In a Perfect World: Threadbare

Picture a sheet or towel that has seen bet­ter days. Where the fabric of the sheet was once smooth and intact, there are bald­ing patches now that you can nearly see through. Where the towel was once thick and fluffy, the thread has worn away over the course of many washings and frequent use, leaving both the look and the feel unappealing. The towel may still be able to do its job, but all the pleasure is gone.

Relationships can become threadbare, too.

They say that married couples who argue have the same basic argument, over and over again. The circumstances may change, and the details, but if the couple tends to quarrel a lot there’ll be some­thing at the bottom of all those spats that doesn’t really change.

Money is said to be the most frequent bone of contention between husband and wife. It’s not so much how they handle the money they have as what money means to them. If the husband views their finances from a security standpoint while his wife views their income as a means of savoring life, the two views will inevitably clash.

She says, “Money is for spending!” He says, “Money is for saving.” He wants to keep his fam­ily safe. She wants to enjoy a certain standard of living.

And so, they argue. Each issue may appear brand new but is actually the same clash of world views, dressed up in different clothes.

There can be other oft-repeated points of con­flict with the potential to run a marriage ragged. Points which may seem to center around practical matters but are, in reality, emotion based.

For example, suppose a couple finds themselves clashing over a wide variety of issues. The fights arrive with depressing regularity. Though the is­sues appear to be disparate, the arguments have a dismal sameness to them. There’s a reason for that. It’s because they’re all reiterating the same, sad message.

The message may be “You don’t love me enough.” Or “You don’t respect me enough.” Or “I don’t feel like I can really trust you.” Or any reac­tion triggered by feelings that are never far from the surface.

When an underlying unhappiness is the founda­tion stone of a person’s character, it doesn’t take much to ignite a firestorm within her closest rela­tionships. You’re supposed to make me happy! So why am I still so sad?

Ditto for an underlying insecurity that makes an individual feel perpetu­ally disrespected. Or a drive for per­fectionism that promotes perpetual stress. Or any number of internal dy­namics that stand ready to erupt at the push of a button. It’s not the issues themselves that really matter, but the emotional upheaval they repeatedly set in motion.

Unless they realize what’s happen­ing and address it, they’ll tend to have the same tedious but painful quar­rels over and over again, running their marriage ragged until the fabric of the relationship grows threadbare.

I once met a woman who was having marital problems. “I feel raw,” she told me, the pain visible in her eyes. Raw is how you feel when the same sore spot is rubbed, again and again. When your heart is lacerated repeatedly by the same root cause, until it becomes the emotional equivalent of a threadbare sheet.

Gnawing Bones

We don’t always require a second party in order to run ourselves ragged. We’re perfectly capable of doing the job all by ourselves. We do it by snag­ging onto certain negative thoughts or feelings and gnawing at them the way a dog worries a bone.

Happiness can be fleeting, but nega­tivity has a way of hanging in there. We have a tendency to hold onto our hurts, running them repeatedly through the wash cycle of our minds and hearts until they become as worn and un­appealing as an old towel. And still we cling to them out of longstanding habit, though they bring us little sat­isfaction and zero contentment. It’s like absurdly trying to dry our hands on what basically amounts to a tattered rag, and then wondering why they still feel wet…

The turning point comes when we identify the source of our useless or destructive patterns and work on un­derstanding that they aren’t good for us. When we decide to stop running our ratty old mazes, always emerging in the same unhappy place.

The same decision can and must be made when trying to repair a tattered relationship. We need to look at the person standing at the center of our world and say, with determination, “There’s an unhealthy pattern here that keeps on repeating itself. We’re going to break it.”

Well Worn

There’s a different kind of wearing down that’s the opposite of the dreary and unfulfilling sort described above. It’s the kind of threadbare that comes from hugging a favorite stuffed ani­mal night after night. From reverently clutching a personal siddur or Tehillim day and after day over the course of years, or even decades.

It’s the kind of wearing down that comes not from a disconnect, but from an abundance of love. It’s not worn down so much as well worn.

Sometimes you see elderly couples who look like that. As if they’ve al­ready said everything that needs to be said and can now just have the pleasure of basking in each other’s company. Theirs is a companionable silence, punctuated by quick, understanding glances and smiles of long familiarity. It’s a state of being that comes when all the sharp edges have been rubbed down by time, leaving behind a softer, gentler surface that glows like well-cared-for furniture.

We can achieve that kind of mellow­ness in our inner lives as well. If we un­earth the various triggers that keep us firing unhappy bullets at ourselves and our loved ones, and then do the serious job of dissecting and eliminating them, we can begin to see how little benefit all that negative emotion has been to us.

In our rockiest relationships, too, we can discover how few of our usual sta­ble of arguments were ever really nec­essary. We can remember how much more binds us together than divides us. How short-lived most of our quar­rels could be if we let them die a natural death instead of whipping them into a frenzy with repetition and a sea of un­explored emotion.

The goal is to avoid the kind of too-frequent clashes that erode us, and the relationship, into a state of resignation and eventual despair. To achieve in­stead the well-worn togetherness that time, acceptance, and mutual respect bring in their train.

To sidestep the pitfalls that’s kept us nagging at the same sore tooth for so long that it feels as if the pain is an in­evitable part of the relationship.

To be able to look at one another, and at ourselves, with eyes that have seen it all and emerged triumphantly on the other side.