Bad Romance: On Changing Your Mind

There are few things so rare as a real change of mind. A man may only change his mind once or twice in the whole course of his life. He may never change his mind.

Why is changing your mind so difficult? As the reasons to change slowly amass, holding out against those reasons becomes more and more painful. The more a man suffers for his commitments, the more committed to them he becomes. If he suffers willingly for his commitments, he gains virtue (patience, endurance) and he attributes his growth in virtue to the very commitments causing him pain. The more reasons he has to change, the more virtue he obtains by not changing. The more a man suffers for a thing, the more he must “throw away” to escape that suffering. And so a man may come many times to the tipping point, but never cross over.

I have been fascinated with the processes whereby a mind is changed for several years now—and it all comes from a ninth or tenth reading of Pride & Prejudice, especially the chapter wherein Elizabeth mulls over Darcy’s letter and finally admits to herself that her entire family (including herself and her beloved father) is a hot mess. There is no other literary work I can name wherein a change of mind is depicted so carefully and accurately.

I want to offer two illustrations of all that I have so far asserted about the changing of minds.

The first illustration is short. A certain fellow goes a hundred thousand dollars in debt getting an architecture degree, then fails to secure a job as an architect at one firm, then another, then another, where he works as an intern. Should he continue to try leveraging his expensive-but-unproductive knowledge of architecture for a job, all the while accruing more and more credit card debt, or should failure as an architect and try his hand at something else that might actually pay the bills?

For the second illustration, let us suppose a young woman named Jill has a lousy boyfriend, but she has not yet admitted to herself that he is lousy. Jill’s lousy boyfriend is named Tod.

Tod is quite handsome, though. He has a good job (at a law firm) and at the tender age of 26, he owns his own house. The house is quite handsome, as well, and the fact Tod himself chose this house proves that he has good taste. These are some of the things which drew Jill to Tod—though, in her defense, it ought to be said that she interpreted these outward signs of competence as signs of inward competence, despite everything which followed.

When I say that Tod is a lousy boyfriend, I don’t mean that he beat Jill or that he seduced her and took her virtue. If that were the case, I wouldn’t call him a “lousy boyfriend,” but something far worse.

It’s hard to know where to begin with Tod, but I’ll start by saying this: he was never around.

He was a busy fellow—obviously, he had a good job—but even when Tod could be around, he wasn’t. He preferred the company of his friends to Jill’s company, though he expected her to be available for a date whenever his law firm had a formal event. Everyone at Tod’s firm thought Jill was quite the catch. She was beautiful, good humored, and had a warm and friendly manner. Jill made Tod look good.

Tod didn’t think of himself as someone who was “never around.” He preferred to think that he gave Jill her freedom. He wasn’t clingy. He wasn’t demanding. He was content to let her live her life, and he expected Jill to let him live his life, as well. He liked the fact that she made him look good, but he made her look good, too. Tod was a real somebody, and Jill was lucky to have him.

He had certain expectations of her, of course. Given that she enjoyed spending time in his beautiful home, she should have some responsibilities in that home, as well. She came over to his house once a week to do his laundry, but Tod let Jill do her laundry at his place if she liked. She also enjoyed using his expansive kitchen, so he asked her to cook him a few meals (on Tuesdays and Thursday) and leave them covered in the fridge so he could eat them when he came home. He asked her to tidy up his gym and to clean the downstairs bathroom every once in a while, but he always atoned for these requests by telling her she was free to use his gym whenever she liked between 9:30 in the morning and 4:30 in the afternoon, the hours he was at work. Tod employed three housekeepers throughout the week, two of whom were consistently rude to Jill in Tod’s absence, but whenever Jill mentioned this to Tod, he told her to not make trouble. After he told her twice not to make trouble, Jill quit mentioning her ill treatment by the other housekeepers and Tod naturally assumed the problem had gone away.

Tod was exceedingly polite, which you might not have guessed up until now. He was, though. He always said, “Please,” and, “Thank you.” He never raised his voice. He held the door for Jill. He always picked up the check. Tod had a bad habit, though, of mistaking polity for kindness and affection. He didn’t praise Jill. He let her know when his laundry hadn’t been folded and put away properly, or that the meatloaf had been a little underdone, or that she shouldn’t joke with senior partners at the firm about how much Tod worked, but he never told Jill she was an amazing girlfriend. He didn’t tell her she was beautiful. He gave her a nice card on her birthday, but he let the people at Hallmark express his love for her and only ever signed his name beneath the printed words.

