Ghostwriters, Episode 3: The Relationship

Jen: There's a version of every relationship where two people pick up the same pen and somehow they write a better story together than either one of them could have ever written alone. I need you to hear that up front because the second I put the word ghostwriter next to the word relationship, some of you are already bracing for me to tell you to leave your partner. And I am not. This is quieter than that. It's about the moment somewhere along the way when we stopped meeting two people writing together and started meeting one person's handwriting with the other person's name just signed underneath it. Welcome back to the Ghostwriter series. Hey friends, and welcome back to the Midlife Edit. It's Jen, and this one is coming to you on episode three of the Ghostwriter series. And so let's just get into it. If you're just joining us, this series is about five recurring authors who ended up being in a woman's life writing her life without ever asking permission. So far, we've done the family, which were the rules we get cast into before we're old enough to audition for another one. And then we've done the culture, which is that ghostwriter that you never met. And still they had notes about your body, your ambition, how much room you're allowed to take up. Today, we're getting into the relationship. And the relationship is the ghostwriter that doesn't sneak into your life through a magazine or a childhood role. This one shows up disguised as love. And so. A quick reminder of the full lineup of the ghostwriters. We've got the family, the culture, the relationship, the caregiver, and the job. Here's what's different about this one. The family, you can point to it. You see it, you were born into it, right? The culture, once you know to look for it, it's everywhere and nowhere all at once. But the relationship friends, that's the first ghostwriter on this list that you actually chose. You pick the person. You said yes on purpose, more than once probably. Which makes it the hardest one to catch in the act. Because when the pen changes hands inside a relationship, it rarely feels like a takeover. It feels like love. It feels like being easy. It feels like somebody caring about you. It feels like a team. I want to be really clear about something before I go further. Partnership at its best is one of the great collaborative acts of life. Two people, one story, both of you holding the pen together. That's not what I'm describing today. I know it sounds like a beautiful fairy tale that you see in the movies, which life can be sometimes, right? But you're always gonna have something. It's for a different episode. The relationship becomes a ghostwriter when compromise stops being mutual and starts running just in one direction. And it almost never announces itself. Nobody sits down across from you and says, Okay, from now on, your preferences matter less. It's so much smaller than that. It's quieter than that. It happens one dropped opinion at a time until one day you realize you've been co authoring somebody else's story so completely. That yours stalled out a while back and you didn't even notice the last entry. And there's some scripts that I want to name in this because I think you'll recognize at least one of them. Okay. So when we're writing our life stories, there's scripts in my mind, right? This is this is my whole hold the pen behind the scenes thoughts of this all. And I'm thinking about how these ghostwriters show up and they show up writing scripts. And so the first one I want to talk about is the compromise script. This is the one where the, yeah, sure, whatever you want stops being generous generosity. And it turns into just like a reflex. You stop bringing your preference to the table because it's easier, it keeps the peace, and eventually you forget you're even allowed to have an opinion before he or she does. Compromise is supposed to be two people meeting in the middle. This is one person just quietly relocating to wherever the other one already was. What about the logistics script? Every household runs on somebody's invisible operating system. Think about it. Think about the operating system that your household runs on. It could be whose job is the quote unquote real one? Whose calendar gets built around whatever it is? Whose parents get the holiday that doesn't require negotiation? When it's always the same person's life. that flexes to accommodate the other, that's not neutral. It's just it's not. It is a script and somebody's been writing it for a while. What about the peacekeeper script? You'll recognize this one from episode one. It's that same peacekeeper role a lot of us got handed as kids, except now it's running inside a marriage or a partnership instead of a childhood home. You pre-edit your opinion before it even reaches your mouth. You round yourself down so there's nothing left to disagree with. It doesn't feel like silencing yourself. It feels like being easy to live with. What about the whose plan is the plan script? Because every household has a fixed point where everybody else organizes around. And it's usually one person's career or ambitions or one person's big idea for the future. The other person's dreams get filed under someday or if there's room. Not because anyone decided that on purpose, just because somebody's plan became the plan just a long time ago, and nobody has revisited that paperwork ever since. And how about the invisible load script? This is the one that nobody puts into wedding vows. Who remembers the pediatrician's number? Whose brain is the household's backup hard drive? Who's still doing math about dinner while the other person is actually genuinely, blessedly thinking about absolutely nothing? It's not that one partner doesn't care. It's that one partner's brain got quietly assigned to always be on. And for the majority of the time, it's it's the wife, it's the woman in the relationship that that happens to. Or if you know, if it's a a partnership where there's two women, it's it's that matriarchal almost kind of woman. Even if you don't have kids, there's always that kind of matriarch rule, right? And so that invisible load script usually falls on the person who is almost like the the caregiver of the home. But let's talk about the one that I lived, because I mean it's my podcast. But it's also something that I have come to this realization of over the past few years. I've always kind of known what I was like, you know, and and how I base my relationships off of. But the past couple years have really shed this light open to me and especially going through my hold the pen moment and and this big ghostwriter series that I have, I