Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
There are many things that make us human – opposable thumbs, the ability to reason, the differentiation of three million base pairs of the genome – and error. It’s a great unifier: all of us, regardless of our standing in the world, spend much of our lives fucking up.
In some cases, I have been lucky enough to view others’ failures from a distance, but most of what I know about relationships has been learned the hard way, by screwing it up terribly before. This is the story of one such mistake.
I started seeing La Freshman last semester. Yes, I swooped. I spent a long time considering my decision before doing so, weighing all the standard anti-swooping arguments against my profound desire to jump his bones. Ultimately, I threw it all out the window and went for it. I still maintain that there is nothing inherently wrong with swooping. I have seen it work for other people. Before this semester, I had always heard it cast in terms of maturity and experience at Swarthmore, but the third, equally important factor is relationship experience.
La Freshman was certainly mature enough, but we were in very different places when it came to relationships. Through my past failures and through this column and the introspection it has provoked, I know that I’m sick of hookups and one-and-a-half month relationships. I want a relationship that doesn’t make me second-guess myself continuously, with someone who will stick around, if not forever, at least long enough for me to learn his favorite food and his middle name. His definition of a relationship was a lot like my definition of a Swat Marriage: a little clingy, endlessly involved in each other’s lives, and highly committed. And he made it very clear that he didn’t want such a relationship.
And, in a slightly more understated way, that’s what he made our relationship into. Within a couple weeks, he was apologizing if he hadn’t seen me for a day and we were spending most nights together. And then, when he realized that he had created the very relationship he feared, he gave me a speech about how he was just incapable of monogamy, but I was great and we should really be friends, and he left.
It’s a very freshman relationship trajectory, and it flat-out sucks. This formula creates a false sense of intimacy and ensures that you stick around just long enough for your partner to become invested, causing maximum unintended damage for the length of the relationship. And man was it successful.
The hands-on relationship we created wasn’t what I was looking for either, but it pulled me in. I was incredibly happy. The commitment seduced me, and I liked him more than I had liked anyone in years. But at the back of my mind, I was afraid of jinxing it. I didn’t want to be invested, because I felt that if he knew, he’d cut and run immediately. That’s also why I didn’t write about it. I was afraid of being the Swarthmore version of Heidi Klum, gushing about their relationship right before it does a Hindenburg-level implosion.
It also made me incredibly pissed when I got dumped. I resented being someone’s relationship test run when I’ve already gotten most of the fundamentals figured out. And that’s when I messed up.
It’s not worth repeating what I did, but suffice it to say that it was verbal (and in private), not something like destruction of property or violence, and it was truly shitty.
When you’ve screwed up, you can never take back what you’ve done. In some cases, you can control the damage and to move forward, but time travel is still impossible, and sometimes when you fuck up, it’s permanent.
What is possible is preventing a mistake before it happens. Usually, when we’re about to do something truly shitty, a part of us knows beforehand that it’s a really bad idea. I certainly did, though I didn’t really know how bad. I just knew that I was pissed.
The best rule of thumb is to treat anger or hurt or sadness or whatever it is that’s fueling your behavior the same way that you would if you were drunk and suddenly had the impulse to do something. Wait it out. Sleep it off. Do something else, like watch a movie or exercise. Talk to someone about what you’re planning to do. Someone who isn’t drunk or equally pissed off. And if you still want to do it after you’ve given it some time and had it okayed by someone in a more rational state of mind, then maybe it’s not such a bad idea.
If you have already screwed up, the first thing you have to do is you have to apologize and you have to mean it. I know that we all learned how to say sorry by the time we left kindergarten, but some people still have trouble admitting their fault, even if they know they were in the wrong. And now that we’re old enough to have a pretty firm grasp of facial cues and tone of voice, most of us can spot a bullshit apology a mile away. Often, saying you’re sorry is really awkward. It leaves you at the mercy of the person you just wronged, but it’s the only way to move on, so put on your big kid underpants and suck it up.
The second step is to temper your own reaction. This part is different for everyone. I happen to be extremely emotive. I was in a UPenn study once that placed me in the 100th percentile for empathy. Sometimes, that’s a positive trait, but it gives me an extreme guilt complex. When I have been an asshole, my mind forces me to live in that moment when I hurt someone. If it was a particularly bad mistake, I won’t be able to sleep or eat for a few days. And of course, it holds onto these moments forever, bringing them out whenever I feel vulnerable.
This reaction helps no one. It doesn’t temper the pain I’ve caused and it doesn’t keep me from being human. It just ends up stacking emotional damage, so that every new error contains the weight of those that came before it, all the way back to the time I peeled paint off the walls of the cafeteria when I was in fourth grade. Some guilt is natural, but it reaches a point where you just have to tell your brain to shut the hell up and move on. I may have burned the bridge with La Freshman, but I don’t flatter myself enough to think that he’s not doing just fine without me in his life. And I’m sure my elementary school principal doesn’t remember me.
