I’m So Over My Partner’s Toxic Positivity

My partner is a kind man. A good man. Just ask him. Ask anyone. “He is without guile,” one friend recently said about him. Another friend seriously compared him to Mickey Mouse. He is always positive, always looking on the bright side of life. The kind of guy who makes yummy sounds before he’s even tasted his dinner because he just knows it will be yummy. Because he leads a yummy life. The kind of man who thinks everyone he meets is good or funny or kind or wonderful. Who gets excited about a good cup of coffee or an egg cooked over-easy with an unbroken yolk. A man who replies to every one of my myriad complaints or attempts at a fight with a wide-eyed, “But I love you babe! You’re my sweetheart.” It genuinely doesn’t matter what we were talking about or fighting about. This is his response every time.

I have tried to find this charming. Some days it is charming. Traveling with someone who is excited about everything, for example, that’s great. Having a man who is so deeply in my corner, who is my cheerleader, has been a revelation at this stage of my life.

There are other days when it is not charming. When I just want to let my eye rolls and Gen X snark fly a little bit without wounding his tender heart so deeply. After we host a party, for example, I find his unwillingness to debrief about our beloved friends galling. If you could see the look on his face if I point out one guest was being rude or another was trying to have a sneaky cigarette on our porch. He’s crushed, not by the idea that one of our friends might possibly have been disrespectful but by my insistence on calling his attention to it. He’s wounded, confused, bruised by my observations. No matter if what I said was accurate. He doesn’t want to know and what’s more, he doesn’t want me to be the kind of person who tries to make him know. I think he would prefer it if we moved forward in life as a Stepford couple, smiling blankly out at the world with our arms linked in the doorway, ready to turn a million blind eyes to anything dark or bad or just annoying.

But the thing is, I want to be able to gripe about my day without feeling like I’ve just broken the news that Santa isn’t real. I want to dig into a full-throated complaint or even just a petty grievance and have him “Yes and” me. If I tell him a friend snubbed me at a party I would love it if, just once, he said, “Oh I know, and did you notice that she didn’t bring that dip she was meant to bring to the party?” As awful as this sounds, it would make me feel closer to him. Seen by him. Instead of being judged by him.

Because he does not want to get down here in the muck with me and it’s not like I want to live in the muck but I wouldn’t mind rolling around in it every once in a while. Also life is muck, a lot of the time. Life is awful and frustrating and sad. Turning a blind eye to it doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone dies, they are dead. Saying “they lived a good life though” or “Thankfully the cancer treatment didn’t go on too long” doesn’t bring them back. My partner said this recently after my stepfather died. It didn’t help me. It didn’t make me feel like I could open up about my complicated grief over the end of a complicated relationship.

It shut me down.

The same thing happened when my sons went off to college and I was distraught without them. “They’re going to have the best time, it’s so exciting! You should be happy for them,” was the response I got, as though being happy for them and mourning an entire adult life spent raising them could not co-exist inside me.

His toxic positivity is like a ghost in the room that only I can feel. He is easy on everyone while I am not always easy. The joke that’s been making the rounds for years is that he is long-suffering, too sweet for his own good, just a regular Mr. Rogers of a man. While I am something else entirely.

He is the best darn guy around, especially for me. He pays attention to little details about me. He lifts me up when I am down. He is loyal and funny and exactly the same amount of social as me, a quality that is highly underrated. So I can’t complain. Least of all to him.

In a perfect world he would hear me when I tell him how much I want to be able to be myself with him. But this is reality, and every conversation feels like I’m telling Mary Poppins all about Lord Voldemort. It just doesn’t translate.

And so I figure it out. And gripe to my friends when needed.