really started thinking about it. And it wasn't comfortable. I'm I'm not gonna lie. I sat in my shit and thought about it a lot. But before I ever named any of those scripts for you, I lived one myself for about twenty years, honestly. And I think that a lot of you are gonna recognize maybe, maybe a little bit of yourselves in this at least. So f for most of my dating life. you know, I I can even remember maybe even the first crush I had, but I didn't date people. I dated potential. Like I'd meet a guy with some rough edge or obvious problem, some red flag doing a full red flag parade right in front of me, and something in my brain, very confident, very wrong of me, would go, Hm, I can fix that. Give me some time and I'll smooth. every one of those edges down myself. Nobody asked me to take that job. I just kept applying for it over and over with different men, like it was gonna turn out differently this time if I just tried a little harder. And it wasn't only the fixing part of it. It was the disappearing act underneath it. Well, okay. And and you think you're gonna fix him. That's Daddy Issues 101. That's for a whole nother episode. But he's also giving you attention, which is that feeling of I just want to be loved. And again, that's probably for my therapist, but it was always this person who needed me. So I thought that that meant that they were gonna love me forever. Okay. But then the disappearing act didn't even didn't even start shortly after. It came with it. I'd start liking teams I didn't care about or dressing in styles that weren't mine, showing up at social things that meant absolutely nothing to me. Laughing in the right places because somewhere along the way I'd learned that being liked meant becoming whatever the guy in front of me already liked. Nobody demanded it, and most of them probably didn't even notice. I did it to myself, quietly, before everything. Anybody even had to ask. And here's the thing. I can remember very vividly my first crush. And why? Because I went and made my mom buy me the same starter jacket for the Miami Hurricanes that he had. I think it was like in fifth or sixth grade. First off, starter jacket. Obviously I like nostalgia. If you're watching, I have a Adelia sweatshirt on that my sister bought me for my birthday this year. Yeah. I love nostalgia, so I'm thinking about the starter jacket, but I didn't even know who one player on the Miami Miami Hurricanes college football team. Their colors, for God's sake, were are orange and green. Like nobody looks good in that, but I wanted that because I knew this boy that I had a crush on liked that team. And that's my first vivid memory of changing who I was or what I liked for somebody else. So this ghostwriter, even though in fifth or sixth grade I didn't know what a relationship was, even if we were dating, we were going out, whatever that meant. And I didn't understand any of it, but I did know that if I started liking that in X Men cards, then maybe there's a chance that he would like me. So I changed myself. And this happened over and over and over again throughout my entire life. And I I'm not being dramatic. I'm being sincere, I would lower my expectations because I didn't think I was good enough for somebody else. Or I would again find those walking red flags because I thought, hey, maybe if I just gave him some money or I just taught him to do this, or I just showed up as a support, he would change. I would fix him. And then I disappeared. I disappeared into things that I didn't enjoy. I didn't like doing certain things. whether it was attending some kind of concert, even though I love music, of course there are some that I'm not thrilled about, or you know, going to a football game that I didn't care about, or ready for this one, going to the gym because going to the gym meant that I would look good for them. Because that's the only thing they cared about. It it was it it's an awakening, you guys, to sit and think about how small I made myself for somebody else, how much of myself I lost because I thought that meant that this person would love me. They would give me love and all I wanted all my life was to be loved. A love like you see in the movies, love to me that made me feel safe. That somebody wasn't gonna leave. And again, I know most of that's for a therapist, but it's relevant to this conversation because. I didn't think I deserved a good one. Not a great one, not even a solidly fine one. So I kept lowering that bar and I called it being flexible. I kept picking projects and calling it love. And every time I disappeared a little bit more into somebody else's preferences, I told myself I was just being easygoing. When really I was just editing myself down to a size that I thought a man could tolerate. I've lost friends. over relationships, good friends, because I just stopped talking to them because that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted this beautiful relationship that I tried to force so hard. And I tried to make myself like that person. And friends, that is just a ghostwriter working overtime. And I was the one handing it a pen. I was handing a pen to a situation ship who at I don't know, 40 something, maybe late 30s, still lived with his mother and wouldn't claim me as a girlfriend. I handed the pen to somebody that needed so much fixing that it was never gonna happen. And I lost myself in that person. I handed the pen to somebody who would with hold kisses and being intimate if I didn't go to the gym. It sucks to say now, right? It's a it's a a really big hit in my gut. Jesus, I was so much better than all of that. Not necessarily better than those people. But I was better. I am better inside as a person to be able to put up with something like that. But I did it because I thought that it was love. And then I turned 37. And I met the man who I now call my husband. I know you're gonna roll your eyes, and it's so cheesy and corny, and it sounds cliche as hell. And honestly. I rolled my eyes too, right up until I find found this thing that happened to me. And here's the point of telling you this, and it's the whole segment in one second. I did not have to change a single fucking thing about myself to be with him. Not my opinions, not my personality, not the things that I like, or the space I take up in the room, or the way I say exactly what I'm thinking, and two seconds after that, I say it again. For the first time ever. In my entire dating life, there was no fixer upper project. Not him. And this part, this part is the part that actually undid me when I was writing this episode. That actually made me cry when I thought about it. But I wasn't the fixer upper problem either. Not in this