[haha Jo, yes i included your note with it :)]
Another fab one! What’s that song?
Have a great day – help yourself to any food you find in the cupboards.  There’s de-caf coffee in the coffee machine.
If you’re in town later drop me a line – I’ll be out with some of the girls from work but I’m not sure how long I’ll last before they get overexcited and suggest karaoke, and I feel the need to disappear… xx

I sit here writing this at Jo’s place after many a vodka and more hours of solving the world’s endless supply of problems – not quite 6am this time, but a typically lengthy session exploring how we all work, why things are the way they are and how it all could be. Aside from having to repetitively tell her to go to bed as we keep getting back into conversation, my brain is slightly addled and almost out of words from hours of back to back meetings and introducing myself to almost 20 new people tonight during my flat-hunting extravaganza. Her casa es mi casa, so John Mayer is on in the background as I think my way through a gorgeous London evening where I’ve driven past a McDonald’s in Brixton that a 14 year old child was gunned down in broad daylight just a week or so ago.

I feel only one kiss away from madness, and one lifetime from wonder. I wish I could see the stars so I could realise just how small I am.

Life is just one incredible tapestry of paradoxes and I love being overwhelmed by not being able to understand them. Today I learned that you can love someone and yet not have anything to do with them. Some things can’t be healed and some people just can’t be reached. You can’t teach the blind to see or the deaf to hear, no matter how hard you try in spite of everything. Last night I gave in and let go of a love of my life and a friend I will never meet again. There’s beauty in that kind of tragedy somewhere. It was hard but I asked myself if I had a sign above my head saying “ABUSE ME” that was given to me when I was small that other people in the world decided to notice later on. You can love them and not put up with them or live with them.

The games we play never win us the things we ultimately want. Playing becomes the end, rather than the means. It’s amazing what you don’t see because you are too closely involved in the madness – justifying it, explaining it or defending yourself when there is no need to. You don’t see what they are doing, but when you finally open your eyes, it’s a revelation. As Mr Mayer says, it’s like punching underwater as you can never hit what you’re trying for. You have your hands full of dealing with what is front of you so the bigger picture is lost. They want you to see. They want you to get a deliberate impression of how things are so you’ll feel a certain way. They always want the upper hand when there is no need to have it. Control appears to be safety but always becomes the prison warden and the fuel that perpetuates the problem. They can’t see it themselves.

And they learn you’ll always come back, as their cynicism shines through at the darkest moments to reveal the callous nature of the fear itself that drives them. They learn they can treat you as they want because of the love, kindness and understanding you show in the face of such dreadful provocation, even after you’ve had your own very dark moments. You question yourself and ask yourself whether you really are the monster they are making you out to be, or have made you become through the pressure they’ve put you under. What you are to them is the sum of their greatest fears, worst experiences and what they ultimately expect you to be.

For them, everything is a game, a tactic, a hidden message or a way of you trying to get at them. Their relationships become months-long arguments and power struggles. Dealing with them is like addressing a child that doesn’t know why things are the way they are and knows no other way.

But then there is that one moment that changes everything. You let go. You say do what you want, be as you want and I will no longer try to be there for you because the cost is just too high. You’re trying to make one of the biggest decisions of your life and all they are interesting in doing is insulting you. You love them more than anything but there is no more you can take, even just to be their friend. You try, and try again because you see them shine and fly. You bend until you break. You fight but realise they’re not fighting with you, but against you. You cry for them, suffer for them and your heart breaks. The cycle has restarted so many times and they are so convinced you are in the game with them that it all becomes just another corner for them to turn to have their way. But it’s only you there. Your bond is so powerful that you can break each other’s hearts from across the country without even seeing each other.

But strangely enough, these people aren’t malicious in what they do. In fact a lot of them know no other way and don’t even realise they are doing it. It was a way of surviving what they suffered and it was what was done to them. Games get what you want you want very quickly and effectively, but the sting in the tail is that the short-term gains hide the overwhelming long-term damage and loss. Make them jealous and you get your reaction, but destroy their trust in you. Make them sad, and they lose a piece of their affection for you. Ignore them and they may draw close to you, but another piece of intimacy is ruined. Hurt them and you’ll know they care, but their heart seals up. Games are the antithesis of intimacy. They destroy and negate it.

