Mark B. Borg

IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy


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of themselves.

      Glen enjoyed seeing Vicky as an emotional labyrinth that he alone could navigate. Somehow, he knew he could fix her—whether or not she felt that she needed fixing. Being with Vicky made Glen feel secure, powerful, and irreplaceable. And Glen made Vicky believe that she could finally feel alive. What could be wrong with this picture? In roles so well paired—he the Performer and she the Audience—why wouldn’t they be a match made in heaven? Wouldn’t their complementary roles lead to a durable, exciting marriage that provided fulfillment to both of them?

      The truth, however, proved to be something quite different; they were building and feeding irrelationship, quickly moving from a simulation of intimacy to a chilly isolation. Ultimately they found themselves at odds, firmly defended against what the other offered.

      As Glen explored his history of playing the Performer for his wife and others in his past, he began to articulate the dynamics of what he came to understand as irrelationship—his taking on the role of caretaker in his professional role and in his marriage. But his assuming the caretaker role began years before when Glen, the young Performer, treated his mother’s extreme sadness and disappointment by playing the young jokester, attempting to lift her spirits whenever he could.

      Glen described his mother and father as “children of the ’60s,” and they were married very young. When Glen was born, they were both eighteen years old. His mother came from a wealthy family while his father was a “boy from the wrong side of the tracks.” A premarital pregnancy and their marriage were provocative and taken as insulting to his mother’s family, who expected children to be seen and not heard. Soon after their marriage, Glen’s father enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam where he found alcohol, heroin, prostitutes, and post-traumatic stress. During the same period, Glen’s mother found born-again Christianity. Notwithstanding Jesus, Glen’s mother became deeply depressed. Her depression was the impetus for Glen to learn his basic song-and-dance routine of slapstick humor, jokes, and tricks that seemed to relieve the cloud that hung over the household.

      Perhaps the best example of a romantic partner (and soon to be Audience) whom Glen ultimately devalued was his wife Vicky. When they met in graduate school, Glen’s routines seemed to make Vicky feel better. The reason is easy to understand; early in their relationship she revealed details of her childhood that motivated her to become a therapist. But her song-and-dance routine, which she originally devised to treat her mother and father, was the opposite of Glen’s routine. Through her childhood, Vicky created ways to make her neglectful parents believe that they were good parents—although she actually believed her mother was unbalanced and her father incompetent.

      The darker reaches of Vicky’s backstory were quite different from Glen’s. Her mother married the high school football star in their small southwestern town. The fact that he was a bit of a cowboy made it even better; her mom had grown up romanticizing the Old West. Unfortunately the starry-eyed days were short-lived, and her football-star husband ended up in the unromantic job of a car salesman, while Vicky’s mother started her own successful business. Two children were born, a boy and Vicky, who learned while still very young to be their mother’s Audience. Vicky’s earliest memories were of listening to unending stories in which her mother was “star of the show,” but as she got older, her mother’s behavior became increasingly bizarre and destructive. Vicky, meanwhile, continued to pretend that her mother and father were good parents—a farce Vicky’s brother refused to validate. She continued the charade but when time came for her to go to college, she fled the Southwest for New York City.

      Neither of their caregiving compulsions ended when Glen and Vicky left their families of origin. They took their unconscious need to be “help-a-holics” into many or most of their future relationships. By chronically repeating this caregiving pattern, they were unaware that they were motivated by their desperate need to keep the world from falling apart. When Glen and Vicky met and became one another’s new family, they recreated their old family dynamics with some minor adjustments, while retaining the destructive dynamics.

      Glen and Vicky are two textbook examples of loving for all the wrong reasons. In both their cases, keeping the world from falling apart was the reason for loving. But, their marriage pact had nothing to do with love; it was an unspoken agreement to marginalize the possibility—and risk—of genuine investment in one another. Instead, they proceeded through life in silence about either of their unmet needs, thereby eliminating the possibility of thriving and change.

      Even though Glen and Vicky told their stories to one another, this paradoxically (and deceptively) failed to establish intimacy between them. Vicky retained emotional reserve and made no explicit claims upon Glen as to her place in his life. Their stories remained separate. Brainlock prevented the possibility that each could function in the other’s life other than how they had always functioned. Neither Glen nor Vicky could listen to or empathize with the other, which made it impossible for them to create and share a life together.

      Vicky’s caretaking performance for Glen—similar to the care she administered to her parents—was simply to accept Glen’s treatment. For his part, having come to experience Vicky as cold and sexless, Glen redoubled his song-and-dance routine. And for a time it seemed to work; Glen got the same satisfaction he received from making his depressed mother smile. Deep inside, however, Glen knew that the whole relationship was a ruse; he was not happy and became aware of a vague anxiety about the future.