I accidentally married a Postmodernist a few years ago. Like 4 years ago.
How do you accidentally marry a Postmodernist?
Let me tell you....
Okay, so what's a Postmodernist though? The movement originated as a sort of mistrust for any ideology and any form of art, but it's moved on a lot and now it's even scarier.
Postmodernism is technically a mistrust for or a dislike of ideology, art, logic, reason, etc. Truth is not real. It's a tool of the patriarchal white man to keep the minorities in line. Basically what it sounds like to me is an anti-enlightenment movement. My marriage turned out to be just that – anti-enlightenment. Anti-growth.
There are a couple reasons that I want to talk about what happens when you let someone like that into your life; I don't want this ideology to spread. Writing about it helps me get my thoughts in order as well.
I told you guys it's been about seven months since everything ended, right? Those years were some of the most miserable in my life, and I knew one day I'd probably want to write it all down. But I'm in such a good place now that I'm having trouble remembering the million and one reasons I finally left.
For a Postmodernist, truth is subjective. That's the biggest problem, right? There's no such things as objective truth. Or, just as badly, the only truth is their truth and it doesn't matter that you have different perspectives/experiences.
I remember sitting on that couch in the marriage therapist's office one of the first days he went with me to counseling. We wanted help. He was desperate for someone to reaffirm everything he had said to me – my expectations were ridiculous, I was spoiled and incapable and there was no reason for me to be unhappy.
But I knew that wasn't what she'd say.
We were talking with her about how sometimes, if I tell him I need something, he'd tell me that my need was silly or immature and that he wouldn't do it. He'd react similarly if I told him my feelings were hurt, or tried to talk about anything serious.
She asked him if that's true. He said no. He never said anything like that.
I told her he did that a lot too – say something then deny ever saying it. If I insisted that it was something he'd said, he'd accuse me of trying to put words in his mouth or bring up the past.
But the fact that he couldn't keep his cool in that room told her what she needed to know. He made stuff up on the spot. Rules, guidelines, things he's now allowed to yell at me about.
Anyway – we were on that couch and she was trying to explain to him that I'm allowed to have feelings he doesn't understand, and that it's his job to help me through them or at least be a good listener. He was telling her it's impossible for him to listen to things he doesn't understand, and he doesn't care about my feelings if he doesn't understand them. She asked him if he meant that he genuinely didn't care about my feelings if he couldn't comprehend them. He said yes.
She tried talking him through differing perspectives. It didn't take. She would instruct me to bring up an example of a conversation – so, I had asked him to do something, he'd said no problem, and then hadn't done it. I'd bring that up to him and he'd start screaming, usually. In marriage counseling it took longer for him to start screaming though.
He couldn't get it. We explored the option of Autism to explain the erratic, sometimes violent behavior he would exhibit when met with emotions/feelings he claimed not to be able to understand. That wasn't it, although he was genuinely worried for a while.
Here's the thing. After his screaming fits, he'd settle down and kind of look around the room a while. I never could tell how much of it was for dramatic effect. I thought a couple times he was putting it on, but most of the time it was real.
He'd cry the rest of the night and be extra nice the next day. He'd try to be better for a while but the next day I would still need the things I needed and he would still be unable to provide them – so when I talked about them, we fought.
When we fought, he wouldn't actually respond to things I said. If I told him something hurt my feelings, instead of actually hearing the thing I had said, he'd change the subject or talk about how I wasn't bringing it up correctly. Once I made him look the thing in the eye, he'd tell me I was bringing up the past. Because it took me at least two hours to get him to actually calm down enough to actually hear me. And by then it was in the past.
When I tried to use logic in our conversations, instead of responding with his own, he would outlaw the modes of speech I was using. Rhetorical questions were banned, yes or no questions were banned, more than one question at a time was a big no-no. Never allowed to use anyone outside the relationship in an example. Never allowed to say things like “I mean I'm a woman, I need X,Y, and Z.” Not allowed to use words like normal, common, natural (i.e, “it's common for ___ to happen”). Not allowed to talk about certain things that happened at the beginning of the relationship.
Not allowed to suggest he actually take his medicine. Not allowed to ask if he took it today. Not allowed to talk about it. Not allowed to bring up marriage counseling when we weren't in it. Not allowed to pull out the sheets she gave us for a fight we were having.
It was the epitome of “I don't need to change my behavior, you need to change how you react to it.”
I didn't know there was a word for that (besides narcissist, but that's just such a diluted, overused and often misused concept that it doesn't say what it needs to say here) until I listened to Jordan Peterson talk about Postmodernists, how they believe that there is no objective truth.
It all started to make sense.
There was a month when I tried moving back home, after I left for maybe six months. I introduced him to Peterson's work. We listened to it together, a lot. He said a lot of stuff was starting to make sense. He started doing his own research and talking to me about it.
Then I had to leave again. Then he disappeared. I had to move on knowing he wasn't done trying. At the time, it was pretty easy, but the weight of it has started to sit on my shoulders more heavily.
It is impossible to be with someone who has fallen for postmodernist doctrine. By definition they believe that all conflict resolution is meaningless because one cannot ever determine what truly happened. There is no point in conversation because there is no truth to hear or give your partner. There is no point in talking about the future because there's no way to prevent it.
It's a shell of a human, on auto-pilot, resentful of the world and lashing out at it with inaction and the refusal to take personal responsibility for their actions.
It's a monster.