The Difference Between Co-dependency and Love

Strands of Night and Fire

1

We return, pigeons and salmon, to the places we abandoned and to the places where we were abandoned. Our secrets, each of them, years worth, spill out of our mouths like rubies and other precious stones. Doesn’t matter if there is no one around to hear our telling. We scatter those secrets like other broken things, fragile and winged. We wait for absolution much longer than we should. We bury our secrets. We forget our dead.

2

“I ruined everything again,” I say to my psychiatrist, Kathy. We were already scheduled to meet today. “All I needed to do was let him have one night. That’s all he wanted.”

“Until next week, when he would have asked for a second night, and then a third. Don’t you see? He was never going to give you what you wanted. You can’t make him healthy. You can’t make him the right one for you. He is not the right one for you.”

That’s as much as she wants to talk about it, this psychiatrist who worried that I would relapse and prescribed me medication that might make my skin fall off. I want to talk about nothing but him—about Jay, the man who I’ve been cheating on my wife with. Present tense, cheating, though there is nothing present tense about me and him. We’ve ended our relationship twice in the last month. I think this time it’s for keeps.

The first time because I spied on him and his friends using drugs. The second time, a bit more than a day ago, because I essentially told him he had to pick between me and using drugs.

He didn’t pick me.

“I love him,” I say.

“And then you won’t. That’s what will happen. You love him now. You won’t love him later.”

I make a follow-up appointment for two weeks from now. Kathy thinks seeing me again that soon is for the best.

“Don’t relapse,” she cautions, when she walks me to the receptionist. “And think about why his not wanting to hang out affected you as much as it did. There’s something to that.”

She adds to her list of recommendations: Keep taking the Lamictal. Find ways to distract myself. Keep the appointment with the therapist. Call if I need to talk about anything.

3

We’ve all had our hearts broken. You have to start counting days since you last saw, touched, kissed, loved the man or woman who broke your heart. Start at zero. There’s likely an app that breaks days down into more manageable accomplishments. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. Then longer periods. Weeks. Months. Years.

People fake forget until they for-real forget. They wear rubber bands around their wrists to help break a bad habit. When they think about the habit—the person or the activity—or when they engage in the behavior, they snap the rubber band, which trains their mind to link the habit with pain. Pain as reinforcement. Touching and re-touching a stove hot enough to peel and blister skin. Similar to, but not quite like, cutting.

4

“I’m sorry for all of this,” I say to Holly. I’ve lost track of the number of ways I’ve told her the same thing. The apologies piled in front of her like candles, each lit with an unspoken promise to not do it again.

5

Days three and four are failures. If getting over someone is like dieting, then I’ve used a month’s worth of cheat days before losing a pound. Yoga helps, and I’m finding a kind of solace in spending an hour, sometimes two, on the treadmill. Up to 4.8 miles in an hour, and I can almost fit into medium tank tops. Down a pants size. Failures, days three and four, which means I’m back to zero. Start counting days since I last saw, touched, kissed, loved Jay.

6

The universe, with her wicked humor and blue-green laugh, pleased with herself. My therapist’s last name is Locke, which means nothing unless you know that for my birthday, Jay gave me the key to his childhood bedroom, asked me to wear it as a necklace, and told me that when we got married, he would melt it and turn it into my wedding band. This way, he said, I would wear his past as a symbol of our future together.

Jean takes a family history then asks me to tell her about my reasons for seeing her.

The Wurlitzer organ signals the start of the ride. I’ve selected a thoroughbred this go-around. Ignore the rabbits; they’re nothing but trouble. A frog and toad in front of me, a tiger and lion behind. The carousel is safe, only as fast as it is programmed to be. My thoughts, currently tamed by medication, let loose to run.

The website, and the first date, and the drugs, then the recording and the suicide attempts and my stay at St. Elizabeth’s. The proposal and the party and the day he met Avery; then this week of text messages and what I found there.

“He wasn’t the only addict,” she says. “You were just as addicted, but to the possibility of him. You had been living a lie. You did not know how to have a healthy relationship with him because he is not healthy. You were constantly reacting to what he did and said instead of just being with him.”

“He’s been hurt before. He said he loved me more than he has ever loved anyone. And I hurt him. I was careless with him. If I had been better able to help him, or if I had known how to help him, then he and I would still be together.”

“You’re spending too much time talking about him and not enough time talking about yourself,” Jean says.

