relationships

The brutal truth is that people rarely change how they treat others — no matter how much they plead and beg and promise to change their ways.

I get a lot of email from people seeking relationship advice. I think it’s because I’ve written quite a bit about love — often documenting my own mistakes — and many people just want to tell their stories to an unbiased stranger who doesn’t know anybody involved. I often get the idea that these hurting people know what they need to do, but it makes them feel better to tell me.

I don’t have time to respond to most of these emails, but I often find myself wishing I could sit down with these women — they’re almost always women — and talk with them for an hour or so. What most of them seem to need to hear is simple: “He’s almost certainly not going to change. Not now. Not next year. Never, no matter what he says when he’s scared that he’s about to lose you.”

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I almost never think about Julie anymore, but she was once very important to me. She was the first woman I became involved with after I divorced years ago. She was just getting out of a very abusive marriage. In many ways, we were a good fit.

For about a year, she was my constant obsession. But she had too many issues in her life and we started drifting apart. The last time I saw her was when I’d traveled to see her and she dropped me off at the airport for my trip home. We weren’t mad at each other, but nothing was right.

We didn’t talk again for another month. I can’t remember exactly how things played out after that. The details are fuzzy — mostly because it hasn’t mattered to me in a long, long time.

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