says Hamburg couple therapist Oskar Holzberg. From booked holidays to planned children - all gone. "It feels like you have not really done something essential in life, everyone loses a lot of psychic investment." A simple parade reads: "That's not true, the terrible does not exist, I do not have to take it seriously." This is not deliberate ignoring, such as when someone crosses the street in spite of a red light; rather, the one who denies, simply does not let the message approach him: she has often threatened to do so. It was already worse. We have always come together again.
Bindings are closed faster today and separated faster. But more separations also mean more difficult separations. And the thing about separating has also become more complicated. A clear cut? Almost impossible. This is due to major changes such as the new understanding of roles: Many fathers, for example, do not simply disappear from the life of their child after a breakup today. That's great. But a clear separation of the parents makes that difficult.
And this is also due to small, everyday changes that favor that couples do not comply with the limits: The SMS for Silke, for example, goes to Simon, the ex ("Oops, wrong - but hey: how are you?"), He stays on the mailing list for the summer party ("Oh, so sorry, I slipped through that was the distributor of last year: But maybe you feel like coming to?"), He posted on Facebook "Landed in Munich", and she wonders all afternoon, if that was addressed to her (she just took on the job in Munich, first time, she said).
Can you stay friends?
And then there is the cult about having to really give up anything and nobody, not even the ex: "But we'll stay good friends, right?" - "Klaro."
"Nonsense," says Paartherapeut Holzberg. Staying good friends - that's not possible, he clarifies: After all, you were a loving couple and not good buddy. "What may work is to become good friends."
Even Oskar Holzberg is increasingly experiencing people who simply do not want to accept a separation. He also attributes this to two new tendencies in society: "Never before have we given feelings as much value as we do today." Belly instead of head. Emotional intelligence has worked its way up to a personal interview as a key qualification. According to Holzberg, a separation can quickly turn the economy of emotions into an autocracy of one's own feelings. (You say, I do not want anymore, but my feeling says it's not over between us.)
Secondly, Holzberg sees the life of many embraced in a great ambivalence: in the conflict between bondage and party. "We see family and relationship as really important, but at the same time we want to be involved in hedonistic fulfillment." The consequence: separation becomes more and more difficult. Because it is always unclear what is still valid as a clear reason for separation. And for both sides. "A woman throws a man who goes out, not automatically out today," says Holzberg. "Just as the stranger does not automatically give up his relationship for the new partner." It can also be a great opportunity to simply ignore a separation. The higher the value of solid, long-term bonding, the more spongy the criteria to resolve them.
There are always two to a separation
Sabine, 47, a Pilates trainer, left three years ago after 15 years of marriage.She was tired of quandary alternate baths between idealization and devaluation. That broke her. She wanted the breakup. But she does not feel free even today. Because he does not let go: sometimes he uses her as a confidant, of course, sometimes he asks her for a favor. Whether she could bring the son together to the lake, to the table tennis tournament, in the beer garden: "Are you so nice?" And then Sabine comes, is so nice, drives the son - and is bombarded with reproaches: "You have broken everything, I'm so bad, you take the child the father." Kai refuses to accept the separation and to pass to a distant relationship, which actually brings a separation with it. Even that can be an ignored separation: Before I have nothing left of her, I have at least war with her. If I can not have a good relationship then it's just a bad one. After all. Even negativity can connect.
"Look at your partner, and you know how he will part with you," says Paartherapeut Holzberg. Anyone who has problems in the relationship to set limits, will often draw in the separation of the short straw. The one whose separation wish is ignored has often had problems before being respected. The pattern remains the same.
The same applies to separation as to love: there are always two. It not only needs the one who walks, but also the one who lets go. If one does not join in, the other has to shoulder the double work.
"Often it is a question of power, the one who ignores the separation does not let the other person, does not accept that he has his own and other interests," says Dietmar Stiemerling. He calls this the "disbelief of the narcissist": I am the greatest human being there is. The partner only an appendage, without an independent center of will. Impossible, he can just leave such a gem like me.
A special case are long-standing affairs. The fact that both often think and feel very different about the status and intensity of the relationship often only comes out with the separation. Something that may make it even harder to accept.
Recently, Ute, 41, interior designer, has done it again. A text message to Martin: "I love you as strong as the sun shines on the Elbe in the afternoon at five." He had said so many times to her, earlier, for years, when everything was still good. Until that afternoon, seven months ago, when her phone rang. An ice-cold conversation in which Martin, 39, told her that his wife now knew everything, that he had realized that he still loved his wife and that she, Ute, had lost nothing in his life. He appeared strange to her. Ute did not even recognize his voice. Later, she often wondered if even the wife was sitting next to him during the conversation. Ute did not question, did not answer, hung up and vomited.
Since then she has sent him hundreds of e-mails, letters, SMS: texts full of love and anger and grief and yearning. She even wrote him that she understood him. The daughter, family, clearly: But because of this, living with this woman who bores him? "That's why we give up?" If necessary, she would take him back with her family, she wrote to him.
If Ute is fine, she is sure: Martin is suffering as well. And it will not be long before he comes back. Maybe today? And then there are the other days. She is ashamed when she has done it again, when she has written him something again.
Often she has already said goodbye to him in mails, he will hear nothing more from her. No, she's over it. And secretly, she had hoped that he would at least report it. She has never thought of that anyway. When Ute has finished an assignment, she wants to show him the result, hear his opinion. When she sees advertisements involving children, she howls. "Maybe he'll go out with me again, to the restaurant?" She asks herself. "I'm sure he could not resist me, I know he loves me."
"Even if she's right," says Oskar Holzberg, the couple therapist, "he's decided to split up, and she ignores that decision."
It keeps the part in us that is not yet detached
A decision to break up is never one hundred percent, one may interject. It's about feelings. "Precisely because of this, any non-recognition of this decision upholds the part of us that may still stand for a life with the ex-partner," says Holzberg. The one who has separated is thereby unsettled or forced into radicalization.
Mia, for example, the woman with the surprisingly mounted lampshade, has tried a lot in her powerlessness. She did not report to him for weeks. She spoke plain text. She's got an affair. She told him about it.
And he? Recently, he has forwarded a housing advertisement: Whether you do not want to look at them together? Mia wants to put his mail address on the spam filter with a heavy heart.