Tod assumed Jill liked Quentin Tarantino and Eminem as much as he did, and she never complained about watching Pulp Fiction again, but Tod had also never given her much reason to believe he’d watch something else merely because she asked. If his friends were over and they wanted to watch something different, that was obviously a different story. Unlike Jill, they understood cinema.

Here’s something else you might not have guessed about Tod: he read a lot of books. He was incredibly intelligent. He knew a lot about personality types, self-improvement, and psychology, and he loved to use what he knew about the mind and the heart to help Jill become a more complete person. After they attended a formal event at the firm, he often gave her notes on all the ways she could improve “as a social being.” He told her, “Be more inquisitive. Ask more questions. People like it when you ask them questions. It makes them feel at ease. People like to give opinions far more than they like to hear them. It’s part of what it means to be modern and sophisticated. You need to give others an opportunity to be assertive. That’s how you get ahead.” Jill sometimes found Tod’s advice rather obtuse but asking him to explain himself often made him feel threatened. Jill had tried offering Tod advice on the manner in which he spoke to her friends, but he always asked her what experts she was basing her advice on and when she said it was “just something she had noticed,” he reminded her that “lots of people notice lots of things.” When Jill told Tod about restaurants she might like to try sometime, or movies she might like to watch sometime, Tod listened politely, but they never watched those movies or went to those restaurants. He assumed she was going to do those things on her own time.

Tod didn’t mind when Jill hung out with her friends, but he told her not to discuss their relationship with anyone. They had a “complex relationship,” he said, and he didn’t trust her to explain it properly to her friends and he didn’t want them to get the wrong idea.

Jill was by no means a perfect girlfriend, though. Against his wishes, she regularly spoke with her friends about her relationship with Tod. This wasn’t because Jill wanted to dish their secrets, but because her friends knew enough about Tod to be unapologetic rubberneckers.

“Did you do Tod’s laundry again this week?” asked Stephanie on a Sunday evening after they’d all finished watching Alias.

“He doesn’t want me talking with you about our relationship,” said Jill, sighing.

“He’s afraid we’ll tell you to dump him—because we will,” said Stephanie.

“Because he’s a terrible boyfriend,” said Kathy.

“You could do so much better than Tod,” said Stephanie.

“Could I? I’m not sure I could. There’s certainly no guarantee I could do better.”

“It would be hard to find someone worse,” said Stephanie.

“That’s not true,” said Jill, “He has a good job, a fine house, and he works hard. Most young men these days smell like Doritos and NyQuil and live in a basement. Tod buys me nice things, though. And he’s not clingy like most boyfriends. He let me hang out with you tonight. You always harp on his negatives, but I have so much to be grateful for. Besides, the grass is always greener on the other side.”

“If you think Tod’s the best you can do, you simply don’t have a very high opinion of men in general. Tod’s made you think very little of the entire species—and that’s because you let him walk all over you. He completely takes you for granted,” said Kathy.

“He’s not perfect, but neither am I. We all have our faults and it’ll do no good to dwell on them,” said Jill.

“He uses you! You’re an object to him. He even lets his maids walk all over you. You don’t really think he cares about you, do you? You make him look good. You serve him. That’s all he wants from you. He doesn’t take you seriously as a person.”

Jill looked at her hands and said, “This is why he doesn’t want me talking with you about our relationship. You always tear him down.”

“Look,” said Kathy, “you do know how unusual Tod is, don’t you? You cook for him, you clean for him, and yet he’s never around. He’s not ‘giving you your space.’ He just doesn’t enjoy your company.”

“He’s busy,” said Jill calmly.

“Other than buying you presents, what does he do for you?” said Kathy.

“He gives very good advice. He gives me books to read that I’ll find helpful. I’m very lucky to have him— he’s told me so many times. He regularly reminds me how important he is at his law firm. He’s a leader. All the single men who work with him regularly ask him for relationship advice. They all respect him deeply,” said Jill.

“Other men take his advice seriously? Why?” said Stephanie.

“Because our relationship has lasted so long. We’ve been dating for three years, which is far longer than their relationships typically last. The guys he works with are always asking him how he does it,” said Jill.

