When it is Time — to End a Way of Relating

This week I had the sensational and interesting experience of spending six hours in a fire station, a car, and a cave with my former husband and our two daughters.

The occasion that brought us into that proximity was our youngest daughter graduating as an EMT Firefighter after six months of the hardest training she has ever done (and she rose beautifully to the occasion and came home with one of the two Top Overall awards in her cohort 🤩🥳).

Mars is transiting Cancer, one of his least favorite signs to be in, and among the many things that can surface while he is there is severing and discomfort in relationships, so I have been contemplating what it takes to end one on purpose.

My former husband and I have not spent significant time together in the nearly seven years since we divorced. Six hours, and he could not say a single word to me unless I asked a direct question, and he seemed pained by my very presence. The silence is not new — it began during the process of our divorce and continued through months of co-housing as we dissolved our ties — but sitting inside it for a whole day made it fresh again.

If there were one way to make my Mars-Venus self uncomfortable, that was it. Relationship is my extreme sport, and I value direct relating, clear words, and hearing what the people around me are actually thinking, so the absence of clarity and courageous conversation is challenging.

What has my attention is not his silence, though. It is what I did with the six hours, which was to hold my own line whilst holding grace for the possibility of friendship someday, and to be in full celebration of my daughter, and to stay thoroughly present, light, my-generally-cheerful-self, curious and conversational through all of it.

And to not reach out with a single word of judgment, recrimination, accusation or wanting it to be any other way than it is. I simply took care of myself — allowing myself to go a little feral afterwards. Driving the 35 minutes back to my Airbnb with every window down, sunroof open, music blaring. Then taking a long shower, listening to music, journaling and dancing. Not going to bed until 1am when I felt I had fully discharged the energy.

With that fully felt and complete, this article decided to come through.

Reunion is not repair

Do not confuse reunion with repair, or closeness with coherence.

Reunion is proximity: the same car, the same cave, the same holiday table, the same text thread started up again after a long gap. Repair is a different critter altogether, and it requires two people willing to look at what happened and say true things about it. You can have a great deal of the first and none of the second, and if you are a woman who was raised to smooth things over, you will be tempted to read the proximity as progress and give away another decade waiting for the rest of it to come.

Closeness works the same way. Closeness is frequency and access and knowing the details of a person's week. Coherence is whether the relationship makes sense — whether what is said matches what is done, whether your presence in it costs you the essence of yourself.

Not every relationship needs to be broken. Not every relationship needs to be deep. But it may be important to not confuse the two.

That distinction has done more for my peace than any amount of processing. A relationship can be perfectly fine at the depth of a shared dinner and a warm hug at the door, and turn problematic or even corrosive at the depth of daily intimacy, and the loving act is to define where it actually works rather than either forcing the depth or blowing the whole thing up.

Because love and access are not the same thing.

You can love someone and still decide that the form of intimacy you once shared is no longer available.

Ending a way of relating

Most of what I have ended in recent years has not been a relationship. It has been a way of relating.

Respecting another person does not mean agreeing with their choices, or protecting them from the consequences of those choices. It means recognizing their right to choose without surrendering my own right to respond.

So the message I find myself sending, in one form or another, sounds like this: I love you, and I always will, and I am gently pulling back from our deeper relating. I would be delighted to see you at family and social gatherings, because I love you and I want to be friendly, and I am not up for deeper intimate relating in the current scenario.

That is not a punishment and it is not a door slammed. It is naming a mismatch in the kind of deeper relating each of us is interested in, said out loud instead of left to fester underneath the pleasantries. It can hurt a lot to realize what is so, and there may be grief, but there is blessed peace and freedom on the other side.

Skipping the discomfort of grief is how a woman ends up doing this countless more times over.

The metric I used

When I chose divorce, I did not choose it flippantly, and it was not about resisting the momentary stress and pressure that is inevitable in any relationship — we had weathered twenty-plus years, four children, building and remodeling multiple homes, and a dozen-plus moves just fine. I decided with awareness, and in retrospect this is the grid I used.

"If the essence of your being, your character, is not admired, seen with fondness, or disregarded on a long-term basis — that is not supportive of the love that you are. Nor perhaps, is it supportive of the other person's being and the love that they are."
— Love Without End

If too many of your days in a relationship include loneliness, frustration, sadness, and an unwillingness on either side to change the contributing patterns, it is worth considering better days. If you have been doing your inner work and there is an ever-widening gulf between you and the other person, the question to ask is what supports the fresh, evolving woman you are becoming.

This is not about a difficult season, the normal demands of intimate life, or the temporary contraction that comes when a relationship asks both people to grow. Relationships will ask things of us. They will sometimes tire us, frustrate us, expose us and inconvenience us.

The question is whether the difficulty is serving growth, or whether the pattern has become one of chronic diminishment.

Choose the course of action that honors your value and the value of Love, which does not mean sticking it out at all costs, because that can be the opposite of loving action.

Underneath the metric is free will, which I understand now as an extension of intuition — the power of my own heart paired with Spirit's higher leadings — and which I express with far more conviction than the sideways, passive version I ran for many years of my marriage.

