When romance is used as a (poor) excuse to harm people
Welcome to Dressing Down by Ainslie Caswell. Join our community on Substack or Medium, listen to audio monologues on YouTube (@ainslieaudio), or explore the studio at ainsliecaswell.com.
Pain is often treated as inevitable instead of something we can prevent through accountability. We grow up surrounded by stories in which romance is used to excuse harm, loving intensely takes precedence over responsibility, and heartbreak becomes an unavoidable cost of desire.
However, I keep thinking about the ways we describe attractiveness in young people. We call someone a “heartbreaker” and say, “He’s going to break a lot of hearts.” When people enter their first relationships, we assume they will get their hearts broken. There are even tropes of fathers warning young boys not to break their daughters’ hearts, knowing almost certainly that it will happen. Somehow, we have learned to treat pain as an inevitable part of love rather than asking why it happens so often.
Pain is often treated as inevitable.
My first experience with intimacy of any kind was with a quite innocent boyfriend in middle school. He asked me to be his girlfriend. He was my first kiss. Subsequently, he broke up with me after eight weeks. I took it very poorly because I didn’t have a very good support network around me. Moreover, the adults closest to me didn’t model the best romantic relationships themselves. Looking back, I wonder how much of what I learned about love came from watching people navigate relationships without considering the consequences for those around them. Romance was used to excuse harm long before I had the language to recognize the pattern.
I primarily lived with my father while growing up, and he dated many women. I formed relationships with several of them, so sometimes I was very sad when I learned they were never coming back. Other times, it simply felt as though he was being pulled away from me whenever he was with someone because his excitement about someone new became so intense. Meanwhile, there was often no adult to replace him when his attention shifted. His dating habits left me unexpectedly alone, and I struggled to understand why the excitement of a new relationship seemed to matter more than the emotional needs of the child already in his life. When I think about how romance is used to excuse harm, I recognize how easily the needs of people outside a couple can become secondary to the feelings between them.
My mother entered a second marriage, but she didn’t introduce her new husband to me very well. For many years, I resented this new man in my life because he felt like a stranger who had been forced upon me. The good news is that he and his family eventually became the family I needed. Unfortunately, however, the work of bridging that relationship became mine while I was still a child. I had to navigate feelings I didn’t fully understand while the adults around me made decisions that changed my life. Although the relationship eventually became a source of support, that outcome doesn’t erase the difficulty of how it began.
Because so many of these relationships unfolded early in my life, I had trouble understanding why seemingly easy missteps that caused me distress happened so often. Didn’t my parents care whether I felt abandoned or alienated? Why didn’t anybody ask how I felt before taking actions that affected me? Why were my emotions secondary? I didn’t have the words for it then, but I was learning that other people’s desires could take priority over my emotional security. Romance used to excuse harm, and the expectation seemed to be that I should simply adjust to the consequences.
Now that I’m an adult with a voice, I recognize that it has taken me a long time to learn how to use it. When you enter the working world, and most other facets of society, people instruct you to assimilate. We assimilate in our intimate relationships, too. Somehow, we accept that people will do things that inevitably break our hearts. We even romanticize the intensity of those experiences, as though the depth of our suffering proves the depth of our love. However, I no longer believe that heartbreak should be the price of admission to intimacy. We can acknowledge that relationships involve uncertainty without treating preventable pain as a necessary ingredient.
For the first time, I’m in a domestic polyamorous relationship. It is beautiful, and it is complicated. The one thing I need is transparency, but my partner is having trouble understanding the pace at which I need to know things. There are so many things I love and appreciate about what we have together. I have the freedom to seek much-needed types of support from different people in my life, as does my partner, and there doesn’t need to be secrecy or guilt. We talk openly about everything in our lives. Nevertheless, having such a close relationship doesn’t automatically make our communication problems disappear. Love may create the motivation to work through difficulties, but it doesn’t eliminate the responsibility to do that work.
In fact, we have to work harder on communication than in any relationship I’ve ever been in. For most of my life, I’ve been trying to get people to stop and look into the future with me. I know it’s hard work, but often we can see what’s coming if we pause and focus. It isn’t fun to anticipate the bad stuff, but sometimes we can recognize a problem before it happens. And if we see it coming, we may be able to avoid it altogether. Then it doesn’t have to happen at all. Romance is often used to excuse harm by making the consequences of our choices seem unavoidable, but I’ve long believed that foresight and accountability can change the outcome.
And isn’t that better? Isn’t it better if the pain doesn’t come at all?
Rather than ignoring the repercussions of our choices and assuming that pain may or may not happen, I’ve started asking more emphatically for those closest to me to stop and peer into the future with me. Every rose may have thorns, but we can anticipate how sharp they might be. We cannot prevent every misunderstanding or disappointment. However, we can make thoughtful choices, communicate before our decisions affect others, and take responsibility when we get something wrong. Romance may be used to excuse harm superficially, but I want intimacy to teach us how to care for one another more deliberately.
I was under the impression that we were supposed to hold each other’s hearts with care. When I dated my boyfriend at thirteen, I told him there were problems in my family and that I generally didn’t get along with either of my parents. I told him I was unhappy, and I told him I was suicidal. I also told him that dating him was helping me because it made me want to show up at school. I didn’t tell him that dating him made me want to stay alive or gave me a reason to live. The truth was that his affection showed me someone could offer me genuine love, and it gave me hope for the future. It showed me that there was a world beyond the one I knew. Then, a week after I shared these things with him, he broke up with me. It was out of fear, out of pressure from his parents, or perhaps for reasons I still don’t know.
I was broken, and I felt more alone than ever. The idea that someone genuinely cared about my well-being was all but shattered. Moreover, the case I had tried to make for my safety and well-being to anyone who would listen was brushed away by his preference for feeling comfortable. I had expressed the fact that I wanted to die, yet no one was taking it especially seriously. Again, I didn’t say this boy made me want to live. My point was that having someone independently see me as worthy of love gave me the courage to show up every day. Nothing my parents, friends, or school had given me previously had made me want to do that. Romance used to excuse harm in the stories I knew, but I was too young to understand that someone could have genuine feelings for me and still be unable to offer the care I needed.
I felt as though I had given my heart to someone, and then he ran away with it. For years, this pattern continued. By that, I mean this boy revisited my life over and over. He never truly gave my heart back to me. I learned the word limerence many years later, and I’m still not entirely sure whether I was in love with him or loved him for who he was. What I do know is that his affection found me at a very fragile time in my life. Without the proper support underneath me, I grabbed onto the way he saw me and couldn’t let go. I also couldn’t let go of the way he couldn’t let me go. He never said goodbye, but he never truly came back, either. That unresolved space between affection and absence shaped my understanding of intimacy for years.
Now, I find myself in my first domestic polyamorous relationship, and I’m very preoccupied with transparency. To be fair to myself, I don’t think I’m asking for anything outrageous. However, communication can be tedious, especially when I have to explain repeatedly why my feelings deserve to be considered so thoroughly. Frankly, I don’t want to have to overexplain why my emotional well-being matters. I want to be informed of basic information when it becomes relevant to our intimate lives. I don’t think this type of relationship, or any other relationship involving intimacy, should come prepackaged with a certain amount of pain or heartbreak.
Ultimately, romance shouldn’t be used to excuse harm.
I’m trying to build something different. We are smart enough to handle each other’s emotions with care. We can be honest about our needs, acknowledge the consequences of our choices, and recognize that transparency is not an unreasonable demand. Every rose has its thorn, but we don’t have to romanticize the wounds. We can love each other intensely while remaining responsible for how that love affects the people we hold close.
0 comments