Following the release of Acrimony, the controversial Tyler Perry movie, many conversation tables could not settle on who was justified and to what extent. Being a woman, I quite understand the raging support women had for the heroine and the outrage at the audacity of the protagonist to recreate the life he had planned with the same woman he cheated on her with never mind that he tried to compensate her financially for all her years of support and motivation.
The question is, how much would he have needed to pay to quantify the extent of her emotional contribution, would it have been more tolerable if he ended up with a different woman than the one he had an affair with or is the flame incensed because he dared to recreate the dream they once shared with the woman he cheated on her with?
Is the new woman a home wrecker? Is it, not her luck that she met this man at the threshold of despair and the brink of a breakthrough? Is it not possible that she could just see the man in him and cater to all the inadequacies he must have felt from the resentment brewing in his previous relationship?
Is it that his emotional need to be respected drove him to an affair or that he never had any loyalty, to begin with, and no matter how much this woman gave, it still wouldn’t have been enough to cater to his wounded ego? or is it possible that he felt entitled to keep getting support from this woman that has given her all that he resented her too for leaving him high and dry when he had gotten comfortable with leaning on her?
Is it that life happened to the relationship? Is it that some relationships are just not meant to be? who is at fault? could the situation have been better handled?
The truth is for some people, good is never good enough. Maybe it is human nature to be insatiable or maybe some of us want more out of greed or curiosity. I do not want to believe that anyone sets out to be wicked, I think it is a compilation of every indulgence uncurbed that eventually rolls there but this is not the angle I want to explore.
How much is too much before it is too much? is my pedantic preoccupation.
The answer varies from one individual to the other, but we are often faced with the question of how soon is too soon to walk away from something that no longer serves us.
Some of us stay longer because we have something to prove to ourselves that we are not quitters. It could just be an overestimation of our abilities to fix things or people that keep us bonded and eventually, that misplaced hubris is usually the cause of downfall.
Could it be that our traumatic experiences keep us in a loop and so it cannot be helped how we respond to and in certain phenomena?
I know a person who says there is no such thing as healing from trauma. More often than not we just learn to manage the baggage and in the worst cases, drag them along.
I want to believe we heal maybe we do not lose the scars and maybe we can never go back to the innocence we had before the painful core memory but it is healing enough that when we think back sometime in the future after time had passed that we no longer carry bitterness or regret. It is healing enough if we can even find something to be thankful for.
When it comes to emotional healing. Healing is what we make it. There is no form it should take so long it leads to a wholesome existence.
Connoisseur of Memories 