"The very fact of having free will is what liberates you from the imprisonment of circumstance. You may initiate changes to make a situation compatible with your love, and you can choose not to support those situations that deny your love."
— Love Without End

Four things a relationship is meant to be in service to

That metric still holds, and if I were to say it today I would say it more simply: a relationship needs to be in service to Life, to Freedom, to Intelligence, and to Love, and when it stops being in service to those, it is time to look hard at it.

The looking usually starts with having the courage to break your own heart, which is painful and uncomfortable, and which also seems to be the exact spot where a seed cracks open to germinate new life. The choices that give us new life are rarely available to us before it.

Life.
When the relationship no longer gives you life and energy — when, over and over again, the hours after are hours you spend recovering, rather than hours you spend building — it has stopped serving Life.

Freedom.
When remaining in the relationship repeatedly requires you to trade your truth, vitality, voice, desire, or self-respect for belonging, then whatever else the relationship is doing, it is no longer serving Freedom. A woman who must continually shrink in order to stay, is paying in a currency that devours her freedom.

Intelligence.
When a relationship is no longer feeding intelligent life structures, when it draws down instead of building, when it becomes mired in a murky, mucky, defensive, contractual, he-said-she-said swirl, it has stopped serving Intelligence. This one is worth watching for, because the swirl is absorbing and it can pass for closeness. Two people can be deeply engaged in a fog and mistake the engagement for connection.

Love.
When the nature of the relationship is not restorative or generative, it is time to at least step back and put an arm's-length stance in place, and stepping back is the point rather than severing — one does not have to cut all ties in order to make a declarative statement about the kind of relationship one is up for.

That is what the declarative statement is doing: taking back my own power and my own choice, in Love, and giving them their power and their choice back, in Love, so that there is freedom on both sides rather than a slow obligation dragging behind us.

It does not mean we stop speaking, or stop showing up at family gatherings and what-have-you. It means the relating is much pulled back, and much more in care and nurture toward my own heart, my own energy, my own Life, my own Intelligence, and my own Freedom.

So allow yourself to cry, and allow yourself to step back, and allow yourself to declare this is the way that I want to relate, and you are either willing to play with me in this way or you are not, and it is up to you, with full choice and absolute freedom for all parties involved, and then bless them on their way.

It is not harsh, and it is not rash, to hold your heart and your energy with tender care and to make your decisions on behalf of them.

Of course my own chart has something to say about it

I have Pluto in Libra sitting in my angular 7th house, the house of one-to-one relationships and partnership, and it makes a tight trine to my Sun and Mercury together in Gemini in my 3rd house, the house of thinking and speaking and the everyday world around me.

Translated out of the jargon: the transformational, underworld, nothing-stays-buried energies reach me most readily through the people I am closest to, and there is a helpful nature to it. My identity, my sense of who I am, and the words I have available to say about it have each been rebuilt through relationship, more than once, and the rebuilding now tends to feel less like a catastrophe than like a door opening that I get to walk through or decline.

This is what I mean when I say relationship is my extreme sport. I am not built to have a mild, unexamined connection to a person and leave it there. I am built to go all the way in, which is glorious, and which also means the discipline I have had to develop is the discipline of the exit — and calling it.

The queenly state

Backing up a bit to my drive down to Virginia, prior to the graduation, I stopped for the night in a small Ohio town and flipped the TV on to see what was there, and It Ends With Us was playing. I had seen it before.

What struck me again was the way the main character holds a balance that most of us think we have to choose between: she claims safety and coherence for herself and her baby daughter, and she sees the man who harmed her as a human being, and she holds forgiveness for him, and she does. not. go. back — a ferocious, ruthless line for herself — and grace held at the same time.

That is the queenly state: a ruthless line without the requirement of a villain.

A woman does not have to hate someone in order to stop allowing them intimate access to her.

And it is the field I want to keep cultivating in myself and in the women I engage with. It applies well beyond marriage: it is how we hold sexuality, money, motherhood, and our own deepest desires — in full view, without shame for having them, without abandoning ourselves over the cost of them, and without wallowing in a puddle of guilt over the people who would prefer we wanted less.

It is responsibility without self-punishment.

I can own where I have hurt someone, misjudged something, stayed too long, left imperfectly, or created consequences for myself and others. I can regret what deserves regret without making regret my permanent home. I can take responsibility without turning against myself.

That, too, is part of holding heaven on earth.

So — when is it time?

It is time when the essence of who you are is disregarded on a long-term basis and there is no willingness to change it. It is time when you have confused reunion with repair for so long that you have stopped asking for repair. It is time when a relationship is coherent at one depth and corrosive at another, and you have been insisting on the wrong depth out of loyalty to who you all used to be.

It is time when the honest answer to Life, Freedom, Intelligence, and Love is No on more than one count, and has been for a while.

And ending a way of relating is rarely the end of love.

I have done a great deal of forgiving, of my former husband and of myself, for the limitations we each had. Divorce was hell, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy, and it was also one of the most incredible gifts of my life, because the exquisite pain was followed by exquisite peace, power, and pleasure as a regular part of my days.

Seven years ago, I needed to leave in order to become myself.

This week I discovered that I no longer needed him to meet me in order to remain myself.

I did not need to repair the silence, punish it, diagnose it, extract anything from it, or make it mean anything about my worth. I could allow him his choice and remain fully inside mine.

Six hours of silence did not undo any of that. It confirmed it.

And then I drove home with every window down. ;-)