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I was raised with the saying “It takes two to make a marriage.” This seems to me a true statement. It takes two to make any relationship at all, with the sole exception of parent/infant where the baby has no responsibilities in or to the relationship and never had to agree to it. My only point of disagreement with the statement that “it takes two to make a marriage” is that so many people misuse this statement to insist, when any marriage fails, it therefore has to be the fault of BOTH participants. That doesn’t add up.

IF it takes two to make a marriage, THEN the failure of even one of the two to do his/her part is all it takes to destroy that marriage.

Marriage = (1 + 1 = 2).
(1 + 1 = 2) cannot equal (1 + 0 = 1) or (2 – 1 = 1) because 2 cannot equal 1.
Said slightly differently, since Marriage = (1 + 1 + 2), all it takes is the absense or subtraction of 1 to destroy the truth of equation and NOT make a marriage.

One person, alone, cannot make a marriage. One person, alone, cannot make any relationship, since any and every relationship is, by definition, at least two people choosing to interact and respond to each other on a regular basis. One person can pursue another, unwilling person. One person may even be able to dominate and subdue another person, imprison them, even destroy them. Those are NOT “relationships” however, even though they might have started as such. If they have reached that point, they have ceased being relationships, according to my definition. Relationships, even bad ones, require at least two people choosing to interact with each other. Ideally, they do this with the goal of building a happy, healthy co-existence with each other and/or to succeed at building a family, a business, or some other mutual goal. Even when the people involved disagree on the details of their mutual goal, or how best to achieve it, or what they hope might grow from it, as long as they keep choosing to interact with each other, they are in a relationship together.

At the point where even one of the participants decides to bow out of a relationship, that relationship, as such, is over. The reason for this decision is irrelevant. Even if the person remains physically present, if s/he is no longer willing to work with the other person, there is no longer any actual relationship between them. In the future, things might change. Until that point, the relationship doesn’t exist. At this point even a legal marriage ceases to be a relationship for all emotional purposes, even if it remains recognized by law.

It is possible that both of the partners might have made mistakes or hurt each other in a marriage. I’d suggest this is even probable, since humans are fallible and such missteps often occur. That is why forgiveness becomes so vitally important in any healthy relationship. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible for both partners to have contributed to the failure of their marriage. I’m only pointing out that this isn’t necessary.

Given the mathematics, any marriage can fail even with a fully committed partner still pouring in all the effort s/he could, perhaps all or more than should have been required to build an outstandingly successful and happy marriage with an equally committed partner. If such a partner was so striving while the other partner gave up, or possibly never participated at all, then there was no way for that marriage to succeed. The marriage’s failure isn’t the fault of the partner who continued to sincerely try longer than the other. The absent partner renders the marriage a failure despite anything and everything the loving partner can do. It takes two to make a marriage, which means it only requires one of the two to destroy it.

I hope people will come to realize this and stop telling divorcees, reeling from the destruction of all their hopes and dreams for a marriage, heartbroken and mourning all the wasted time, effort, emotions, energy, and resources they fruitlessly poured into it throughout the years, that the marriage failed at least in part because of them. The good partner, who did her/his best, doesn’t need that guilt piled on top of all the rest that they are grieving, especially since it isn’t necessarily true.

It may be that the fault of the good partner was nothing more than trusting someone who was untrustworthy, which is something trustworthy people tend to do. Knowing how dependable they, themselves, are, they naturally expect others to be as well, until that expectation is disappointed in an individual. At that point, many good people may see it as an aberration. People tend to view themselves as the standard of “normal,” so a trustworthy person believes being honorable, dependable, etc., is normal. A person who proves himself otherwise to them seems to be an exception to the rule, until enough people have done so to convince them such behavior is more common than they had realized.

It may be that the good, honest partner, who understood the importance of clear communication in any relationship, was guilty of nothing more than believing someone who was lying to them. Are they truly foolish to trust their spouse? Is it so unreasonable to expect complete honesty in a marriage, where anything short of that can only be destructive? If you are partners working together toward mutual, shared goals, of course you are going to be honest with each other, because that is a fundamental requirement for success when working together. Someone who, in such a situation, falls prey to a liar pretending to be a partner, should not be blamed for failing to see that coming.

