Still Expecting Damaged People to Self-Repair to Accommodate Me

I was friends with two married couples back in the day. Two of them, some years back, chose to break up with their respective partners so they could be with each other. This was intensely painful for the rejected spouses, of course.

It happens. It's not nice, but it happens. Commitment to relationships is a thing, but so is love. It's a tricky wicket. I have no pat answers.

However, the happy couple, both of whom are celebrities here, had the chutzpah to produce a TV special detailing the storybook nature of their beautiful love story, retracing their circuitous paths to a middle-aged discovery of a level of towering, billowing love neither previously imagined possible. This shlock played on television in front of their exes, who'd done nothing but love them sincerely (one of them had moved across the world and put aside career ambitions for the relationship).

Holy Jesus on a shingle.

Obviously, I took the side of the jilted, and aimed to steer clear of the storybook lovers. But circumstance landed me in their midst, and, having no personal beef with either, I was cordial, and we kept up some contact for a while. But at some point they were shamelessly and callously inconsiderate of my feelings. And this actually shocked and perturbed me.

Proving, yet again, that the human psyche can't process the fact that damaged people cannot be expected to self-repair to accommodate you.

Consider the narcissistic absurdity of my thought process: These are people who not only cheated on their partners, and devastated innocent lives, but then went so far as to gloat about it on national TV. And when they were less than agreeable with me, well, I took UMBRAGE! How dare they! And it took me months - months! - to frame it correctly.


So that time I met Don Rickles, he was so - what's the word? - insulting!