I was never invested in the relationship I created.
Nonsense.
Think about it.
No relationship, no breakup, no story.
If you want the reader to care about the story, the characters or anything else, they have to care about the relationship or else all the rest is meaningless.
If you want the reader to care about the relationship then you have to care about it.
Otherwise you don’t care enough to write about it in the first place.
Ergo, you were invested in those relationships.
This is a very poor analysis of the writing process — exceptionally so from you.
Go to a creative writing workshop — learn about your craft!
0 stars.
No dog biscuit.
Oh, okay, I get what you’re saying. I cared, I just cared the character got the hell out. I cared about the character. In that moment the one about to be dumped was a flat villainous stand in.
By the dictionary definition: devote (one’s time, effort, or energy) to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result.
I was invested in the character and the breakup.But the relationship? not so much. I didn’t imagine how they met, where they had their first date, the happy times, any of that didn’t matter
A one-sided story in which the other character is a cipher/whatever is one thing but you cannot from that draw the conclusion that you do not care about the relationship or that it is irrelevant.
The relationship is the most significant character in the story, even though it is absent; without it, there is no story — or, at least, not the story you thought you set out to tell.
“my intention is writing fiction [,] not a sociology paper.”
Short of shopping lists, recipes, repair manuals, etc., all writing is a sociology paper in one way or another — it’s about the human condition and why it is the way it is.
“fights, tensions, lack of intimacy (which is hard when you are at each other’s throats all the time)”
Just as Hate is the flip side of Love … which is why we so often watch people who hate each other and wonder when they’re finally gonna get a fucking room … a fight requires intimacy — no intimacy, no urge to fight.
That intimacy may only be the need on the part of one of the antagonists to see the light die in their opponent’s eyes with their particular choice of opponent otherwise immaterial, but … there is always an intimacy to conflict — if there weren’t you wouldn’t be writing about it, because nobody would be interested in reading about it, because there would never be any conflict and stories about it would not ‘speak’ to any putative reader.
“all of the things that would suggest both parties would be better off alone”
Interesting.
Why do you assume both parties would be better off alone rather than simply apart?
This is not a criticism, simply an enquiry into your thinking there and whether it is revealing of subconscious assumptions.
I assume everyone would be better off alone after a breakup, at least long enough to find their own self again. People do indeed wrap part of their identity up in their relationships (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a separate question) and when a relationship ends part of their sense of self is lost. Rediscovering yourself takes a bit of time. “Alone” here isn’t lonely tho. I’m not saying people shouldn’t hang out with friends.
I assumed that the ‘alone’ wasn’t in the sense of hermitage but rather not in a relationship.
But, the implication of the original phraseology is temporally located in the relationship and suggests that both parties would be better off alone, which doesn’t follow — they might both simply be better off in a relationship with someone else rather than not in a relationship at all.
This is a self fulfilling prophecy, when you think about it. When you are living in misery it is only a matter of time before one or both involved will seek solace in the arms of a third person, or in drugs or alcohol. One way or another people will find ways to cope. How much time will depend on the people involved.
Very astute observation, but …
If you have good, loyal people the misery can drag on for years.
Again, not a criticism, just exploration …
Have you considered the psychology of people who aren’t good and/or loyal?
Codependency could account for matters dragging on — which has nothing to do with being good and/or loyal but, rather, is a self-serving strategy.
So could Stockholm Syndrome.
Or religious conviction.
Eventually one is going to betray the other.
Not necessarily … it needn’t be a betrayal that results in the end of the relationship … simply the realisation on the part of one of them that they no longer want the relationship that now is rather than the one (they at least believed) it started as.
If there’s not a good enough reason, and a breakup is attempted anyway,
Hmmmm …
Whatever anyone else may think of their reason(s), as far as they are concerned, the reasons one party gives are good enough for the breakup.
In fact the only reason for a breakup that is ‘good enough’ is, by definition, the desire on the part of one of the parties to it to break up.
One party will try to convince the other to give them “one more chance”. They will want to know what they can do to make things better. They will desperately try to change themselves. And that either doesn’t work or doesn’t stick, for much the same reason gay conversion therapy doesn’t work or doesn’t stick: you can’t change the person you are at your core.
Again, an astute observation.
Sometimes two people aren’t good together.
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, eh? 😉
But you are, here, making my own point (above) that it needn’t be a betrayal, or because the person breaking up isn’t good and/or loyal.
Again, that’s not a criticism, merely an observation.
Any breakup will hurt. There’s real pain in losing the beautiful dreams you had in the beginning. Even if you weren’t happy you’re losing part of your identity. You will go through hell. You will doubt yourself, the world and the concept of love. This pain is inevitable, but eventually you will heal.