They don’t know how to communicate humanly and honestly. They never take responsibility for their actions, blaming everyone else – they play the victim and you are the monster, when they have led you down the path to being the evil they themselves fear. You will always be wrong. They know how to attract someone and start a relationship, but not continue one. Everything is final and concrete, there is no rest or peace and there is only their brick wall. All problems are finite and terminal. There is nothing you can do to escape the fact you will only ever end up being the monster no matter who you are. Their relationships always turn out the same way, as they always behave the same way in the same pattern. There is no friend or partner out there who will ever be strong enough, calm enough or wise enough to deal with them. To them, relationships are about power and having the upper hand, even if they don’t know it themselves.

Therein lies one of our paradoxes. In trying to drive out the demons, they conjure them instead.

One of the strangest phenomena I’ve ever witnessed is what Jo and I christened the “Manipulative Mirror Effect”, which is probably explained somewhere else in depth, although we have the comfort of having the copyright now it’s in print. Those who would seek to manipulate you for their own ends (whether they realise it or not) often are doing exactly what they accuse you of. They are seeing themselves in you like a mirror, and jump in fright. They call you obsessive, when it’s actually their obsessive thinking that makes them think that. They accuse you of betraying them, but nothing will ever satisfy their fear because they are all too willing to betray you themselves. They accuse you of abusing them and controlling them, when by even claiming that, they themselves are doing it to you. They tell you to let go, but they are too afraid of letting go.

They get angry, but deny you the right to be angry at them. Your feelings are acknowledged insomuch as they do not overshadow theirs. To them, everything they feel and do is completely justified. Everything they fear is what they are thinking they could do to you. They see their faults, their words and deeds, and their own potential for causing hurt to someone else. They rabidly enforce their own privacy but invade yours. They assume every question you ask is because you are suspicious, as they always are. There is no you anymore, there is only a silhouette falling from the person they see you as in their mind. Their lies become their truth. The lies they are convinced you are telling are the ones in the mirror they have told you or are telling you. They hate their looks but use them to manipulate others, attracting the kind of people who are only interested in them for their vanities, when inside they are desperate for someone to care about them for what’s on the inside. They rampantly invade your personal boundaries but recoil violently when they think you are transgressing theirs. They tell you to get a life and fear you living your own as you go about it, when they are frustrated they don’t have one themselves.

They demand inhuman levels of understanding from you but give none of their own, despite their pleas of self-sacrifice. You watch them ruin everything and complain they are lonely. As you don’t give them what they want, they judge you and resent you. They see you as criticising and rejecting everyone when you they are unable to be close to anyone. They always think they can find their way back in by playing on your compassion and bleeding love from you like a magic lever or button. They call you possessive when they have bombarded you with messages and calls going crazy with jealousy and insecurity. They complain and resent you for not reacting to their emotional violence with unconditional love they expect to run perpetually like a waterfall in the desert.

You listen to them telling you that thinking of you makes them cry but have to endure their lashing out between moments of kindness. They complain you don’t show them they are number one in your life when they treat you like dog shit on a pavement, whilst cursing those who love you and care for you in parallel. You watch them punish themselves for every little thing and wander around lost when the answer is around the corner. When you reach out and try to tell them how much you love them, they are confused and don’t believe you. They take out the pain caused to them by other people and the changes in their life on you, as if it were you who caused it.

They tell you to move on, but can’t themselves, although its not hypocrisy per se. They desperately fall at your knees in a panic for reassurance but curse you when you are on yours for the same. They tell you that you take life too seriously when they feel they are boring. They fall apart at the thought of you having intimacy of any kind with anyone else, but enjoy watching you writhe when they describe themselves with someone else. They fear you are out doing what they themselves would be doing. They close off to you and demand you open up to them. They make exaggerated demands of you that they would never agree to themselves, and even if you yourself agree to them, it doesn’t make them feel any better because if they can control you and manipulate you, so can someone else. They wind you up and mock you for being wound up. They try to make you feel as worthless as they do and complain you are not strong or calm enough. The cycle starts again.

