A few months ago, I put up a long post about how we move on with and without the people from our past: The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow. This week, Amber, who introduced me to the marvelous (if somewhat cobbled together) term Erfolgtraurigkeit (sadness at another’ success) links to a New York Observer story about the frustrations of having an ex-boyfriend suddenly become a much better person after your relationship ends.
I was happy for him, but there was also a little teensy part of me that felt whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is—instead of feeling happy at someone’s misfortune, I felt resentful at someone’s good fortune. Why couldn’t he have gotten his proverbial shit together while we were dating? And, a more uncomfortable thought: Was it somehow my fault? Maybe, I realized, I had seen him as someone who had potential but just needed a little tweaking. But it was sort of annoying that he managed to do all the tweaking after we’d broken up.
It’s the Butterfly Effect: one day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights “playing music” (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.
I like Erfolgtraurigkeit as the opposite of schadenfreude.
I wrote last November:
I don’t know if it’s always been entirely true, but I’ve always assumed that every woman with whom I shared a bed and a life liked me and wished me well. It’s not that I imagine that I am God’s gift to women; far from it. But for whatever reason, I’ve never been the sort of person who imagines that those closest to him secretly dislike him. All of my exes found flaws in me, of course, and most of the time, those infuriating flaws played a part in the end of the relationship. But though they might have been furious with me sometimes, and even said “I hate your guts” once in a while, I always figured that deep down, they wanted nothing but the best for me as I did for them. In most of these relationships, what ended up happening was that the gulf between the “real Hugo” and the “public Hugo” became obvious and eventually overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s had the pleasure of dating and mating with someone who was habitually diagnosed with the standard “cluster b” personality disorder.) It may well be my my old character defect of narcissism rearing its ugly head, but I remain convinced that those whom I loved genuinely and deeply loved me as well, and that even after the relationships ended, their hope and their expectation that I could grow and change endured.
And so today, I do everything I can to pour all of my sexual and romantic energy towards my wife. At the same time, I know that my ability to do so is based on experience as well as grace. I am blessed to have been loved, and loved well, by many people in many ways. Whatever confidence and optimism and resilience seems apparent in my character is a consequence of having certainty that I am loved. Loved by God, first and foremost, and — increasingly — loved by myself. Loved by my wonderful family, of course, and loved too by a series of women who in one way or another tried to build a life with me. I learned from each and every one of them, or so I tend to think; the fact that most lessons had to be repeated several times doesn’t vitiate that truth. Of course, the role of these women was not to make me a better man — they had their own drives, their own motives, and their own equally important lessons to learn. But the byproduct of the love we made and the lives we shared is a series of lessons about how to live, and live well, in this brutal and beautiful world.
I haven’t asked if any of my exes experience Erfolgtraurigkeit, and I’m certainly not going to hunt them down to ask. Were one of them to inquire “Why are you sober and faithful and communicative in your marriage now, when you weren’t any of those things when you were with me?”, I would assure her that my bad behavior was never a response to anything that she did or didn’t do. Every one of my relationships taught me something new, even if the lessons learned did not result in any discernible change in my actions until long after those relationships had ended. And some of the lessons I needed to learn were repeated in a series of relationships until finally the stars aligned and I “got it”. I accept that it might be immensely frustrating to have been the very last one on the list before the “Eureka!” moment.
One of my exes whom I dated on and off for more than a year was a drug addict and an alcoholic. We alternately used together and tried to get sober together, were chronically unfaithful to each other, and couldn’t stay away each other. It was with this woman that I did drugs for the last time and took my last drink; it was with this woman that I tried to take my life — and hers — in a strange and thankfully unsuccessful suicide pact in June 1998. I haven’t seen this ex of mine since I looked over at her in the ER of a hospital where we were being treated for our overdoses. We spoke a few times in the weeks after this disastrous final evening together, but we have had no contact at all in well over a decade. I heard recently through mutual friends that this ex of mine is doing well, finally sober herself, in a relationship, living a good and interesting and productive life on the other side of the country. I was very happy to hear this, though I had and have no interest in resuming contact.
But if I am rigorously honest, there’s just a little bit of me that wants to know if our relationship, for all of its beauty and toxicity, played a role in prolonging her addiction or served (as it did in my case) as a catalyst for transformation. It’s ego, of course, that creates that hope that I was an important and ultimately positive figure in her life. But I know enough to know that not everyone has the same narrative. I tend towards a tenacious optimism as well as a fondness for the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc — and that means that I tend to have, as my linked post above makes clear, a generous slant to my memories of ex-wives and ex-lovers. It ought to be pointed out that that generosity is linked to an ease with forgiveness (ENFPs tend not to carry grudges) and, perhaps most importantly, a recognition that in relationships, I have always been a sinner (to reverse Lear) more often sinning than sinned against! The reality that others may want to blot out any recollection of “what we had” is one of which I am keenly aware. That awareness doesn’t entirely vitiate that childish and narcissistic longing to “know that I was important”.
