A point comes in a damaged relationship that it becomes a damaging relationship. 

Habits of (mis)perception and (mis)reaction become difficult to break, because they enter from both sides of the relationship. A feedback cycle of injustice leads to unjust emotional response, which leads to escalating mutual injustice, and the dysfunction takes over. Even the possibility of this occurring creates tension and hyperalertness and leads to strained unnatural behavior that arouses suspicion and anxiety.

And each time an attempted reconciliation fails, new evidence of futility accumulates — new symptoms and clues to watch out for if, god forbid, there is a next time. And each time next time is allowed to occur and it all goes wrong again like it always does we are forced to witness our selves as we were five, ten, twenty years ago — worst-selves we have invested years into outgrowing. We have gotten nowhere. It takes days, weeks, months to recover who we have worked to become. The stakes of trying again increase with every failure.

The effort required to overcome the damage is enormous. The emotional self-discipline needed to resist the compulsions of the worst perceptual and reactive habits is much higher than the level needed to function gracefully in healthy relationships. The retraining of trust, of interpretation, of communication is much harder and less pleasant than starting fresh with brand-new relationships. 

Why would anyone make such an effort? The other has become monstrous. The other makes us ugly to ourselves. Why would we do it? 

I can think of two reasons. The first is practical. These relationships, in some strange way, remain inside us as inaccessible wounds. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say parts of ourselves are stranded in the estranged relationship, in a no man’s land beyond the reach of our independence. The only way to regain access is to collaborate on mutual healing. We can divert attention, distract ourselves, try burying the offness in new interests and feelings, but the pain remains there as a pervasive existential ambience. Something urgently needs a hearing but it cannot be said or heard. To stop trying means to accept this ambience as permanent.

The second reason is religious. If the other has us so wrong, isn’t it possible that we have them wrong, too? Something belonging to their own imagination seems to obstruct their understanding of who we really are beyond their image of who we are, but they can’t see it. How could we know if we were doing the same? Why shouldn’t we assume this is the case? What imaginings are we superimposing over the reality of who they are that we can’t see because we have mistaken it for who they really are? What would happen if this image-imposition were arrested and both allowed the reality of other to shine through and be witnessed in its fullest value? Is it possible to not want this?

Isn’t this mutual shining and seeing what forgiveness really is? It is the opposite of the popular new age forgiveness of “working on myself” by deciding to think and feel more positively and charitably about some figure who has been reduced to a figment of memory and fiction and willing our brains into believing that we believe it? This is solipsism — the very thing religion transcends. Rather it is an active inviting of another to surprise us with the truth of who they really are, and why they are worth knowing and loving, despite all flaws? This is transcendence of the self into what lives beyond the self, by way of discovering real, tangibly felt love for one’s enemy, one’s neighbor and one’s self. It is for this reason forgiveness has religious importance.

But until that effort is made from both sides, friendship cannot exist. Not because the status of friendship has been revoked, but because friendship exists as a fact of life and death. If friendship is not mutually given life, it does not live and there is no friendship, no matter how peacefully it lies where it is laid. 

But fortunately, religion differs from biology. In religion death is reversible. All it requires is the self, and realities transcending self — the most important ones being the people around us — to commune and to ask together for life.

* 

At the beginning of writing this, I planned to conclude with a point that sometimes we must recognize that reconciliation will never happen. We must amputate, and lose some of who we are in a stranger who will never know us. From time to time we will notice the aches of a phantom limb, but this is better than hacking off new pieces in the attempt to reconcile with someone who is hardened against it. We need closure. 

I crave closure. I doubt I am allowed to have it. It might be unforgivable.