If you try to argue, as a divorce lawyer I knew once argued with me, that the good partner should have kept perpetually alert to the possibility of being intentionally abused by the other partner, whom they “foolishly” loved and trusted, then I’ll respond that this cannot be useful to building a good marriage. Love and trust are essential and should be present in a marriage unless and until they are provably destroyed, at which point the marriage is destroyed. Doubting a good partner is potentially worse than trusting a bad one, because it can unjustly and irrevocably destroy a wonderful relationship, full of potential for you both. That loss is worse that continuing to trust a deceiver for a little longer.

When you wrongly trust a deceiver, the worst of all the losses you suffer is only what you never really had – the dream of a loving relationship. How much worse is it to lose something wonderful that was truly yours, but needlessly doubted? By constantly looking for betrayal from a loving spouse, you set yourself up to imagine it where it doesn’t exist. You have, thereby, hurt not only yourself, all your hopes and dreams, but you have also betrayed your good partner, who was depending on you to keep faithful and loving so s/he could keep faithful and loving to you. It is horrible when good people are intentionally abused by their ill-chosen partners, but, once, an abuser has succeeded in being chosen as a partner, even through deceit, the good partner must give the marriage a real chance by remaining trusting and faithful until the evidence proves, beyond a doubt, that they are being abused. In the end, it isn’t a good partner’s fault if his/her partner acted despicably and destroyed their marriage, but it would be his/her fault if s/he unjustly suspected the innocent partner. Where the good partner seems to stay too long with someone who was abusing them, especially covertly (lying, cheating, and/or stealing, while hiding his/her activities, for instance) then the good partner should be held innocent of the destruction of the marriage and even honored for staying faithful and loving until the abuser’s evil was fully proved.

If someone insists that they did their best, that the failure of their marriage wasn’t their fault at all, allow that they may very well be telling the truth. One person, alone, can be the cause of a marriage’s failure, even with an excellent partner. You might be talking to a lying or self-deluded person, so reserve some doubt, privately, until you know for sure, but you might also be talking with an honest, good partner, who doesn’t deserve blame for something that, truly, they had no way at all to remedy.

If you are inclined to suspect they are lying because, for years, you heard their partner complaining about them behind their back, stop and question why the partner was complaining to you instead of working to improve the marriage with their partner. It is possible that the complainer was being abused, but more often the truly abused partner, who is trying desperately to hold the marriage together against mounting odds, isn’t bad-talking their spouse to others outside their marriage. In cases of severe abuse, it is more often the abusive partner who is intentionally trying to turn public opinion against his/her victim, in anticipation of worsening abuse and/or prior abuses coming to light. It is also part of trying to isolate the victim, removing any source of potential help, to keep the victim under his/her control. A good partner, who is struggling to make a marriage work, rarely will malign his/her spouse to others. Abusers commonly do.

If you are the divorced or divorcing person, listening to friends and family trying to tell you that you had to be at least partly to blame for the failure of your marriage, please understand that it isn’t necessarily so. These people may be well-meaning, but they are very possibly mistaken. Unless they can tell you exactly what you did wrong, or help you discover that element yourself, they may not be worth listening to on this subject. It might be best to politely ignore them.

Advice also worth rejecting is any that insists you should ignore the past and just move on. It is harmful to you to wallow in the misery of your failed marriage and divorce forever, but those experiences hold a treasure trove of useful information for you to build your future if/when you can uncover it from beneath all the pain. Everything you go through should be turned to good in your life, especially the tragic events. There are likely important lessons embedded in those experiences which, if you do not learn them this time, may be forced on you again through even worse experiences. It is worth the time and effort to examine, at various points in your life, the failure of your marriage, to see what you can learn from it. What, if anything, could you have done differently or better? The more emotional distance you get from the event, the clearer your understanding may be, so review it a few times at different points in your life.

Where you can find your fault, if any, you have found gold. It is exactly what you need to study, to learn how to improve, in order to make better relationships in the future. Where you have the fault, there you had the power but failed to use it wisely. Identifying where you had the power makes you that much more powerful going forward, and learning how to use it better improves your chances for future joy in current and future relationships. Your faults are not the prettiest images you can find of yourself, but they are the most useful for self-improvement.