Mirrors are disingenuous things that hide other people from you as the real person is standing behind, but they also never show you the things you are doing yourself as they should. It’s too painful to see or acknowledge yourself when you see it. Everything they see in you, throw at you and criticise you for is what is inside them. They follow your lead and take their prompts, reacting to what you have done or might do. Their anger is very rarely about you, it’s that you are the trigger – you commit your own sins, but suffer for someone else’s. There is no individual person fully developed inside so you become part of them, and the day they are trembling is always compounded by the 3 following it when they are attacking you.

There is no love in the world that can make up for what they’ve lost, the pain of the past, the wounds that never seem to heal, and there is no reason, rationale or kindness that can rescue what is a self-fulfilling prophecy in slow motion. There is no gesture, no words and no actions that are the magic bullet you hope for because they are just games to the one who plays them. You love, you understand, you care, you forgive, you comfort, but there is nothing but to let go because you can only be down in the pit with them so long that you lose the strength to pull yourself out, let alone them too. You are too confused in the process of trying to rationalise the irrational. There’s no warmth there either in being there with them, there is only their anger. And your continuous apologies, because you are always the one who ends up saying sorry to calm them down or bridge the gap between you. The moral high ground is always theirs somehow.

They get angrier and more frustrated because nothing changes the way they feel; they get what they want in the short-term but are starving for what they need in the long-term. It gets worse as time goes on with every relationship less satisfying than the last. They never know or get what they want as they can’t see what they’re searching for, and angrier with those they love because they can’t provide it. They look inside, they look outside and reject the world that has no answers. The small talk fails and the deep thinking is too much. All they know are the fears that drive them as they keep them alive and safe, but paralysed at the same time. They seek the worst in everyone and find it, because by finding it, they feel safe from it knowing where it is. The closer to danger you are, the safer from harm.

But you love them for who they are regardless, even though you refuse to have them in your life. You see what they could be, where they have been and why they do what they do, but you can’t reason any more or bend any more. You rest knowing you can do nothing, and you don’t have to wait. You cherish the moments you shared and value the wisdom you gained regardless of the hurt they’ve caused. You give up trying to help or understand and forgive them as they will never be able to repay their debt. You want to scream at the men who hurt them so much and strike at the root of what makes them do it. You listen to them calmly and smugly explain that’s what they wanted you to do all along despite acting the opposite and watch their games as they throw them at you, and play with others (as well as willingly taking part in the other people’s games). You see through to who they are and release yourself from having to be with them in any way.

It doesn’t mean you don’t love them, it means you can’t live with who they are or the way they behave. The person is different to the behaviour. You want to be there but you know it will always be abused despite their spite or their promises, or the 2mins when they were as lovely as anyone can be. There is no anger, no resentment, no spite and no worry. You hold up your hands and say no more. There is no waiting or anticipating their reply because it no longer matters. Their words and feelings are vapour. You accept they are who they are and give yourself room to heal and recover with the help of those you love and those who have just been introduced in your life as blessings. You let them do their worst and no longer resist them as they wash over while the storm passes. There is no fear, no guilt, no hurt and no darkness despite what they do when they have lost control and the game only has one player left. The game you will always receive the blame for.

You remember the person – the skin, the bones, the smile, the hair and the clothes, instead of the public front in your face every day. The person trembling in front of you, scared and vulnerable. The person who uses your words, thinks like you, speaks like you, talks like you now and has become so much more than they were just from knowing you. You accept your faults, your mistakes and your shortcomings and forgive yourself and them. You say sorry, hope for the peace you need and let yourself live because what you did was not always because of your own depths of horror.

If only it worked like that. There is only one end. They read this and say “that’s not me”.

