Recapped

In my last relationship, I wasn’t allowed to be angry. The thought of being angry towards your significant other wasn’t right. She said to me "if you love someone, you cannot be angry with them because that will taint the love". That was drilled into my head and for a very long time, I made that my truth.

Because of this, everytime I got angry, I wasn’t able to voice out. That in turn, had let me to pent up my anger and it slowly dissipates little by little in the long run. So whenever my then girlfriend does something that I wasn’t comfortable with or when she say something hurtful, I cannot get angry. My only option was to hide it away.

While she, when angry, would scream at me, among others. When she cooled down, I’d asked her "I thought we weren’t supposed to be angry at each other?"

In turn, she’ll tell me that she wasn’t angry, just disappointed. Out of devotion, I took that reasoning to be gospel. In sheer blind loyalty, I failed to see that anger was masked with disappointment. So whenever she shouts at me, she wasn’t "angry", she was just "disappointed" and unlike anger, disappointment has this non-chalant feeling to it. While anger is temporarily hot, disappointment lowers your self esteem and that just kind of stick with you.

Then slowly, I too started to emulate that practice.

It took me a long time to realised that that was unhealthy because anger cannot be capped. It cannot be contained in a bottle and magically disappear. Through the end of my long term relationship, I had a couple of outbursts and it was surprising for the both of us that I was capable of bursting. She said "you weren’t like this before, you’ve changed."

Again, the gospel was preached once more to me, ie. You cannot be angry with your partner. So whenever I had an outburst, I felt like I had sinned.

That was ultimately the downfall of our relationship. No, it wasn’t anger that broke us up. It was the lack of healthy communication. It was the lack of transparent emotions. It was the lack of empathy. We both failed to address the issue. We both committed atrocities against our relationship that we tried so very hard to build. We were the architects of our own demise.

Because, in the infancy stage of our relationship, we believed in a fairytale-esque relationship. We believed in a disney-like definition of a couple without having to consider that we are, foremost, human beings. Human beings capable of emotions and emotional outburst.

We viewed emotions such as anger to be a bad thing and therefore, tried our best to rid it from our relationship for good. We didn't just swept the issue under the rug. We denied its existence altogether.

But like pain, anger demands to be felt and in our arrogance, we shunned it away. We walked around holding hands, not realising that we have created a massive shadow lurking behind us. We were a ticking time bomb.

Anger is neither negative or positive. It is just a reaction to a situation. When we separate the person from the emotion, we could have come to a rational solution.

But we didn't. We ignored it. We didn't communicate it. We blissfully deny it. As it grows and no longer can be contained, anger became a hungry ghost and the only thing on the menu was the relationship.

Anger requires a channel of communication that flows back and fro in order to quell it. Through this communication, you will learn more about your partner and you can then mould yourself around them as they do you. In time, you will start to realise that anger is just a reflection of past trauma, which we all have our own. And in situations where anger is released, that is life giving us the opportunity to assess it. Through that assessment a bilateral growth is formed. There is no such thing as a person free from anger because anger is just an emotion.

We are now both grown in terms of emotional growth and maturity. Althought we live separate lives now, we still maintain communication but we keep a distance from each other. Which is good.

But I’ll always remember her for who she was. Not an angry person but rather a loving girlfriend. I hope she’ll remember me the same.

Gunthor x

14.02.2021