Ralph,
I have struggled in the past with tendencies similar to your girlfriend’s. I wouldn’t presume that her issues are exactly the same as mine were, but my guess is it’s some variation on this theme:
She hasn’t learned that life is something you have to adapt to, not the other way around. She has unrealistic expectations that things are supposed to go her way, and when they don’t, it pisses her off.
So it’s not necessarily directly an issue that she is avoiding responsibility; she literally may not see that she has any responsibility in those areas. As far as she’s concerned, the bike should have been unmolested and she shouldn’t have to bother about the blasted lock. She doesn’t choose to live in a world full of bike-molesting idiots. And in a back-handed sense, she’s right – in an ideal world, people would totally respect her property and leave it the heck alone – just as she would for them. Her problem is she doesn’t respect the fact that it’s not her ideal world. The world doesn’t owe here anything. Other people don’t owe her anything. God and the universe don’t owe her anything. Other people don’t have her ethics or values and it shouldn’t surprise her when they fall short of her standards – even if they are “good” standards. And she can hold her breath and stomp her feet all she wants, but it isn’t going to change, automatically, because she wants it to.
Hence, the temper tantrums and funks and the bleed-through into your relationship. There’s a lot of impotent raging about how things should go and don’t. Most of it is nothing personal, but at some point, you’re not going to perform as expected and then watch out.
Absent some kind of life-changing insight she is never going to be happy because she’s waiting for the world to shape up and start behaving – she considers that a prerequisite to her happiness. This is not a formula for success.
It took three decades of this kind of misery for me to snap out of it and get the message that life will never conform to my ideals, nor does it need to in order for me to find peace and fulfillment. You cannot put conditions on how the external world must operate before you are willing to play the game. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s also a little nuts, actually.
Your SO may be less dense than me, and may mature more quickly. But knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t want to inflict my former self on someone for any length of time. So personally speaking, I’d bag it. Especially since you find the collateral damage in terms of how she treats you “completely unacceptable”. I don’t think it’s going to get much better very quickly, and not necessarily at all.
Others here have made the point that you are responsible for how you react to her. True enough. But one legitimate way you can accept that responsibility is to be honest with yourself and with her and say that you don’t want to deal with it. It’s your choice – nothing says you have to.
If you really want to stick this out no matter what, I can only suggest that it may help you to think more kindly of her to understand that in all likelihood, if she could see reality accurately, she’d accept her responsibility in areas such as your example bike scenario – as she no doubt already does in many other areas where she sees reality more clearly and accurately.
But I can’t tell you any one thing that helped to open my eyes to reality. My expectations were poorly set, I was a True Believer in certain key illusions, and only complete disillusionment with my warped reality, resulting in total desperation, allowed me to accept the broken, imperfect world around me, and find peace with the world as it is rather than as I wished it would be. I had to accept that most of my suffering was self-inflicted by trying to make the world work in ways it was not designed to. Initially, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, and I did everything in my power to resist it.
The truth is, people like your SO need to literally be completely disillusioned in order to liberate their true selves from an overweening ego that wants to have things its own way. And it’s almost like life will arrange itself to do that breaking, because until this matter is resolved, I believe with all my heart that God (or life or the universe, or whatever you choose to call it) is more interested in her character than in her happiness.
I guess you have to ask yourself if you want to bear witness to that and help her through it, accepting the possibility that she may or may not ever change. If that’s your calling, don’t shirk it – but if not, don’t feel bad about it.
Best to you,
--Bob
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