So you smile, thank them for what they taught you and tell them you will always love them for who they really are despite how appallingly they treated you from day one when they promised they wouldn’t, and that you were so special to them that you should never be taken for granted. The bond and memories remain, but the responsibility ends. Emancipation takes its time but when the light switches on, the world is so different. Everything becomes so much more simple when you release yourself and fall back from being drawn into the games. Because you withstood it all; all they had to throw at you knocked you off your footing but you stood firm and swallowed it down in preparation for what the world will throw at you in the years to come.

And then, you are gone.

Only Mr Mayer could have the perfect last words: “I will go to my grave with the love that I gave, not just a melody line on a radio wave, don’t hold your love over my head…do I have to fall asleep with roses in my hand?”

——————————————————————-
I never really liked or understood this song until now:

I know a girl; she puts the colour inside of my world
She’s just like a maze, where all of the walls continually change
And I’ve done all I can to stand on the steps with my heart in my hand
And now I’m starting to see maybe it’s got nothing to do with me

So fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters too

I don’t know anything about relationships. I’ll be the first to admit it. My childhood template for them is about as poor as it could be. But one thing really irritates the hell out of me, and slightly clouds over my usually rosy affection for the female gender. All girls (yes, ALL of you) have this dreadful arrogance that only women understand relationships. Sorry girls, you do, even if you don’t want to admit it. Your mum taught you, and you’ll teach your daughter as well. Men apparently have no idea, and need women to “guide” them somehow as they understand it all so intuitively.

I always get a smile from any woman who is any age when I mention the in-built “relationship-o-meter” they naturally have. It’s something that’s installed from birth as they are totally defined by their relationships. They are constantly monitoring their relationships every second and know exactly where they are emotionally, physically and spiritually. Any disruption is traumatic. Scores are kept, grudges held and potential examined. I’ve read so much about them now that I can see the meter flicking from left to right in their eyes as they’re talking. The new men’s pact needs to be “you let me know how the relationship is going, I’m driving.”

I’m sat on the plane writing this whilst speaking to a lovely couple next to me who have been together for 35 years, who are complaining that people give up too easily these days. They seem bemused by how articulate I am, probably because I’m meant to be a lot more cavalier. It occurred to me that we make some massive assumptions about relationships, and we have expectations of them that are almost totally unreasonable. We don’t actually give it a lot of thought. The comment thread on my “what do you call this?” blog also stirred me as it’s a rather polarised view of the romantic world. I’ve asked a lot of people what their secret is when it comes to staying together long-term, and the answer is always “companionship”.

We take for granted the concept of “good” and “bad” relationships, and those we deem “healthy” and “unhealthy”. We have a classic stereotype at work which is not always right – different things are needed by different people at different times of their lives, and just because they don’t fit into our expectations doesn’t make them invalid. The romantic notion is of initial attraction, courting, honeymoon and then deepening or disillusionment. It’s over when communication and the natural “flow” have disintegrated. Girls of course claim they understand and know way before their partner.

Everything we learn up to the age of 8 is from our parents or “primary caregivers” as psychologists call them. Whether we like it or not, the way we see the world or understand things to be is subconsciously embedded in us from a very early age on a basic primeval level. Girls end up chasing their father and boys their mother. If you define your perfect partner and then look at the qualities of those you’ve sought out, the differences are stark. What you want and what you seek out are completely different. People with similar backgrounds tend to seek each other too and form extremely intense relationships. The cardinal rule is our parents’ relationship is the model template of our own, and one we “go home” to in later life unless we change our conditioning. Look at your mum and dad and then look at how a lot of your relationships ended. Trying to “save” one or fulfil the broken promise never, ever works.

This is also the case with self-esteem and self-worth: before we reach self-awareness in our teens, we are totally dependent on the worth and esteem our parents place on us. We are born blank vessels and are defined by their behaviour and feelings towards us. None of us are slaves to our childhood, but only a fool would ignore the importance of it.

Relationships challenge you and grow you. They take you out of your normal comfort zone and force you to become more than you are. You adsorb qualities from the other person and change from the experience of being with them. It works better when there are differences as long as communication is open, and the closer they are, the more you learn. Being with someone is like a mirror that shows you who you are and what the good and bad bits are. Being with someone too similar can be a frustrating and uninspiring time.

