Ask a Queer Therapist: My Girlfriend Ended Our Relationship Because She Wants a “Traditional Family.” How Do I Cope?
“I’m a queer, trans man who has been in a loving relationship with a cis, straight woman. She has kept our relationship hidden from her friends and family for the last few years, and has now decided that she needs to end our relationship because she wants “a traditional family.” I have proposed marriage, told her I want to have babies and build a family with her, but her fear and insecurity about the people around her won’t let her explore that option. She is taking the easy way out and ending our relationship. I knew this day would come eventually, but how do I deal with it?”
Dear Heartbroken,
I am so sorry that your relationship ended this way. It sounds like you really put your whole self into this relationship for several years, so it will definitely take you some real time to heal.
You end your letter saying that you knew this day would come, so this is where I would like to start my letter to you.
I find myself wondering what it was like for you to be in a years-long relationship that, somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew would end? And not only did you know it would end, you knew that it would end for reasons over which you had absolutely no control: your girlfriend’s inability to accept you fully for who you are. I don’t know how conscious you were of this knowing during the time you were together. I suspect not very much, or it would have been incredibly painful to be together. Still, I wonder what drove you to imagine building a life with someone who, you both knew, could never build a life with you?
I’m not asking those questions to be harsh, but rather to encourage you to focus on the one thing in this situation that you have the power to fully understand, and to change if you decide to do so: yourself. Your motivations, desires, hopes, fears. Your perception of yourself, love for yourself, acceptance of yourself. The temptation of a situation like this is often to focus on the other person’s thoughts, feelings and actions; why couldn’t she accept me? Why was what I was offering not enough for her? Why couldn’t she see that we could build the life we both wanted, together? But going down this path ultimately leads you right back to where you started, or even worse, it leaves you at the edge of a cliff with nowhere to go but down.
The difficult, frustrating, infuriating truth is that ultimately the answers to those “why” questions do not matter. Even if you could answer them (which you can’t), you have absolutely no power to change them, and to focus your energy on them is to lose even more of yourself to this relationship. Focusing on these questions is also damaging because they all hold within them the same subtext: why wasn’t I enough? And this question leads you right back to the edge of that cliff.
I encourage you to first take time to just be sad. Mourn the loss of the relationship you had, but also mourn the loss of the relationship you imagined yourself having. I don’t know if these two relationships feel the same, but I wonder how much of the imagined future of this relationship may now feel like a fantasy that never could have come to life? Relationships predicated on one person believing in the other’s potential to change are more often than not doomed to fail. This is certainly not because people lack the ability to change (I’d be out of a job if this was the case!), but because desiring someone to change means not accepting who they are in the moment. And who they are in the moment is the person you’re building a relationship with, not the fantasy of who they might become.
I would be remiss if I didn’t address the line in your letter that mentions your ex, “taking the easy way out.” If I may, I highly encourage you to look within yourself and see if you are open to reframing the narrative you are creating by describing the situation this way. For one, casting her decision in this light belittles both you and the relationship; I can not imagine that there is anything easy for her about letting go of a years-long relationship with someone she loved. Using this language to describe her decision also belittles you, by putting you in a box that is so easily discarded. But I imagine that might be exactly how part of you feels–disposable, unworthy, easy to forget.
An IFS trained therapist would encourage you to spend some time getting to know those parts of yourself, the ones who feel so dispensable. Get curious about them, explore how else those parts show up in your life and relationships. Take notice of what other parts are showing up in this narrative (I bet some pretty angry parts are there as well), and get curious about them too. Ultimately the work would involve befriending those parts that feel disposable and angry, asking if they can take a step back and allow your whole, healed self to take center stage.
When relationships end we tend to see them as failures, but I do not believe this to be true. Even when a relationship ends in heartbreak, when the heartbreak heals, you can allow yourself to appreciate the relationship for what it gave you at the time, and for what lessons it allows you to bring to your future self. The ending of a relationship is the beginning of something new, and giving yourself space to figure out what you want that something new to be, takes time. In your case, I hope that the “something new” you see in your future is a partner who is ready to accept you into her life, her family, and her community wholly for who you are, and a person who knows he deserves nothing less.
Warmly,
A Queer Therapist