The Causes of the Ultimate Destruction of My First Relationship

(started 7/23/18, forgot about for a month, finished 8/13/18)

With an interest in self improvement, and because I've still been thinking about it quite a bit lately, I'm going to write down what I see as the problems and ultimate causes of the demise of my first relationship.

1. Me and Brenna began to develop underlying disagreements that, instead of resolving and coming to unity on, we would change topics and leave the issue unresolved. The main one that comes to mind is our slightly differing views on feminism/gender roles. This topic was at least tangentially related to multiple causes of our breakup. We both believed in Male headship in marriage and the church (though she was much weaker on those when we met), but we had different understandings of how exactly that played out and also what were the biblical gender roles in broader society.

I saw what I considered to be a compromise with feminism on her part, and her lack of fully embracing what I see as biblical womanhood caused me great consternation. However, I am still fully working out my understanding of these issues, and though I realized there was an problem, I didn't know how to adequately explain my thoughts, at least to where she could understand them. Instead, being the graceless person that i am often am, I reacted by going too far in the other direction, as if thinking that would drag her with me.

2. My visceral hatred for feminism, which I still have, and still believe is justified, also caused me to sometimes say things/present ideas that I think were unbiblical in how they treated women because I enjoyed how anti-feminist such thoughts were and the theoretical offense they would cause in such a person (I've also overreacted to political correctness to the point where I've often taking delight in trying to offend people).

3. I have a strong sex drive. That can be good in and of itself, but in a dating relationship it can cause problems. I have always remained unsure about how issues of intimacy are to best be handled while dating (not whether sex is fine while dating or anything but more like where to draw the line and what types of conversation and sexual jokes are appropriate). I was consciously aware of how my sex drive might influence my positions on such issues but I don't think I was able to successfully counteract it. I shan't get into specifics, but one big example was how Brenna told me I'd guess a little over a month before it ended that she had begun to feel uncomfortable with our sexual innuendo. I completely agreed with her, but I (a) did not make that clear to her (probably out of some vague misguided "game" related ideas), and (b) did not come close to successfully stopping that kind of language in our conversations. I take full responsibility for that.

4. I probably could have given her more comfort in the sense of telling her how much I cared about her regularly. There were times when I thought about texting her out of the blue something along the lines of, "just felt like telling you I love you right now," but never did. The reason I didn't is not 100% clear to me but is either a result of a bad "game" influence, me just not being an emotionally expressive person, or just an inexperience doing that kind of thing in a relationship. Probably some combination of all of them. I wish I had done that kind of thing a bit more because I definitely did care about her deeply.

5. As this was my first serious romantic relationship, I would experiment with different things to see what was good and what wasn't and how she would react. I learned some beneficial stuff from that, but I also went way overboard sometimes and may have caused lasting damage. There's one specific time that comes to mind where she got slightly up in arms over something and I, trying to be teasing, said, "calm your tits" and then when (shockingly) she didn't respond well to that, ran myself further into the ground saying, "so you don't want sugartits as a nickname then?" Don't really know what I was thinking there.

6. Somehow I feel like the relationship became less centered around God at it went along. I fondly remember our earlier days texting where we would regularly have deep discussion about God and theology and Christianity and over time that seemed to go away. I remember the last time we saw each other, paintballing, and how we were talking about how we met and how it was over a discussion of the problem of evil and I thought to myself, "we really haven't talked about stuff like that much lately." As with a couple of the other issues, it was a case of me noticing a problem but not fixing it proactively enough. I suppose this could be seen as blameworthy on each of our parts, but as the man, I think I shoulder the final responsibility.

So far I have mostly listed things I see as shortcomings on my end. That is appropriate because (a) I can only control and improve my own actions, and (b) I was the one broken up with so the presumption should be I was more likely at fault. However, I think it's still good to discuss what I see as shortcomings from her end, both so as to help with the tendency to idolize the relationship, and so I can try to avoid these in future relationships, or at least be better prepared to deal with them.

1. She sometimes didn't seem to take joy in being a woman, being feminine. Many, many things associated with traditional femininity she disliked, which I was never happy about but didn't really know what, if anything, I should do about it. For example, she didn't like having long hair, she only grew it out because she knew I liked it, and she complained about it regularly. I appreciated that she would do something to please me but I would've gotten more joy out of it if her having long hair was also out of her innate pleasure in being feminine. Other examples include she didn't like wearing dresses, didn't like cooking, and she really wished she'd been able to be on the boys wrestling team(!) growing up. Especially that last one raised huge yellow flags in that how could a traditionalist girl ever possibly think that that was a feminine activity becoming of a woman? She really seemed to have that feminist resentment that guys could do things she wasn't allowed to do, instead of taking joy in the many beautiful feminine things that were hers to do.

2. When talking about her plans for the future, even while our relationship was very good, she always seemed to be much more keen on going to college to get a degree than getting married and starting a family. This is pretty much ubiquitous amongst American girls these days and it seems likely that (barring a trip to Eastern Europe) I'll end up with a girl who wasted a few years in college. It's not the end of the world, no one's perfect, but if some girl was talking to me and mentioned how she just wanted to get married and be a wife and support her husband and didn't have lots of extra-familial aspirations I'm sure I'd be so shocked I'd ask her to marry me on the spot lol.

3. She wasn't always the most respectful or reverent when bringing (often legitimate) complaints. I don't think 1 Peter 2 telling women to win sinning husbands over "without a word" means they can never bring complaints to their man, but they should always be respectful. The way she would bring up some issue she had with me often was disrespectful and attacking and that made me less likely to respond to the complaint in a productive way.

4. Relating to the idea of "underlying disagreements" mentioned in #1, because of the innate discomfort and bad feelings getting into them would cause, Brenna had a tendency to avoid taking about them, she would often say "don't start" if a topic we had known disagreements on was about to come up. I, on the hand, really wanted unity of mind, not just a surface unity, so I would regularly think about how to talk about something we disagreed on so we could resolve it. However, for whatever reason, I never explained any of that to her.

All in all though, she was a good girl. She was a fairly traditionally minded girl who wanted to get married and homeschool her kids, I was just such a zealot for ideological purity on the issue that her perhaps slight aberrations caused me more disquiet than they should have. I probably should have more grace with girls in the future, and also be more forthcoming and proactive when I see disagreements or problems brewing in a relationship.