Next you have to figure out why you messed up. It’s the only way to keep history from repeating itself. With a little distance, that one was easy for me. Last semester was one of the worst times of my life. I had the glorious quadfecta of family, personal, academic, and health issues, and most of them really hit the fan right after La Freshman dumped me. It was easier to take all of that out on him than to do nothing. For you, it could be that you hadn’t slept enough or that you’re legitimately pissed and just went too far. Whatever your catalyst is, you have to learn what situations push you to do things that you’ll regret, otherwise you’ll just keep getting involved in land wars in Asia.
And ultimately, no matter what the other person does, you have to just let it go. You have to admit that, for whatever reason, you committed the supremely human act of messing up, and then move on with your life.
Amen. While I love all of your pieces, this one rang sooooo true.
SM, I do think that we all mess up in relationships and have to accept that, but I’m not sure how sympathetic I am with you in this article. To err is one thing, but to do something so “truly shitty” that you can’t give it more than a sentence’s mention in an anonymous column, well, that’s something else. I was hoping for more advice on how to move on after doing something bad and less of a pity party on your part.
@hmm,
Honestly, I’m a little confused by your comment. It’s perfectly fine that you don’t have sympathy for me. I don’t really have any for myself in this case, but there seems to be a disconnect between calling the column a pity party and complaining that I didn’t go into more detail about what I did wrong.
There are multiple reasons why I didn’t go into more detail about what I said.
This column isn’t my diary and the primary goal of it has never been to get sympathy from my readers. And while it may be anonymous to you and the majority of the community, I’ve been writing this column for a year and a half, so the number of people who do know has grown over time as friends have figured it out, etc. And of course La Freshman knows, as it was pertinent to his life. At this point there are two people who know exactly what went down when I was an asshole – me and him – and I thought it would be disrespectful to expand that to include the entire Swarthmore community.
I have always viewed this column as a way to use my personal experiences and issues as a springboard for more general advice, and within that context, giving details only serves to fuel the gazette audience’s voyeurism.
Maybe it should have been heavier on actual advice. That’s legitimate. But in some ways, I’m still in the middle of this one and I’m trying to figure everything out too.
Hi SM,
I’m sorry to make it seem like I wanted more details of your personal interations – that would definitely be crossing a line on my part. Your privacy should definitely be respected. What I meant more to say is that it seems that, for something that you feel so uncomfortable talking about even under the veil of anonymity, you seem to be writing it off as just something people do. And I’m not sure why. I understand what you’re saying, now, about being light on advice because you’re still somewhat in the thick of it. It just seems like this column is an excuse to say, “I did something really bad, I feel bad, tell me it’s okay because I’ll tell you it’s okay!” which doesn’t seem all that productive and certainly doesn’t make me pity you.
hmm, I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that something really egregious occurred. Certainly the Serial Monogamist regrets something, but especially given the very general frame of things people often do and here are some ways to avoid those common mistakes of poor behavior, it seems strange that you’ve determined that it was so bad.
I’m also wondering where you’re seeing a request for validation, because I’m pretty sure the writing does just the opposite: it states that SM regrets something and then just moves on without lingering.
I would say that the perception that what SM did was bad comes from her own words:
“It’s not worth repeating what I did, but suffice it to say that it was verbal (and in private), not something like destruction of property or violence, and it was truly shitty.
When you’ve screwed up, you can never take back what you’ve done. In some cases, you can control the damage and to move forward, but time travel is still impossible, and sometimes when you fuck up, it’s permanent.”
I would bold/underline “truly shitty” if I knew HTML.
Okay, it seems like I need to correct some misperceptions.
I didn’t go into the details about what I did not because I’m “so uncomfortable” with it, but because it doesn’t matter. There were plenty of reasons to leave it out. It would be invasive and unnecessary to include in order to actually give any kind of advice. And as the only person in this conversation who knows what was omitted, I can promise that it wouldn’t have added anything and would have taken up additional space when the gazette already wishes that I would write shorter columns. It was mean and bitter and related to events not in this article and still fairly standard for the kind of crap that people yell in a bad breakup.
That doesn’t make it not shitty. That doesn’t mean I don’t wish I hadn’t done it (that’s a billion negatives, but it makes the structure work). But even if it were something “worse,” you still can’t wallow in your worst moments forever. If you’ve done everything in your power to make it right, after a while you have to move on.
I’m still not firmly grasping why you think I want your pity. I can guarantee that I don’t. I assume it has to do with the personal details in the final few paragraphs?
I included the details of the way I respond to guilt because, on a maybe slightly less extreme level, it’s pretty common. There are jokes about it all over the internet. And all I said about it beyond that is that it’s unhealthy.
I didn’t say that last semester was one of the worst times of my life because I was trying to be hyperbolic or because I was feeling depressed or to get you to feel bad for me. I said it because it was absolutely true. I was in and out of the hospital and no one had any idea what was wrong with me. One of my family members was going through a crisis that was threatening to tear my family apart. But I don’t want your sympathy about it. Sometimes that’s just how life is and it wasn’t relevant to go into that much detail because it doesn’t apply to anyone else.