I was watching TV more than one year ago and ran into the movie “Terms of Endearment.” I’ve never seen the 1983 tearjerker and decided this might as well be the night.
I’m glad I watched it because I got a great line of dialogue from Shirley MacLaine’s character Aurora. She delivers it to her daughter Emma played by Debra Winger. Emma is planning on getting married and her mother decidedly does not agree with the decision nor the spouse choice.
You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage.
My step-mother Susan joined a post-divorce support group while a young single mother in Idaho. Three years later, after she was no longer attending the meetings, she ran into one of the women from that group.
“How are you Susan?”
My step-mother cheerfully updated the other person on her latest news. Then she asked the same question.
“Ohhhhhh. You know…..I’m having such problems. It’s tough.”
“What is?” Susan asked.
“Well you know. The divorce. It’s so hard. The divorce. I don’t know if I can go on like this,” the other woman morosely and haltingly told Susan.
“What? But that was years ago!”
Susan was shocked her colleague was saying the same things and behaving the same way as she had three years ago during the support meetings. Nothing had changed for this woman.
This reflects what Aurora meant when she warned her daughter Emma.
Some aren’t able to move on and move forward after a breakup. They lack the ability to see themselves in a future. They’re locked in the here and now.
Some are afraid to be alone. Those are the people who leap into relationship after relationship. Or those are also the people who grasp onto a relationship so frantically that they allow themselves to be unhappy or stay with a cheater and look the other way while he or she dilly dallies with others. As long as he or she comes home at night and puts on the pretense of a marriage or dating, the other person afraid to be alone will tolerate a lot.
Aurora doesn’t think her daughter is strong or smart enough to get out or get on.
“It takes great strength, an inner drive, and bravery to survive a bad marriage. The toll it takes is what I believe she [Aurora] was talking about,” my friend Racquel told me.
My friend and colleague Ken says someone is “special” when he or she knows “what to do and when to do it and being brave enough to live with the consequences. You are breathing and you are no longer in the bad marriage. You have survived.”
There’s always the big possibility that someone thinks he or she is special enough to have a life different than what he or she is living currently.
Are you special enough to survive? I bet you are.
The special enough line is 1:27 into the following movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY0GM9KHU8o
I think this is the best article I’ve read on this site.
Great read!
Very Nice! Happy to be apart of the process
Great article. Makes me think. My wife’s best friend through school turned out something like that. All through school she was strong and domineering, chewed up boys and spit them out when they didn’t meet up to her her standards any more. Now, she is completely the opposite. She hangs on to her abusive, cheating husband for reasons that we simply cannot fathom. She was spiteful and bitter towards my wife the last time they met by chance. Needless to say, there is no communication between them now. To bring this to the point, she isn’t special enough to make that bad marriage work, nor is she strong enough to leave it. Maybe someone should have done for her the same that was done in the movie.