If, however, every self-review keeps assuring you that you did, to the best of your ability at the time, everything you could, and the failure really wasn’t your fault, then accept that. Try to choose a better partner next time. Please keep your heart open and eager to love. For someone worthy of you, you may be the perfect partner with whom s/he can make a truly wonderful marriage. I trust that, when you are both ready, you will find each other. For both your sakes, and for the joy for all who love you, and the inspiration of all who know you, I wish for you that great happiness.

My brother recently came to town, without telling me, and took my adult and almost adult children out to dinner with him, behind my back. He also bought them some badly needed clothes. During this visit with them he was, apparently, maligning me to my children. One of the insults he applied to me, probably the least offensive, was that I “hold grudges.” I have been puzzling over this and wondering if it is true or, even if it is, whether it is wrong for me to hold grudges in this situation.

The last time I saw my brother was shortly after my divorce was finalized. He had already broken some of his promises to me – promises on which I was completely dependent since accepting my divorce settlement, crafted by him with a lawyer he had hired. The divorce settlement trapped me in an impossible situation in which I could only survive if my brother kept his verbal promises, which he neglected to write in any contract form. I, very foolishly, trusted him. After I had fulfilled my part of our deal by signing the wholly disastrous divorce settlement which allowed my brother to buy our house and property for far below its value, in exchange for me accepting the financially crushing settlement, my brother announced that he was not going to keep some of the promises he had made in exchange. This forced me and my children to remain living in unhealthy, unsafe, sub-human conditions that he had promised to mend. Then, three months later, my brother returned to announce that he was reneging on keeping the rest of his promises as well, thereby inflicting complete disaster on us.

His method for making this announcement was by coming into our home, flying into a rage, and wrongly blaming us for something that was only due to his negligence, which was outside of our control. He commenced yelling at us, in increasing volume until he was screaming, that my children and I were “too disgusting for anyone to ever want to help!” He kept screaming this for about an hour or more, over and over, until I not only gave up trying to have a calm, adult, rational conversation with him, which had been my objective, but I also gave up defending myself and my children from his wholly unjust, ridiculous accusation. I couldn’t insert so much as a single word into our interaction, and every attempt only made him rage worse. That left me with no way to defend myself or my innocent children. The children fled the common room but could still hear their uncle raging from their bedrooms. Once he felt I was sufficiently subdued and that his destructive message had been adequately beaten into us all, he stormed out of the house.

Shortly thereafter, my sister-in-law contacted me and told me I had to talk with my brother. I refused to attempt another verbal conversation on the basis that his prior behavior had proved he had no intention of allowing me to say anything at all. Instead, I emailed a letter, identifying his behavior as abusive (in accord with numerous textbook and other authoritative psychological definitions of “abuse”) and demanding an apology. He emailed back a long letter, the gist of which was

1. His behavior was not at all abusive (based solely on his opinion).

2. My attempt to keep talking to him and to respond to every point he was making was the reason he was forced to scream at us, over and over, that we were “too disgusting for anyone to ever what to help” until he could finally get me to shut up – i.e. his behavior was all my fault.

3. He felt so good doing this to us, during and especially afterward, that he can’t imagine why we didn’t also enjoy it – with the implication that there had to be something wrong with us for not being masochistic enough to enjoy his abuse of us.

I had planned to respond to his email but, after reading that last point, decided he was too insane for any response I could make to have any positive impact. I therefore decided to have as little contact with him as possible from then on.

I was not pleased when I discovered that he was texting and meeting with my children behind my back but, as one of them is now an official adult and the other two are 17, I figured I had no way to prevent them. What I know, that my children don’t, is that my brother was physically abusive toward me during our childhood, to the point where I felt unsafe in our home. Most vivid in my memory is one scene when my mother picked us both up from middle school. I sat in the front seat and was quietly trying to work on my homework on the way home. My brother, in the back seat, suddenly reached around my seat, wrapped both his hands around my neck, and began choaking me. I begged him to stop, which made him choak me harder. I tried to pull his hands away but could not, so I dug my nails in the back of his hands. He let go with one hand, and I let him go, withdrawing my nails from that hand, hoping he would realize that I would withdraw my nails from the other one as soon as he let me go. Instead, he used his free hand to begin battering my head and neck as hard as he could, trying to force me to release his other hand so he could continue throttling me, much harder, without my interference. It was getting difficult to breathe and I was terrified he’d bash in my head or break my neck, so I began crying while trying, and failing, to shield myself with my free arm. My mother responded by yelling at me, blaming me for causing a dangerous scene and distracting her while she was driving. She insisted that my brother was only “playing” and complained that I was “overreacting.” She accused me of having no sense of play, no sense of fun or humor, and said that this was why no one would like me, love me or value me in my life. I was doomed to failure because I could not enjoy my brother strangling me. My brother had been increasingly abusive toward me, throughout our lives, but that was the moment when I finally realized that, according to my family, I had no right at all even to my own body. I had no right to defend myself. If my brother succeeded in killing me (as I was afraid, during that scene, he might do,) then not only would my mother fail to blame him, but, in fact, my brother and my parents would all blame me. My murder by my brother would seem to them to be deserved, especially if I tried to protect myself. That was the moment that it hit me fully that I was absolutely unsafe in my own home and that the only way I was going to survive was to keep my head down and be as invisible as possible until I could move out.

