When I told one of my oldest friends I had recently found a boyfriend, she thought this was hilarious because, quote, 'the Ice Queen let a boy be her boyfriend!'
She didn't mean anything bad by it--it was just her way of expressing surprise. I've been openly cynical about almost everything since I was a child, but the most scathing of it was concerning love and marriage and relationships. The ones around me--my parents and family members--were all so overwhelmingly dysfunctional that I was just disinclined to want to try it for myself. I didn't date at all in high school and very seldom in college, partially from a total lack of interest (both from me and in me) and partially because my realm of childhood experience didn't offer an especially positive or rosy perspective about romantic relationships. I'm aware that my perceptions are greatly skewed by the disproportionate concentration of really unhealthy relationships within my family, but it's really hard to shake off something as deeply ingrained as that cynicism. In fact I'm so cynical that I was only half joking when I suggested to my now-boyfriend before we got together that a perk of dating me would be having the best 'crazy ex-girlfriend' stories in any given group.
Yeah, in a single declaration I managed to be cynical about myself and romantic relationships. Not only did I straight-off assume that it would fail, but I also labelled myself 'crazy' and suggested that my only positive attribute would be derived from the unusual intensity of all my negative ones.
He still wanted to go out with me, though, so either he was really into me or my unregulated seratonin reuptake turns him on.
Anyway, I know why I think this way. On the whole I'm infuriatingly self-aware--I understand most of my serious problems very well and am capable of stepping back to look at them objectively to put them into a more realistic perspective. I even understand the basic steps I'd have to go through in order to resolve them, or at least lessen their overall impact on my life. I'm just way too lazy, unmotivated, and apathetic (all of which I understand completely) to want to do any of it. Like I said, it's infuriating. Well, infuriating to therapists and doctors and people who end up with an unwitting front row seat to my violent emotional instabilities. (It's not uncommon for me to undergo a complete shift in my demeanor within a 24-hour period between such massive extremes that I almost appear to be suffering multiple personalities.) I'm too apathetic to really be bothered by it. Which is actually a pretty bad thing.
But back to why I turned into a cynic about relationships.
My parents rarely got along and spent a lot of my childhood trying to overrule each other and then fighting about it. My mother is two-faced and manipulative and my father is emotionally distant and controlling. They bring out the worst in each other. They should have gotten divorced years ago. And I suspect the only reason they don't divorce (even now that my brother and I are grown and gone) is because they feel like they have to do better than their own parents did.
I never had an intact set of grandparents in my life--not because of death but because both sets divorced long before my parents even married. They actually all got divorced in the 70s, when such a thing was still pretty taboo. It says a lot about the depth of their mutual hatred that they were all willing to go through something as socially unacceptable as a divorce just to be rid of each other. My maternal grandfather had an affair and left for 'the other woman' (to whom he is still married). For most of my early years the wounds were still fairly fresh and I didn't see them together in the same place until I was about seven and my middle aunt got married. (And she only got them to do that by threatening not to invite either of them if they couldn't put their differences aside for the duration of one wedding.) The anger has since cooled and they're on decent terms, but there's a lot of noticeable tension in their voices when they talk to each other. Weirdly enough, my grandfather's wife and my grandmother actually get along quite well together. They told me it's because they compare notes about how obnoxious my grandfather is and I kind of believe it.
But at least they used to like each other, which is more than can be said for my dad's parents. They were from different cultural backgrounds (my grandfather was Italian, my grandmother mostly German, which is just as horrible as it sounds) and married at a time when you didn't associate with people not from your particular culture. Let alone marry them. And they did it just to piss their parents off and never liked one another at all. That dislike intensified with time to sheer hatred. My mom's parents can sit through a dinner together or attend a formal occasion without wanting to start throwing grenades, but I never in my life saw my paternal grandparents in the same room together. They never talked about each other. It was years before I realized that they even knew one another. (To be fair I was very young and didn't entirely understand what 'grandparent' meant in terms of familial relations.) When my grandfather died of cancer in 2004, my grandmother didn't attend the funeral. She didn't acknowledge it at all. Yeah, you have to have a pretty deep hatred for someone to do that.
(And it gets weirder. My grandma never remarried--neither she nor my maternal grandmother appears to ever have noticed that men existed after divorcing--but my dad's father was back in the dating pool. He was briefly married to a woman named Ellen, freakishly similar to his ex-wife Helen, who turned out to only be after his money. That marriage ended, too. For the seven years prior to his death, he had a long-term steady partner in a lady called Karen. Karen was herself divorced and before then had been a nun. You cannot make this shit up. My twice-divorced devoutly Catholic grandfather lived in sin for seven years with a former nun who was herself divorced. This is so fucked up it's funny.)
They aren't the only family members I have who married for the wrong reasons, either. My mom's dad's parents--my great-grandparents--were also from wildly different backgrounds. He was a dirt-poor Italian immigrant; she was from an obscenely wealthy family that owned theatres all over New York and frequently had movie stars over to dinner. I mean this woman was so rich she had servants growing up and having servants in America is a phenomena that's almost completely unknown. She was also Jewish. He was Roman Catholic. This was a big marital no-no back then. In fact it was such a big no-no that her family disowned her. She never saw them again and died in near poverty in a Brooklyn tenement. I wish I could say that she gladly suffered all this because of her love for the man she married, but the truth is that she only married him because it was the early twentieth century and pretty much the only way an upper-class Jewish girl could rebel against her family would be to marry someone they didn't like. Which appears to be exactly why she did it. It didn't bring anybody involved any happiness.
There's more, too.
I have one uncle who's a recovered drug addict and married a pretty young Irish lady who turns out to have only been after US citizenship. My youngest aunt spent years with a man who beat her. Another of my aunts was bullied and manipulated cruelly into having children she never wanted (and still doesn't love) in order to meet his standards.
And this is just the shit people talk about. I'll bet my left tit there's much more--and probably worse--that's just swept under the rug and not discussed.
Such a concentration of totally dysfunctional relationships doesn't happen in the general population. It just appears that my family has more than their share and that some of them are real doozies. My childhood wasn't confined to family alone, of course, and I had experience with other people's families that were much more normal than mine was, but in the end the shit happening all over my various familial branches coloured my perceptions the most.
It's no wonder I'm a cynic.
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