college friends. He was a very sociable guy with a good sense of humor. By dating him, I did not have to deal with the multitude of decisions, rejections, and disappointments of dating other people. I did not have to think about me, about my values, my identity, my beliefs. I was able to mindlessly be in a relationship that was respectable and pleasing. I thought I was happy.
I thought I was happy until my senior year in college.
It was the spring of that year, 1974. I was to marry in May and graduate with my class shortly thereafter. I was doing it right by the book. My college friends were to be in my wedding. By the end of June I would have a degree and a husband, and return to live in the city in which I grew up.
My husband-to-be and I were at a sorority dance that spring. Somewhere, somehow, it came to me that night that I really did not want to go through with this wedding. Over the course of the evening I tried to explain this to my fiancé, and, by the end of the night, I had returned my engagement ring. Some part of me was aware that going this route of marriage now just didn’t feel right.
Within a day of my breaking off the engagement, my family and friends were asking to talk with me about what was happening. The details of those conversations escape me still, even my feelings at that time. The end result of those conversations, however, I do recall: I changed my mind and decided to reinstate the engagement and proceed with the wedding as planned.
And so we were married in May, and I graduated in June. We lived in the city where I grew up, and I entered graduate school there.
Now to be clear, this story is about me. It is not about what other people did to me or my life. Granted, my life has been influenced by my relationships with others. However, here and now I am describing my fledgling self, a self that was just starting to be heard by me and was trying to speak up. But I was not really aware of this, and so I only experienced much of this as a big mess that I made and I needed to clean up.
We were married two years. My husband remained the fun-loving, generally attentive guy I had dated, and he offered comfort and companionship. I believe, however, that I was just not comfortable with the idea of being married. I was in graduate school during those years and worked in a psychiatric hospital. We lived in a townhouse in an urban area and had some fun decorating it and making it home. But I did not feel quite right with things.
My doubts about being married remained and grew. Over time I saw that there were important differences in the way my husband and I liked to spend time, in the company we would keep, and in some of our values. We decided to end our marriage.
I had no idea then that I was working on finding my self. Looking back on it now, I can see that a voice in me that hardly knew any words wanted me to know that I could not simply keep following external expectations, whether they were real or imagined by me. I was mindlessly living my life.
I had no idea I was mindless. If you had asked me, I would have thought I was rather focused and purposeful. I had always been a successful student, worker, and daughter. I tried very hard to please many people and seemed to succeed at that. I was rarely “in trouble.”
My life looked pretty good, and in many ways felt pretty good, as I reaped benefits from my successes. But inside me, things were feeling confused and unsettled. I needed to do something different.
So I finished my master’s degree and moved to the Shenandoah Valley, about three hours away from my childhood home. A new job took me in this direction. I was aware that I wanted to get out of the city and into the country. What I wasn’t aware of then was that I also wanted to get some physical space for my self.
It wasn’t until this time in my twenties that I realized how much I was influenced by my desire to please others. I cared so much about keeping my parents, my teachers, my friends happy with me. I feared their disapproval and their anger. I hated having anyone mad with me. It meant feelings of being bad and wrong. So I almost always tried to be good and to do things “right.”
“Right” meant doing things according to the books, according to spoken and unspoken shoulds. “Right” meant “Do as I say.” Certainly “right” also means doing things that are moral and ethical, and I am comfortable with that. It’s just that my actions, my decisions, my behaviors were governed by watching those people whom I was trying to please and selecting a response or course of action that seemed to be what they wanted. And I mean I literally watched. I watched their faces and their behaviors for clues about how I thought they were feeling toward me.
I can still watch people. Even now, if I am feeling anxious and worried in my relationships with certain people, I will regress to my watching behavior. I look outside of my self and to others. I watch what their faces are showing me and listen carefully to clues in their speech or behaviors that tell me if they are disapproving or mad with me. I wonder what they are thinking and feeling. I want to know what they want from me, what would please them, what would make them happy, what would keep them from being angry with me.
To begin my escape from this pattern, I came to live in the Valley. I was moved to this action by a small, internal voice/ feeling that said this would be something I would like to do. And I was blessed by my ability to do so.
One of the good things about this rather random move was that it put me in a community in which I have been very happy. When I moved here, I told my self that this would be for at least two years. Two years have turned into thirty-three. This is now home to me.
Another good thing about this move was that I met the man who was to become my second husband and to whom I am still married. Through my years in a twelve-step program of recovery for the family members and significant others of people who suffer from addiction, I have come to understand what people mean when they say, “I’m glad I’m married to an alcoholic.” They mean that this brought them into the program that has transformed their lives. The program has brought them to a level of peace and acceptance that they never knew possible. The program has helped them to focus on their own lives and to greatly enhance their spirituality. In this same way, I say it is good that I moved out here and met my husband, for my relationship with him led me to yet greater depths of “lostness in the other” and, subsequently, to finding my way out.
“Are you mad at me?”
The Second Twenty-or- So Years
“If only I knew what he wanted from me.”
For the first eleven years of my life here in the Valley, I frolicked in my insanity unknowingly. By day I worked as the psychotherapist-of-delinquents. By night I took ballet classes, danced with a small dance company, and acted in summer stock theater. I fixed up my home, socialized with new friends, and enjoyed my cats. In many ways the times were good and just what I needed for autonomy and identity development. Granted, we know of those tasks as belonging to the adolescent phase of development. But there is no doubt in my mind that I did not really work on those developmental tasks until I was in my twenties. Prior to then I had appeared independent, but there was little independent thought and substance to me. I was driven by my needs to please others, to avoid conflict, and, as my work supervisor described me, to be “obsessively over-responsible.”
In the context of Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, as a result of having delayed the identity formation task of adolescence until my twenties, I was “behind” in my development related to the next stage—the cultivation of healthy intimate relationships. So during the first four or five years of living in the Valley, I dated some men and threw away one or two