“And what does he say?” asked Kathy, intrigued.

“He shows them how neatly I roll his socks,” said Jill.

The way Tod spoke of their relationship to his friends didn’t always seem entirely accurate to Jill. Tod was ambitious, of course, and perhaps this accounted for his tendency of wildly exaggerating how often they saw each other, or his descriptions of what they did when they were together. “We have this thing we do call Sunday Drives,” she heard him tell his friends. “On Sunday afternoons, we pick a random place on the map that’s about two hours away, a place neither of us have ever been. And then we just drive there and talk about our week—what we’ve been thinking about, what we’ve been listening to, what our hopes and fears are. We really just connect. When we get wherever we’re going, we pick some small café and just drink a cup of coffee and connect. No phones, no distractions. We both really enjoy it.” And he wasn’t exactly lying. At the time Tod said this, they had done exactly what he said in exactly the way he later described it to his friends. What’s more, it had been his idea, he had laid out exactly what he wanted to happen, Jill thought it sounded quite romantic, and in the end, it was. But the following Sunday, he went to the movies with his friends, and the Sunday after that he had been out of town, as was the case the Sunday after that. Many weeks later, Jill reminded Tod of the Sunday Drive they’d gone on and he said he was busy but encouraged her to make a Sunday Drive on her own and to tell him how it went when she got back. “You can do it the same way we always do it,” he said, “just by yourself. That way, you can listen to the music you like.” She had taken his advice and had a fine time after she quit feeling sorry for herself, though Tod never asked how it went and she never felt much compulsion to tell him. After that, she never brought up Sunday Drives again. Months later, when Tod told his friends about their Sunday Drives, Jill was surprised he even remembered. “They’re great. They’re such an important part of our relationship,” he told his friends.

Sunday Drives were one of a dozen “things we do,” as Tod put it. “We have this thing we do called Chasing Your Hat.” “We have this thing we do called Desert Island Five.” “We have this thing we do called Dinner After Nine.” “We have this thing we do called Ten Dollar Present.” They had done none of these things more than once or twice. They’d never actually done Ten Dollar Present. That was a thing Jill and her friends did, though she had once told Tod about it and he liked the idea so much, he said they ought to do it, too. When Tod told his friends he and Jill had a thing they did called Ten Dollar Present, Jill didn’t know if he was lying or if he genuinely couldn’t remember what they’d done together.

“We have this thing we do called Blue Christmas Rules,” Tod would say.

“There’s just so much to your relationship with Jill,” his friends would reply, “So many facets and angles. You’re always doing something interesting.”

“Always,” Tod would say, “We both think it’s really important to develop a relationship, not to let it stagnate.”

“You should write a book,” his friends said.

On occasion, Jill’s friends attempted to point out just how lopsided her relationship with Tod truly was. He didn’t listen to her but expected her to listen to him. She visited him at work, but he never visited her. He regularly arranged for them to go on dates, she altered her plans, and then he cancelled on her just a few hours beforehand with no explanation.

When her friends harped on this, Jill told them she “didn’t keep a record of wrongs.”

“You should,” they said.

“Real love means being willing to suffer.”

“Is he willing to suffer for you?” asked Kathy.

Jill demurred, “My relationship with Tod has been good for my soul. Since we began dating, I’ve drawn closer to God. Being with Tod has taught me patience, endurance, longsuffering, and hope.”

“You could learn all those same virtues while locked up in a concentration camp and still be justified in running away the second you could,” said Kathy.

Jill listened to her friends, and yet the more solid reasons they gave her for breaking up with Tod, the more committed to Tod she became. She knew they were right—Tod was a lousy boyfriend. The more convinced Jill became that he was a lousy boyfriend, the more she theologized and spiritualized her reasons for staying with him. As her friends enumerated all his faults, Jill was in agony. “Look at all I’ve endured to be with him,” she told herself. The closer Jill came to changing her mind about Tod, the more she suffered to stay with him, and the more she suffered for him, the more love she showed him. The more she loved him, the more she would be throwing away by leaving him.

Jill’s friends tried everything they could to persuade her to leave Tod—but they found that the more they berated and insulted him, the more solemn, quiet, and contented with her decision to stay with him Jill became. Jill did not demand perfection. She did not keep score. She could be content with such a man as she had. There was plenty of good about Tod for which she had to be thankful. She hoped God would someday judge her as leniently as she judged Tod. Besides, Tod could change. Perhaps he would change.