But there is no Erfolgtraurigkeit. Rather, there is simply an acknowledgement that in the end, in the final analysis, we make sense of our past the best way we can, by making it all seem part of the plan. Many people know this famous excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth.
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
Bold emphasis mine. This is how I see my former lovers, and how — though I have no say in the matter — I would like them to see me. It’s how I see most people, really, who have come in and out of my life. And in that vision, there is surely no room for Erfolgtraurigkeit.
“And in that vision, there is surely no room for Erfolgtraurigkeit.”
Easy for *you* to say. You were usually not on the receiving end.
I get what Amber’s saying and I hate when that happens — your ex finally gets her act together and is a great wife/girlfriend to the lucky guy she’s with now.
Hugo, why do you like Aristotle when he was such a mysogynist? I mean, the man didn’t even believe women to be people.
Katie, I’m missing the specific tribute to Aristotle in this post.
Well, my first husband had some issues, and he doesn’t really have them anymore–I suppose I was a candidate for the above feelings of “why-could-he-get-his-act-together-BEFORE-I-left-him?” But I didn’t ever have them (and don’t have them now and really doubt I ever will have them, seriously) for two reasons: 1. By the time I left him my desire to be with him had been permanently destroyed by his behavior and 2. I know that my leaving him was what forced him to get his act together. He refused to accept that he had any real problems–oh no, everything was all her fault!–til I was gone and his anxiety problems and temper control issues sent him into a suicidal spiral that nearly cost him his job. Then, since there was nobody left around to blame but himself, he had to realize that he was the problem. He got help, and after he gave up on getting me back, met a woman who was far better suited to him in her life goals and personality type than I ever was anyway. He’s happy and has a great life, and honestly, all I feel about that is glad for him, and still glad I’m not having it with him…perhaps you need to still have some lingering desire to be with that person, to experience the, what are you calling it..? Erfolgtraurigkeit. And also not have gotten to be shown so conclusively that the other person’s problem was none of your own doing, as I was shown by his subsequent behavior.
Re: Hugo, why do you like Aristotle when he was such a mysogynist? I mean, the man didn’t even believe women to be people.
Katie Anderson, thanks for reminding me again why I’m not (thank God) a feminist. And the word is ‘misogynist’.
Gosh I wonder this kind of thing sometimes. Unfortunately (and it sounds like your case is similar), most of my relationships (or situations I experienced as relationships) ended in a way that precluded any further contact, so there are things I’ll probably never be able to know.
I wonder if the man 15 years my senior whom I dated when I was 18-20 is still successfully recovering from being a sex addict, whether he’s in a new relationship and whether he’s treating the woman he’s with right. I’ve felt a lot of pain over the woman he was with before me (and still with for a couple months after we met…with her permission). She followed him around for ten years, endured prison his two year legal battle and four months in prison and the undiagnosed PTSD for three years afterward. I guess I was the new gf with the $300 sweater to her.
The two years he was with me, my attempts to leave him got him into therapy, talking about the prison trauma and admitting to himself that he was a sex addict. I’m still not sure he was sincere, that it wasn’t just a ploy, but I like to believe he really saw what I came to know. He emailed me two months after I stopped talking to him for good to say he was back in therapy, but I didn’t respond. It would have been wrong. It’s been a year and a half now and I wonder if he really changed. Being honest with myself, I feel like it is less for him than for the the next woman he is with. I knew things that were publicly secret about him from the beginning because I met him through his online avatar, and it terrified me when he’d say he’d never let another woman know the things about him I knew in his next relationship. I hope I was a positive force in his life less for him than for his future partners and possible children.
I also wonder if he knows how I think of our relationship now. I’ve had to accept it as incredibly sexually and emotionally abusive. He met me when I was 17 and out of my first real relationship. I was 18 but he took advantage of me and used our age difference to control me. I learned things from him and had some positive experiences, but it was a bad relationship. He never stopped romanticizing us, even at the end. However, I wonder on the flip side if he just remembers me as a mistake that lost him a fortune (paid for plane tickets for every three weeks for a long time). That’s the extreme, but it would be more conducive to his recovery if he could see us as unhealthy.
More often I wonder if the legal scare I imposed on my abuser from 14/15 deterred him at all from hurting others. Could he have seen what he did to my life and subsequently tried to not do it again? He was only 21 when he hurt me. That’s probably a pipe dream; I’m working to accept that and not need to believe he’ll ever change. He’s married now. Got married a couple months after a co-worker filed a sexual harassment suit against him at the children’s psychiatric hospital he worked for. Now he’s at a geriatric facility two block from my apartment. I hope maybe that suit will re-scare him. Change him. I’m scared for his wife. Kids they might have.
The guy I’m with now (my age) I’ve actually helped reform while we’ve been together. Let him stay with me, fed him and lent him money for four months while helping him get a job and an apartment. He’s been flying solo for a couple months and paid back the money…but it really dampened my desire for him. I hope he makes a good husband to someone one day and I’m glad I was able to help him get his life together. I know he’ll never forget me.