one. I'm not the one I'm not the big project that needed fixes fixing because I didn't have to become someone more palatable. To be loved well. I just had to show up as the person I already was. And that's not a plot plot twist about him, by the way. Even though he is wonderful, it's a plot twist about me. Because the common denominator in every one of those old relationships was never the men. It was a woman who decided somewhere way back at the beginning. That she wasn't the kind of person who got to have this. So she went out and tried to build it herself, project by project, edit by edit, out of men that she thought that she could improve. And I'm not telling you this so you go wait around for your own 37-year plot twist. Some of you are already with the person and just needed somebody to name the pattern. Some of you are single and has nothing to do with this. It has to do with timing and it has to do with what you want out of life, right? The point isn't the age or the timing or the guy. The point is the sentence I used to believe. I don't deserve somebody good, so I'll just build one myself. Versus that sentence that I truly believe now. I don't need to be built, I need to be met. And again, I could go on forever about this. And again, it's probably for my therapist, but it is so real because I feel like so many of us have brought ourselves down to this. We have changed who we were for a guy. We have lost friendships and family and everything else just for this man or woman, this partner who doesn't see the real you. Here's how you know one of these scripts is still running. The compromise scripts becomes the woman who can't remember the last restaurant that she picked. The logistics script becomes the one whose work trip always gets rescheduled first. The peacekeeper script becomes agreeing out loud with something you don't actually agree with just to keep the evening easy. The whose plan is the plan script becomes describing your own goals as it's just a hobby, really, without meaning. That it really is, and you don't really mean to say that. The invisible load script becomes being exhausted by 8 p.m. and not being able to point to a single thing that you did that would show up on a to-do list. And the pattern I just told you about shows up as falling for somebody's potential instead of their actual current self and calling that patience instead of naming it what it actually is. Hope, doing a job that. compatibility was supposed to do. None of this makes your partner a villain. Most of the time nobody sat down and planned out any of it. It's just easier to keep doing what's already working for one of you and harder to notice stopped working for the other one a long time ago. The fix here isn't leaving. I'm not telling you to leave your partner. I want to say that twice actually because I know how this sounds from the outside. The fix isn't leaving. The fix is picking the pen back up inside the relationship and finding out, honestly, whether it can hold two authors. That starts with a question that's a little more pointed than the ones we've used in the last two weeks. Is this actually a compromise? Or is it erasure wearing a wearing compromise's clothes? A real compromise costs something to both people. A real compromise costs something to both people. If it only ever costs you, it's not a compromise. It's just editing. And you're the only one that's losing pages. And if you recognize your pattern in your yourself, I'm sorry, in the pattern that I just told you about, you know, the potential daters, the project starters, the one Who spent years being the flexible one because some part of you decided a good one wasn't in the cards or that you didn't deserve it? The pen question gets even sharper. Are you editing him into someone better or editing yourself into someone smaller so the mismatch is easier to live with? This week, notice one moment where you're about to say, it doesn't matter, whatever you want. And before you say it, ask yourself honestly whether it actually doesn't matter or whether you've just gotten really good at deciding it doesn't matter, so you don't have to bring it up. It's lot to sit with today. It was a lot to sit with when I wrote this. So I'm gonna try to keep this short and sweet. And we can absolutely get into this deeper. have a guest on that talks about these things. But I I do want you to sit and think about it. I'm not asking you to bring up all the terrible relationships in your past, but think about the pattern. And again, I'm not asking you or telling you to leave the relationship you're in now. Because every relationship, I'm sure there's things that can be adjusted or fixed or worked on. And a partnership, a true, beautiful partnership, is one of the greatest things in life. Just don't lose yourself in it. So that's episode three of Ghost Raters, the relationship. If one of these scripts is running in your house right now, I want to hear about it inside the edit room. And if you're in a relationship where the pen genuinely gets shared, I want to hear about that too, because That's worth naming just as much as the hard stuff. Next week's the caregiver, and that's the ghostwriter that shows up when you become the one that everybody leans on. And what happens to your own story while you're busy holding everybody else's? So again, if this episode resonated with you, please do all the things. Like, like, subscribe, five-star review, you know, all that fun stuff. Share this with somebody who needs to hear it because I know for damn sure there's somebody, there's a woman out there that needs to hear this episode about the relationship. next week again, it's the caregiver. I am recording that early because, friends, the one thing That I never gave up in any relationship I've ever been in, or in my life, the most stable thing for the last 25, 30-ish years of my life has been my love for the Dave Matthews band. And I finally get to make my pilgrimage to the gorge for Labor Dave weekend. If you are a Dave Matthews fan, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, Labor Dave weekend is a three three show event over Labor Day weekend at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State. And I cannot wait. It is a bucket list item and my husband and I are going to have the greatest weekend. So follow me on all the socials because I will be super annoying probably, but posting every little thing that we do. And I am just so excited to do it. So Go find somebody that will take you on your bucket list trip. And if you don't, then go on your bucket list trip yourself. Because until next week I want you to pick up the pen and make it a damn good chapter. I'll see you on Tuesday.