True, but …
I’m not gonna waste our time going over old ground here — we’ve discussed my own history in some detail in the Past.
And I’m not gonna go for the cheap laugh of playing the bitter, twisted misogynist with the aim of engaging in banter.
So …
However much I may be able to introspect about my own experience and responses to that experience … however much I may be able to rationalise about them both … however right I might be in my analysis of both …
I’m not sure I will ever heal … not any more.
I can’t remember how old I was … somewhere between two and five years old … but it’s a very early experience and I suspect closer to the former than the latter — not least because my memories of that time are temporally unlinked (I have clear memories, but couldn’t tell you in what order they should be).
But, the first time I can consciously recall vomiting was after eating fish and chips.
Since then I have never liked fish — it doesn’t matter how much I rationalise the experience and tell myself that it is simply down to psychological trauma and all in my mind … I just don’t like the taste of fish.
Similarly, when it comes to Love and relationships, I’ve been through so much, so often, for so long that I simply no longer trust either myself or anyone else enough to believe that ‘the next time’ could be the time I meet ‘the one’.
And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Moreover, how much harder must it be for a woman to heal who has been in multiple (or one long term) physically abusive relationship(s)?
For children to heal who were abused?
There’s healing and there’s healing — we may recover the use of our legs with time and physiotherapy, but we might need a walking stick for the rest of our life.
There’s only one type of story I’ve encountered that doesn’t come with the extra misery people inflict upon themselves on top of the necessary loss. It goes like this: “I don’t really know what went wrong. One day we were fine, and the next they ghosted me.”
Hmmmmm …
The most personally important (rather than intrinsically significant) relationship in my life … the one that was on again, off again, on again, off again over the course of three years …
Each time, the end was precedented (if you see what I mean) by her effectively ghosting me — for months on end, if I didn’t contact her first, I heard nothing from her … and, when I did, all I got by way of reply was a perfunctory acknowledgment of the fact that I had contacted her.
It was the hardest aspect of it all.
I’d’ve preferred that she simply end it than drag it out over months of uncertainty, doubt and anxiety … ripped the plaster off quickly — it’s kinder than ghosting.
So, I’m not sure that type of story does come without the extra misery — it’s just that it comes with the extra misery people inflict upon others rather than the misery they inflict upon themselves.
While I am not disagreeing with the point you were making, a relationship created for the purpose of breaking up is still important to the story. And had you caught me something like 2 months ago, I would have agreed with you without argument. But I am now convinced that knowing it’s important isn’t the same as being invested.
I think I understand where you’re coming from but, at the same time … and I may be wrong about this … I think you are conflating being invested in the relationship personally with being invested in it as a writer.
You may not be invested in the relationship as an individual.
It may not be the thing you want to examine in the story.
But it is the core of the story.
The whole story hinges upon it — if it didn’t, there’d be no story to tell in the first place … or at least not the story you are telling (C.f. the point below).
In the relationship I was writing in my novel length story, I didn’t set out to have the characters break up. But in my revisions, the way the characters have grown, a break up is the only thing that really makes sense. The first draft didn’t have that, but it feels wrong when I read it over. I was/am invested in making it work — it just doesn’t. Turns out that’s a whole different beast to write.
That, however, is a different matter altogether and, furthermore, simply reinforces my point that the relationship is a crucial element of what we’re discussing.
Albeit that stories often have a way of telling themselves as it were … and, moreover, that you may be finding … or it may have been your intention all along … that the story be not specifically about the relationship itself but about one or more characters and the relationship incidental to that, the fact remains that … as a writer … you are invested in that relationship because, otherwise, it would never have been a part of the story at all and you’d be telling a different story.
What I’m driving at with all this is that there is a difference between the story that we wish to tell and being invested in some aspect of it as a writer.
It may not always be immediately apparent and … albeit that I long ago became obsessed with subtlety to such an extent that the only way for me to explore it to my own satisfaction was to do a Douglas Adams and pen material in which it hangs in the sky in exactly the way bricks don’t … and notwithstanding that I do, to no small extent, engage in shaggy dog stories (so to speak), full of red herrings which serve the purpose of deceiving you as to what my real purpose is with a given story … even though, my exploration of (the opposite of) subtlety means I signpost like crazy all over it … whatever we choose to write about, even if we (try to) conceal it in order to deliver a suckerpunch twist in the tale, we are invested in it in some way as writers — otherwise we would not write about it in the first place.
Okay … the floor is yours 😀
