I think this added another layer onto my struggles to connect with his Mom because in addition to her own challenging behaviors, she also brought out some challenging behaviors in my ex-husband. The two would feed off each other's negativity, judgment, paranoia, entitlement, etc.
When he was with friends and colleagues, but he seemed to really mirror the person he was with. There was a friend years ago that was a very abrasive, crude, and at times a mean person. I used to dread the time we spent with that friend because some of those same traits would creep out in my ex-husband. Earlier in his career, he found an ally with a common enemy in another colleague, and the two of them would spiral into an almost obsession of this other colleague.
He had a female colleague in recent years where his interactions with her just felt weird. I don't know how to describe it. I never got the gut reaction to her that I needed to worry about him with her like I did with his crush but it still always felt a bit off. I suppose it is the ones that brought out what felt most contradictory that stand out most.
Thinking back to the beginning of my relationship with him, I remember feeling like we were so incredibly aligned, in values, in what we wanted out of life, in how our personalities meshed. In hindsight, he was probably mirroring me.
As the marriage progressed, I think there were some ways he felt more free around me. I got to see a side of him that loved adventure and spontaneity, the opposite of what he displayed around his Mom. And although, I now realize he still held back a lot, I got to see a much wider range of emotions - I suppose this part was necessary if he was going to lean on me to help him manage them.
I now realize he also held back on a lot (but not all) of his judgments and criticisms with me because I wouldn't participate in it. In a bit of irony, he used to get irritated when my parents got critical, while refusing to see the same behavior in himself.
His comments at the end that we weren't compatible really confounded me. With the information I had about him at the time, I didn't see how we could be more compatible. When I asked him why, he pointed to superficial things like me not liking horror movies or playing video games with him but those aren't relationship incompatible things - those are differences in interests that make a relationship more interesting. But maybe he really felt a deeper incompatibility with how much he had mirrored me and as a result silenced himself. I'll probably never know what was authentic to him and what was just a mirrored image.
How much do I mirror others? How much do I show up as a contradicting person in different scenarios? And I'm talking about something more than just adjusting for what is appropriate in different circumstances. We all use different language around our boss than we do around our closest friends. We share different things about ourselves with different groups of people. But those differences shouldn't be start contrasts of one another, right?
This past year, I have really focused on tapping into what is authentic to me and my relationships all feel really authentic. So I would be surprised if today people saw significant contradictions in my behavior in different scenarios.
But what about all the years leading up to now? Outside of my marriage, I don't think so. I've always been someone who worries little about what people think and has a strong sense of self. But inside my marriage, did I at times to cope? I know I made myself smaller and convinced myself I didn't need much in the relationship. There probably were ways I mirrored to just avoid making waves.
Why did I not see through his mirroring? I was aware of the discrepancies. I was even irritated by them at times. I suppose that is what made the illusion I created of him all the more necessary if I was going to stay loyal to him. I needed some way to make sense of what I was seeing.
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