The Comfort Factor

When I became single again, my best girlfriend Jennifer was also single. I thought it would be great because I’d have someone to rule the city with, someone to understand me and relate to my heart ache. We did go out, and have fun, we talked about boys excitedly, and we man-bashed, until one evening while we were sitting in her apartment and she sighs and says “I miss Allen.”

Now, I had met Allen a few months prior and instantly I didn’t like him. He looked and acted like he was 12 years old. Allen was Jennifer’s ex fiancé and was not kind to her-he mentally abused her-probably not intentionally, but after hearing intimate details of their relationship, I couldn’t believe she had hung around that loser so long; and even more astonishingly, that she was willing to spend the rest of her life tied to someone who made her any less than blissful.

Jennifer is a beautiful girl, but she is self conscious about her weight, and has low self esteem. I know that women with low self esteem can guilt themselves into staying in an abusive relationship or one in which they are not truly happy because they think that he is the best they can do. They start to tell themselves lies about how no other man could love them because they aren’t pretty, they’re fat, weird or a burden, and that this man must be a saint to “put up with me” and soon they are stuck. Luckily for the happiness and well-being of my friend, she found out he was cheating on her, and they split up. I say lucky because otherwise she would have married that idiot and been miserable the rest of her life. I believe everything happens for a reason.

She says she misses Allen and she wants to call him. I sternly but lovingly tell her NO, she is not allowed to call him, she’s better than that, he cheated on her, and he didn’t want to be with her anyway, why would she want to go back to that? Of course, she sighed dejectedly and said “I don’t know!” I thought long and hard about it. I too had once considered returning to an ex boyfriend whom I broke up with because he was an alcoholic and I didn’t see his ways changing. A year or two after we split up, we started talking again, and it seemed he had out grown his phase of getting plastered 4 or 5 times a week. He seemed to be the man I had wanted in the beginning, so we were thinking about trying again. What made me want to go back to him? What made Jennifer want to even call Allen?

It took me a while, but I realized it’s “the comfort factor”. The alcoholic ex of mine, we shall call Darren, and I had been together about 3 years, Jennifer and Allen had been together about 3 years. When you spend so much time in close proximity to someone, and tie your life with someone else’s the way you do when you are in a relationship (or even a friendship) for several years, you have reached a level of comfort where you feel safe enough to let your guard down and be yourself around that person. The urge to run back to that person, “the ex” arises in conjunction with feelings of loneliness, a desire to be accepted as you are, and the desire to be around someone who knows all the basic information about you. Around that person, you don’t need to …put on a show, impress him/her, hide your imperfections and oddities, play up what you have in common with the other person so they will like you, use pronouns like “my cousin”/”my step dad”/”my daughter”(you can just use their names and the other person understands that “Suzan” is your step-mom, for instance) or pretend in any way to be anything or anyone you’re not at your core.

Everyone wants to be comfortable-we spend our lives trying to get comfortable; so when we find someone who gives us the security of acceptance, love, security and comfort, we want to run as fast as we can back to whomever gave us those feelings in the first place.

Those genuinely expressed sentiments of love and acceptance are usually gone by the time the relationship ends, but in our low points, we want them, real or “lab created” with the appearance of being real- but if only for one more night.