Jill also had to consider the evolution of Tod’s intellectual life. They had met years ago at church and what initially attracted her to him—before she knew anything of his work ethic, his commitment to his friends, and his ambition—was the compatibility of their ideals. And yet, Tod had since begun attending a different church and was no longer committed to the same ideals they had jointly embraced when quite young. He now preferred to spend time with people who could advance his career, no matter how compromised or fashionable they were, and he regularly suggested she was narrow-minded, mean, and puritanical for questioning his new friends.

All the while, Jill continually reminded herself that Tod could change. She prayed he would change. He didn’t change, though. In fact, he got worse. The more successful he became, the more distant he got. He asked more and more of Jill, offered her less and less, and Jill regularly noticed the sad, defeated looks that had come to characterize the ladies whom Tod’s work friends dated. Tod began writing his book of relationship advice. He was a featured speaker at a two-day seminar called Making Romance Work in Pittsburgh. She listened to him lecture and thought, often enough, that he did understand something about romance—perhaps. His understanding of romance was split down the middle between things that didn’t work and things that would work if only he was just willing to do them.

The decision to leave Tod came as an epiphany the likes of which Jill had never experienced before. Everything which had weighed down on her before, forcing her upon Tod (and forcing Tod upon her), was suddenly converted into air, levity, ascension. Up until her epiphany, she hadn’t had ears to hear her friends. They had pointed at reason, common sense, experience, reality, and yet Jill said that romance must be a wild, mystical thing and responded to her friends’ complaints with the language of Theresa of Avilla. At long last she heard them, but not because any of them made some dazzling new argument against Tod, and not because she was bested in a debate with Kathy. Instead, she simply came to her senses. Tod forgot her birthday, which he had done many times before, but she finally admitted to herself that he just didn’t care about her.

Besides this, they weren’t married.

“We’re not even married,” she said to her friends.

“That’s what we’ve been telling you,” they said.

“And our relationship isn’t doing him any good,” she said to her friends.

“That’s what we’ve been telling you.”

“There are better men out there,” she said.

“That’s what we’ve been telling you.”

“I know,” she said, “I just didn’t—” and she made an emphatic gesture toward her own head.

What was more, it was entirely just that Jill leave him. It was right. It was deserved.

The fact that romance is a wild, mystical thing has nothing to do with the fact that Tod was a lousy boyfriend and deserved to be treated like a lousy boyfriend. A little painful rejection might even wake him up. He might become husband material yet.

None of this was rocket science (though this is true of most great changes of mind). Jill’s thoughts returned to the world, to the way things actually were. Something had blocked her from hearing what she heard, from seeing what she saw. Back when she’d been with Tod, she had often told herself their relationship was “complex,” though now it seemed quite simple. She didn’t need an elaborate theory to explain their relationship. He was just a sucky boyfriend. He was more interested in being praised than in doing praiseworthy things. Simple. And she had been blinded by love. Simple.

It wasn’t until she left him that she could truly give thanks for whatever had been good about him. After leaving him, she also found greater zeal in confessing her own sins—a talent that had declined in the latter years of their relationship. She had learned patience and longsuffering while she was Tod’s girlfriend, but not nearly as much patience as she had previously believed. Jill was glad to clear this up.

Jill’s friends thought her a saint for complaining about him as little as she did.

After reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth has the choice between persisting in her old beliefs (Wickham good, her family solid, she a good judge of character) or embracing new beliefs (her family is a mess and she’s quite gullible). If she holds on to her old ideas, she saves herself the embarrassment and humility which comes with great change. In order to give up her old ideas, she has to believe there is more to gain from beginning all over with fresh truth than maintaining whatever advantages came from seasoned, “stable” self-deception. In this way, changing one’s mind requires imagining an entirely new life, a better life—a life which is better despite the humiliation necessary to achieve it.

Chesterton once suggested that the final step of any conversion is death. In order to truly change, one must give up everything. All that was alien and disconcerting before must become familiar, and all that is familiar must become foreign. We must admit that our friends have been wrong, and that our enemies have been right, and this entails double humiliation.

It is good that change comes with such tremendous difficulty, but it is also good that change is no harder than it is.