Why Are You Suddenly the Villain?

Rekha still has the video of the speech Vivek gave at their fifth anniversary. He is holding a glass, a little flushed, telling forty guests that she is the best thing that ever happened to him.

Fourteen months later she told him she wanted to separate.

Within a week his sister had stopped taking her calls. His mother told a neighbour that Rekha had “always been unstable”. And a message arrived at one in the morning: “Everyone is going to know what you really are.”

It is the same man. Rekha keeps watching the video and asking herself which one was real.

The pedestal and the drop

The lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy and the writer Randi Kreger named their book on difficult divorces Splitting, and they mean the word twice. The first meaning is the obvious one. The second is a term from psychology: the unconscious habit of seeing a person as all good or all bad, with nothing in between.

They describe it as a way of coping with confusion and mixed feelings, and they say it grows stronger under stress. Few things are more stressful than a break-up. People who split, they write, put a partner on a pedestal and then knock them off it.

So the speech was sincere. So is the message. They are the two ends of one pattern.

What the loss feels like from inside

Why does the switch come now? Eddy and Kreger point to three losses that a separation can set off: the loss of attachment, the loss of a flattering picture of oneself, and the loss of control. For some people each of these is close to unbearable.

It does not seem to matter who asked for the divorce. What you experience as relief, the authors note, your partner may experience as a loss they cannot tolerate. From inside that feeling, you must be to blame. And if you are to blame for something this painful, you must be a very bad person indeed.

Feelings first, facts afterwards

Most of us build our feelings on facts. Something happens, and we feel a certain way about it. Kreger describes people who work the other way round. When the feeling does not fit the facts, the facts get quietly revised until it does.

The authors call the results emotional facts: things that feel true with great force and are stated with great conviction. The person saying them may believe every word.

They offer an image for this. Picture a witness who staggers into court drunk, falls over the chair and announces that his wife made him fall. Nobody would take it seriously, because everyone can see he is under the influence. A person in the grip of all-or-nothing thinking is also under an influence. There is simply no visible sign of it.

Predictable is useful

This is the hopeful part. Eddy and Kreger say that people with these patterns have a narrow range of behaviour under stress, which makes them unusually easy to forecast. Readers, they report, often ask whether the authors have met their husband or wife.

They list the moments when behaviour tends to turn extreme. You say you want to separate. You move out. Legal papers arrive. A decision goes against them. The case ends. You begin a new relationship. Each one registers as a fresh loss.

If you can see those moments coming, you can prepare for them, and you stop being stunned every time.

Not about you, and not yours to fix

The authors are careful about one thing, and I want to be careful too. They do not call such people bad. They say they did not choose this, do not see their own part in it, and want to be happy like anyone else. They also say, plainly, that helping them cannot be your responsibility.

You do not need a diagnosis to use any of this. The authors’ advice is to think in patterns and not in labels.

Which one was real? Both. The man who gave the speech exists. So does the pattern. Only one of them is going to turn up for the next year.