We grew up and lived apart, so the physical abuse ended. He continued to be emotionally abusive when we met, especially when alone with me or in the presence of my mother, but we had both been raised to believe that I deserved this treatment and that it was not abuse, so I did my best to ignore it when I couldn’t avoid him. The recent scene in our home, however, was not only emotionally abusive, but there was the clear threat of physical violence behind it, directed now not only at me, but also at my children.

My brother including my children in his abuse was a revelation to me. I had accepted from childhood that I was in some inexplicable way deficient enough to deserve abuse, but there was no way I believed that of my children! Furthermore, in my experiences during my marriage and through the counseling I received afterward, I have since come to realize not only that emotional abuse is truly abuse, but that abuse only gets worse. It NEVER gets better. In our last interaction, my brother’s emotional abuse of me and my children was, apparently, extreme. There was no possible benefit to anyone at all in convincing me and my children that we were “too disgusting for anyone to ever want to help.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was about the worst possible thing a person could be – including no possibility of every being loved, valued, hired, or cared for by anyone in any way. It was wholly and only demoralizing of us. Worse, my children all believed their uncle, without questioning what he was saying. He is the most respected authority figure in their family, it seems. My brother’s behavior in the scene he made is clearly identifiable by objective, authoritative sources as textbook “abuse.” Beyond that, however, the horrific rage with which he inflicted it, along with the history of physical abuse, left me in no doubt at all that it would quickly escalate into physical as well as emotional abuse. He was not only making it absolutely clear that he had no affection nor even the slightest respect for any of us, but that he felt fully entitled to abuse us based on our current vulnerability and dependence on him. He obviously considered himself to have bought a whole family of punching bags with a handful of promises that no one could force him to keep.

My refusing contact with him since has so far put me out of his reach (though, with my impoverishment, that could change) but my children, being willing to meet with him, makes them vulnerable to him. So now I see him grooming them toward this end. His maligning me to my children to undermine what little, if any, respect for me they may still hold, thereby encouraging them to dismiss my warnings, is another step closer to when he starts beating on them physically as well as emotionally.

Is it a “grudge” to want to protect myself and my children from someone who had been abusive, defends his abuse, expresses enjoyment in abusing others, and whom I am certain intends to acerbate his abuse of us in the future? I would say my behavior is simple common sense. I don’t consider that I am holding a grudge against venomous snakes because I don’t want them in my home and I protect myself against them in the wild. I am only acknowledging the threat they pose and avoiding it. It seems to me the same with my brother. One might say that, because of our lifelong relationship, we have more mutual obligation to each other than I would have to a cobra, but, since our lifelong relationship has included instances of him being abusive to me throughout our childhood, and has been devoid of any instance of him showing me any true kindness or respect, then is it really so different? I believe that, if my brother had acknowledged the wrongness of his behavior toward me and my children, accepted the responsibility for it, promised to change, and not revealed the fact that he enjoyed doing it so much that he could not understand why we failed to enjoy having him do it to us, then I would have given him another chance. A wise counselor might have been appalled by my decision to do so, but, for the sake of our relationship, especially since he is the only immediate family member I have left on this earth, I might have risked it. He did the opposite, however, so of course I want to avoid the obvious risk he now poses to myself and my children. Can this, therefore, be rightly termed “holding a grudge?” And, if it is “holding a grudge,” is it really wrong to do so?