At the end of 2010, I meet Eline at the Activity Center where I had enjoyed working for a number of years. She is a young woman who is six years older than me. I find new energy in myself and we fall in love. She gives up her relationship for me, something that later turns out to be a particularly persistent pattern for her. I am so incredibly in love that I justify it morally in order to be able to be with her. In the end we are together and that makes for a very beautiful time. We send each other endless emails, simply because we want to see each other as well as possible, and be seen as well as possible ourselves, because that is what was lacking in our youth. Eline also has psychological problems, but of a completely different kind than I have. I had decided for myself that I wanted a woman who was a bit tougher, a bit stronger, and Eline fulfilled that requirement perfectly. She was a very tough girl. I was addicted to being intimate with her, and I loved her very much, but she sometimes tended towards the antisocial. When I became irritated by this, she did not really respond with understanding, and she wanted to avoid her responsibility. When we had shared so much with each other, and we had kind of ‘exhausted’ each other, she would start to focus more on herself. I had a hard time dealing with that, being the obsessive person I am, and regularly lost my temper when she did or said something antisocial. I would invariably get a reaction that I could not handle. But my love for her was so strong, and I enjoyed being with her so much, that I did not want to give her up. For months I declined further and further. And every time we made up again, but this could not go on forever. And she in turn distanced herself more and more, because she found me a bit smothering.
At a certain point she went to do months of therapy. She went to live on her own as well, and we would go to couples therapy at her therapy location. I remember it as a very pleasant time. I took many long train rides to that clinic, and would listen to music by Rush, an American rock band. Seeing Eline was so much fun every time. We clicked in so many ways. But what remained was that she distanced herself more and more because of my anger, and the relationship therapy eventually ended in a ‘break in the relationship’. We talked about needs in that therapy, and that according to the therapist, Eline perhaps had the need to be courted. I found this ridiculous, because I find it difficult to be positive towards her all the time, I think the negative should also be able to be expressed. In the end, she decided to break up with me.
It was actually very strange how that relationship therapist treated us. He constantly asked Eline what she thought about things, probably because she was so introverted, but he never asked me what I thought about things, probably because he thought I could already express that. But this gave me a very skewed picture and gave me the idea that my needs for the relationship were completely unrealistic and that it was only about Eline’s needs. I had the feeling that I had to be someone else, and that was the moment that my self-confidence started to crumble again. The amount of strength that had already been eroding since the part-time therapy had run out. I told the relationship therapist and he wanted to see me once without Eline. Then he admitted that he had made a mistake and that he had not thought that his therapy would have this effect.
A few months later, however, I got back in touch with Eline. We decided to meet again. It seemed that this was the real ‘break in the relationship’ that we had tried before. I went to see her and decided to take the relationship therapist’s words to heart and try to charm her like crazy for a while. When it all had no effect and she still did not want to be intimate with me, I drew the line and said that I would otherwise give up and no longer want any contact. And that helped, because then she suddenly did want to. It’s amazing how that can work. Before we were ‘back on’, however, she had something else to confess to me, and that was that she had had sex with another man she had met in that clinic. I was extremely angry and almost wanted to leave, but she begged me to stay. I decided to give it another try (because I was still very much in love, so much so that I put my moral objections aside again). We had a few more pleasant weeks. Until we had an argument about something small. She completely ignored my needs in that regard, and then I thought back to all the times she had done that before. I told her that I had serious doubts about whether I should continue with this. And then she got so angry that it made it even easier for me to distance myself. I had used her to restore some of my self-confidence, so it was to expect that she was angry. But that was the end of our relationship, which had lasted a year and a half.
What was clear was that I was in great need. You don’t do such things otherwise, even if at the time it wasn’t conscious. And she in turn also did things she shouldn’t have done. But I really regretted how it turned out, because she was a very great love of mine.
By that time I had deteriorated to the point that I needed more counseling. A good Belgian psychiatrist named Dimphy Peeters agreed to help me, still in the Anxiety and Mood Disorders department. She really gave me a lot of attention and apologized for not being able to help me sooner. At a certain point she had had enough and saw the seriousness of the situation, so she decided to intervene. She made unpleasant remarks until I lost my temper with her. She strongly disapproved, and when I started crying, she disapproved of that too. I had not been used to this in recent years. They had handled me very carefully for years to prevent deterioration, but once you have reached the point where you are going to undermine your self-confidence, which is very dangerous, then it is time for the hard approach.
I walked through the streets crying. I understood why she did it, but it felt like I was once again the guilty one in the story, and I only got more of the same negativity thrown at me. I didn’t think I deserved it, but again, I understood why she did it. By repeating the trauma in a moderate way, I could once again be forced to deal with it differently. Something they had also done in the clinic, after all, through the extremely confrontational attitude of my head therapist Anke van Brunssum at the time. But I really felt that I should never be angry again. What happened next is quite special: I only was going to allow myself to be sweet to others…