But relationships are also extremely strange and scary places. When you bond with someone, breaking that bond or damaging it hurts badly. Parentage is the only type of relationship where the natural and healthy end is separation. It means the walls and barriers come down, boundaries are stretched and its impossible just to have the good without the bad. Baggage gets in the way, and feelings start coming out that really need to come out somewhere else. They can become who you are, rather than just a part of the whole of your life. Some things are meant to be said, others only felt and kept in external silence.

When your heart is opened you are forced to deal with the things that have been holding you back. If you’re suspicious, you need to learn to trust again. If you’re angry, you need to learn ho to express your feelings safely and constructively. If you’re self-centred, you need to learn understanding and patience. If you’re intense, you need to learn to be moderate.

Counselling and therapy only ever works effectively through the bond of a therapist with their patient. Relationships are natural places for healing to take place, and a place to practice tolerance, compromise, patience, forgiveness and humility. Unwanted and strange feelings always bubble to the surface once the doors to the heart are opened as they the path is a 2-way street. Again, you cannot have the good without the bad; indeed you could argue one is there to justify the other.

Ultimately anyone you talk to randomly in the street is a potential relationship of some kind, as they are nature’s bonding and social exchange mechanisms. They’re started by a common interest, shared values, chemistry, humour or a mutual commitment. Every one has its storms and calms, its own lifecycle, periods of longing and means of fulfilment. They are a way if sharing the experience of life with all its struggles and time together to share the highs and lows. Every one could be classified as being in your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.

There is this frightening cynicism about “honeymoon” or “fireworks” in the early stages of a relationship that gets to me simply as it’s so negative. Of course discovering and bonding with someone is electric – it’s meant to be as lust, infatuation and attraction are the means to bring people together. But its almost as if its thought of as false or unreal. These early feelings are part of the natural lifecycle of a relationship and as long as see them with the mature eye knowing they will lessen, it doesn’t have to be the end. If you are so naïve as to fall in love with love itself, you can only expect to be heartbroken.

For me, the fireworks don’t disappear, they only calm and mature as less frequent spikes on the graph. As time goes on, those moments and experiences need to be nurtured and invested in so they carry on. If you’re expecting them to happen naturally (as everything else in life for the naive), you’re a fool and deserve what you get. You have to make time to be with each other, to think of the other person and do things for them. You have to be open enough to change, compromise and accommodate in ways you wouldn’t if you were on your own. The natural by-product of that process is personal spiritual growth, the healthy end-goal of any relationship.

Anger, passion, love, sadness, joy, wonder, warmth, excitement, loneliness, affection and worry are all part of the ride. And that’s what a relationship is – a journey together, rather than a destination. There is a fundamental support frame that underpins your bond with the person, like the chemistry, your friendship or your natural attraction to each other that never dies or is lost as it’s the very nature of who you are as people and how you interact. Very rarely someone crosses your path that knocks the wind out of you and drives you insane.

Part of that is having a good distance between each of you, as living in each pockets means you lose sight of the one you love and can’t appreciate the other person fully or have respect for their individuality. If you’re looking for the cure to your insecurities in another person you are on the route to madness. Making someone the centre of your life with all their faults, weaknesses and shortcomings is a very painful way to find out that you need to get a life before you share it with anyone. Inevitably you start trying to forcefully change your partner into what you want them to be, and despair when they don’t. What you need is generally somewhere else.

Bad experiences in the past can be lethal to bonding with someone, as the baggage piles up so high between you that it’s impossible to climb or ignore. Often you meet people who are so cynical or scared that their own relationship pattern becomes a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. When you assume all is doomed or superimpose the source of your previous pain onto the face of the one you love, walls get built and poison circulates. You block off, freeze up and stop giving because you blame the person in your life and amplify their own shortcomings to be a greater evil. It takes 2 people to make a relationship work, and when one is so reticent that they aren’t actually “there”, their own prophecy is fulfilled and their thoughts ratified and validated. If you don’t give, you don’t get.