“But how I was with him is who I am.”

“You were a version of yourself with him, but you were not you. You can’t be hung up on someone who is no longer an option. If you don’t take care of your emotional needs, you will continue attracting men who don’t take care of their emotional needs and are unable to take care of your emotional needs as well. He took advantage of a weakness he saw in you.”

“A weakness?”

“You had a void. He recognized it because he has a similar void in himself. He knew he could get from you what he needed. He manipulated you.”

“I don’t think that’s true.” I say. “I don’t have a void.”

“Then who are you?”

“I’m a single father. I’m a husband, barely. I’m a friend.”

“Don’t tell me who you are in relation to everyone else. Who are you?”

“I don’t know who I am separate from who I am with other people.”

“That’s right. You don’t know who you are. You’re afraid of people not wanting you, and afraid of people leaving you, so you pick people who will never work out so that the outcome is that they leave you or don’t pick you. They walk away from you. That’s the cycle. You play out the one thing you don’t want to happen just to prove yourself right. And then it happens and you wonder why.”

“Nobody wants to be rejected,” I say. “No one wants to be left behind.”

“Then break the cycle. And if you don’t think you’re ready to break the cycle, then ask yourself why. You’re the only one standing in your way.”

“I am not standing in my way. I don’t want to feel what I feel anymore. I don’t want to feel, if the only thing I’m feeling is hurt. I love him. I thought he was the one.”

“You picked someone you couldn’t end up with,” Jean says.

“I lied to him about being married. I led him on. He fell in love with me. I wasn’t available. But I thought I would be available.”

“He’s a drug addict. He wasn’t and isn’t available.”

“But he didn’t lie.”

“All addicts lie, Will. The pills?”

She’s good, I think. She pays attention, and she listened to me, even when I felt like I was leaving out important details and that the story wasn’t coming out right.

“He said it was only that one time.”

“Wasn’t that one time one time too many?”

“I loved him enough to risk our relationship.”

“And you lost him to his addiction. There was no getting him back. Even if you had been single and available for a relationship with him, you wouldn’t have gotten it. You and he developed an unhealthy co-dependency. You thought you could fix him. He liked that you took care of him.”

“I miss him,” I say.

“Moving on is the best thing you can do, because otherwise you will get stuck.”

“I am stuck. How will I find someone else who will love me and my kids?”

“Thinking you can move past him and this experience by jumping into the first relationship that presents itself, or that you think you can make work, is co-dependent thinking.”

“What’s the difference between co-dependency and love?”

“When you don’t have to ask me that, then you’ll know what the difference is.”

Would anything be different if Jean had been able to see me last week? Thinking so is a bit like blaming her for things going wrong, though.

Don’t count the days I talk to Jean about Jay. I have to talk to Jean about Jay. Part of the process. So these days don’t count. And if I’m going to succeed, then I have to allow some room for him. A picture developed in reverse. Image to negative to camera click. Nothing left to expose. Everything out on the table.

Jean suggests distractions are in order, as is finding other support systems. Groups out there, for people like me.

“Gay?” I ask.

“Struggling,” she counters.

7

A morning in front of the computer, and I find, and read, and then re-read, an eleven-page PDF abstract of a 200-page document called “The Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations.”

Long-term worldwide effects.

Multiple nuclear weapons detonations.

So, something worse than my relationship with Jay ending.

Explosions in the sky and in the ground and in the world that Holly and I built. Long-term worldwide effects. Ripples and ripples and ripples again.

A different therapist, Erin, said that hearts are muscles. To build muscle, you have to break down what you have, so it can rebuild itself bigger and stronger.

Broken hearts are just waiting for the right reason to be fixed. Or she said something like broken hearts are just waiting for the right reason to be fixed. I wasn’t fully listening to Erin, when she talked about broken hearts, convinced that my heart would not be broken for long. He’d come around, I thought. Give him time.

After becoming kings and queens, the Pevensie siblings, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, return through the wardrobe, children again.

Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gangee see the ring destroyed in a fire of lava. Ariel gets back her voice and marries her prince. True love’s kiss wakes up the sleeping beauty.

The glass slipper fits Cinderella’s foot. Harry, Hermione, and Ron survive the Battle of Hogwarts.

To return from her adventures on the other side of the looking glass, and from her journey through Wonderland, Alice has to wake up.