Pleasure Principle

by Gwen Cooper — July 25, 2007

My friend Stacey's really been through the wringer with her most recent boyfriend. The two of them have spent the past 2 years cheating on each other and lying about it, breaking up and getting back together, threatening each other with various ultimatums ("If you don't propose soon, I'm leaving!"/"If you don't stop threatening me, I'm leaving!"). All that sort of thing. Finally, the two of them split up for what seemed to those of us friends looking on to be for good. Two of us went over to her apartment the other night to be with her, at her request, while her boyfriend packed up the remainder of his things and moved them to his new place. He's now seeing somebody else, and she was at his new apartment waiting for him to return with his stuff. Seems like this should be the end of the story, right?

Wrong. We're now realizing, to our general dismay, that our friend's story is developing an epilogue--at least, what we hope is an epilogue, and not the prelude to a whole new chapter in their relationship. The boyfriend hasn't stopped calling and emailing, and Stacey--although she claims not to have responded to any of these calls and emails--can't stop telling us about each of these calls and emails. What concerns me is that she can't stop talking about him; I mean, she wouldn't be talking about him so much if she weren't thinking about him, no? And that can't be good.

I've often been accused over the years of ending relationships too quickly or for reasons that were deemed arbitrary by my friends. I've always insisted that what I do isn't jump the gun so much as foresee potential situations like my friend Stacey's and head them off at the pass. My firm belief is that everybody knows in their hearts the moment when a relationship becomes un-solveably bad. We just tend to pretend we don't know it for as long as possible, until the day comes when there has been so much pain and fighting and bad feeling that we can ignore the truth no longer.

Why go through all that? Why not just be honest with yourself from the get-go and cut out all that suffering in the middle? To me, it makes as much sense as paying retail for a pair of shoes when you know the wholesaler and can get them at the wholesaler's price, without having to go through the middleman's markup. But I also realize that I'm nearly alone--and possibly, therefore, somewhat bizarre--in holding this opinion.

So I guess the question is: why do we go through it? If our natural human tendency is to avoid pain and seek happiness to the greatest extent possible, why is it that when it comes to relationships, our natural tendencies seem to be completely inverted? Why do we cling to an unhappy relationship--no matter how unhappy it makes us--rather than give it up? I'm not talking about people with decades-long marriages and kids in the mix, who clearly have a vested interest in making almost superhuman efforts to keep the relationship together. I'm talking about the more run-of-the-mill, "boy meets girl, boy and girl are happy for about three months, boy and girl then spend two years making each other miserable" scenario.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So maybe long-term relationships provoke a kind of insanity over time. Although, for those of us who've been dating and breaking up with guys for years without having yet found "the one," maybe it's dating in the first place that makes us insane.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.