One of the most interesting phenomena when stress takes it toll or a relationship falls apart is the emergence of childlike thinking and behaviour. Imagine a small child demanding its own way and it’s truly fascinating.

Circumstances also kill passion and love, battering you down and eating at your ankles so the distraction is louder than the positive things; It’s impossible to deal with what’s happened. You have to work through the obstacles as they arise or they keep coming back forever. And we all know women never, ever forget anything and nothing is ever in the past when an argument starts. Women never truly letting go of anything that’s officially forgiven and historical is another pet hate of mine. Love keeps no record or scorecard of wrongs, and yet the self-appointed experts can’t seem to accept that sleeping dogs are better alone to lie where they are.

Confrontation is healthy and normal, and doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship is suffering or over. The principle is how that confrontation is dealt with, and if you think it’s a bad thing, you are quite simply immature and naïve. Confrontation and arguments happen everywhere in any type of relationship and needs to be resolved maturely. If you’re female, it’s really very important as the idea of clear, direct communication, expressing your feelings in a meaningful way instead of bottling them up for months and resolving the issue permanently seems to be something that’s beyond most of you. Most of the time it’s an external stress (money, circumstances etc) that causes the difficulty and it needs to be worked through rather than run from.

The gentle healing care for a relationship that’s in trouble, or for one that is in the process of being cemented is simple and effective: intimacy. When things break down all hope is lost, the situation is final and you are totally powerless to stem the tide of disparate estrangement. The honeymoon brings you together with experiences and madness that are remembered for a lifetime, and the breakdown the first casualty is intimacy, as it involves the guard coming down and expressing vulnerability. Its not intimacy we fear, it’s the consequences of intimacy. Fear becomes bigger than the relationship itself.

For me, a relationship is a formless and metamorphic thing that knows no rules or boundaries, rather than fitting into a pre-defined social box for others to label. If we want to speak every 3 minutes, we bloody well will. Maybe we’ll go a week without speaking but we know it’ll be fine when we do. We make each other laugh. It’s a safe and secure place where its ok to flirt outrageously or where the other person can go so far as to sleep next to another person in their bed and the trust level is so strong that it would never cause a problem. A place that its safe to cry and share your secrets in confidence (I really need to work on that one), and grow as a person.

We can be on the phone for 5 minutes or 5 hours and it doesn’t make a difference. Somewhere you both have your won friends, dreams, goals and career, and help each other to achieve all the things you want and get to be where you want to be in life. I’ll take Shakespearean madness over formulaic sterility any day. Give me poetry, romance, rollercoaster waves of emotion and spontaneity and I’m happy. Oh, and good conversation. Morons with a capability and/or preference for small talk, an aversion of so called “deep” conversation and a predilection for mono-syllabic drivel need not apply.

My point is that you cannot judge the validity, value or quality of a relationship on its conventional stereotype. What you see as “unhealthy” may just be exactly what the doctor ordered and a very healthy process for two people to go through. It doesn’t always come in the package we expect it to, but that doesn’t make it bad, unhealthy, doomed or wrong. None of us can judge whether what life imposes on us is for our good or bad until many years later. They are more than their labels or articles in Cosmopolitan magazine. A relationship is a vehicle for change and not a Mills & Boon story template.

I wonder if my own relationships have been healthy, but then I realise I am here questioning, ruminating and wondering about them, which is an amazingly good thing. The painful experiences I’ve had recently have forced me to question what I know and assume, and to decide what I want for my own heart – the relationships I’ve had in the past, the ones I am in now and those I want to be in the future. I have to re-consider and re-model what I know. She’s doing the same, even in the midst of the madness. Only very rarely does a period in your life come along that teaches you something as fundamental and important as that, and not in a way that you’re doing it simply because the experience was so bad you really need to sort it out. Growth forces gaps and changes, and life has a wonderfully mysterious way of preparing you for what’s ahead.

Now that is healthy.