Hmm…my experiences have been rather different than the standard reported phenomenon of reformed exes, though I just tried to relate myself to them. In fact, most of the things I tried to relate just now are probably not appropriate to this conversation. It is really depressing at parties when people are sharing “bad” relationship stories and then you share something you think is “funny” and then everyone gets really uncomfortable like you just make an anti-semetic joke or something.
Sigh. Maybe I try to relate to more than I should at 21.
I think all your really upfront sharing makes me want to share, Hugo.
Google is my friend, and I know just how everyone is doing with whom I was ever in anything remotely resembling a relationship. Save for the one who died in a car accident while I knew him, they all seem to be doing well professionally, and for most of them Google shows evidence of presumably stable marriages.
I haven’t any regrets that they seem to be doing well, post-me, but that’s easy for me to say. They were college relationships. You expect people who maybe sometimes treated you in a boneheaded way when you were all in college to eventually have grown up and gotten more mature. Likewise, I hope I’ve matured since then, and I hope those people that I may have treated in a boneheaded way would now forgive me, all these years later, when I’m more than twice the age I was then.
I can imagine it could be harder if someone seems to grow up and become happy with someone else right after breaking up with you; it might be harder not to take it personally. It might seem, not that he finally reached the point of being ready to get his act together, but that here’s further evidence that He Wasn’t That Into You.
Women do really make everything about themselves, which is one of the more common accusations used against “us,” but then we’re conditioned to feel that way, aren’t we? We’re acculturated to be caregivers and mommies to the whole world. Moms on TV and in commercials “raise” their husbands and their sons, which gets the whole wife/mother role fused together in an emotionally incestuous dynamic. When something isn’t right about our relationships, we assume it is our fault for not nurturing a partner correctly even though a partner’s development isn’t our responsibility. Adult partners are separate people, not defenseless children whose early developmental narratives are being shaped by their caregivers. People really need to be raised to see the boundaries between certain roles and to value and take responsibility for their identities as independent agents.
I tend to subscribe to the Harvey Fierstein school of thought on exes - “If God wanted us to be friends with our exes, He wouldn’t have made them such shits to begin with!” Or perhaps it’s more like a paraphrase of the line from Fiddler on the Roof: May God bless and keep my exes….far from me.
I wonder if the Erfolgtraurigkeit isn’t just about being mad at the ex for their past jerkiness. After all, if your ex is wonderful and successful now, clearly they COULD have been decent when you were together, but simply chose not to. It’s a jerkiness multiplier.
Or perhaps it’s more like a paraphrase of the line from Fiddler on the Roof: May God bless and keep my exes….far from me.
Heh. I was just thinking of that very line, myself, not with regard to any of the actual exes, but … I have an ex-friend who wanted to sleep with me, pushed my sexual boundaries, ceased to be my friend after he groped me over my protests and attempt to push him away, and I told the story to the RA and got him barred from the college house when I found out that he was doing similar stuff to other women.
A few years later, I heard from a friend that some of my other friends were friends with him now, said he’d changed, under the reforming influence of a new girl friend. Mixed feelings there - I’d love for it to be true, but mistrust the power of the reforming influence of the right woman on men whose fundamental problem is abusive behavior toward women. So, no ill wishes toward his reform, and I’m delighted if he really is a better and happier man now, but may God bless and keep him … far away from me.
I don’t feel any worse about him if he should be wonderful and successful now that I no longer know him, but I like my safety too much to put any such changes to the test.
That guy I don’t Google. I don’t want to learn anything that would upset my peace of mind.
It seems that Hugo’s response to the article and the bulk of responses here miss one of the main points.The question the writer poed is, ‘why couldn’t he have gotten hi act together WHILE THEY WERE TOGETHER?’.
Yes, some relationships reinforce the wort in people and are best ended. Yes, said relationships can be, if you’re lucky, the catalyst for subsequent personal growth. But the implied message here is that this woman’s vision of the guy making changes that I guess he wanted to make anyway,couldn’t have happened within the context of that relationship.
I often hear things like, ‘don’t go in expecting your partner to change’. Well if the change in this guy was possible anyway, then I’ll also ask, ‘why couldn’t he have done it with her?’.
(since you know what this is about, you may get an e-mail about it. ; ) )
The letter S is jammed on my keyboard. Fill in the blanks please.
Looking at the article, it does strike me that the woman who got used as resume and cover letter coach, told the guy was seeing other people the instant she’d completed her coaching, and then learned that he went on to improve his job with the resume and cover letter she’d supplied, maybe has grounds for a little Erfolgstraurigkeit; it’s one thing to see someone who’s an ex do well, and another to see him do well because of some slimy thing he did to you.
Lynn,
Amen!
I guess I remember I loved them once and hoped they’d do well, but mainly I remember that there are many good reasons why they are “ex” - it didn’t work out & we are both different people. I love the philosophy that “You never can stand in the same river twice” - lives are fluid and people change a little each day and never remain the same.
The times I find it difficult to deal with the success of others is when I hear about nasty people doing well, the guy who raped me happy with girlfriend and baby, the girls who bullied me at school now with high-powered jobs… etc. Especially I think it’s hard seeing people with kids who I don’t think deserve them, when I can’t have them.