Blue Walls: Toxic Relationships

Ever since I watched Thappad, I can’t get the dialogue from the lead character “But mom wasn’t my favourite colour yellow?” out of my head.

Let me add a little more perspective here for the uninitiated. Basically a girl is in a happy marriage with her husband and they are planning to move to England and she is dreaming of a big house with a blue door. Emphasis on the blue door. Interestingly enough the walls of their home are all blue. One day, amidst a party, the husband slaps her. And she can’t get over it. It reminded her of all the things she had given up for him, her life that she left behind.

Focus on the blue wall. 😛

To me this represents the very root of patriarchy and how it is embedded by default in Indian marriages. It also represents toxicity in relationships. To me any relationship where both the people are not equals is toxic. If one person dictates the terms and conditions of a relationship and much worse of life of the other person then your relationship is toxic.

While identifying toxicity of a relationship is something I find myself to be very good at by now, how people respond to it was something that I couldn’t comprehend. After having a few conversations with a few people on different type of relationships ranging from parent-child relationship and romantic relationship to citizen-government relationship and fan-football club relationship I have developed a framework of how different people handle the toxicity.

I will extend the analogy of walls that I am so much in love with. So you and your partner shares a home and you are planning to paint the house. Let’s further assume that your partner paid the down payment while both of you pay off the EMI. They are using multiple claims and ways to convince you that Blue is the better colour for the house but you contend their arguments and just wouldn’t agree. Ultimately they use the argument “I paid the down-payment, I will be paying EMI so I own majority of this house as of now so I will decide what colour the walls will be and I am not going to justify it to you.”

Here is how I believe different people deal with above situation.

• Keep your god damn house: Frankly speaking, I don’t think there is any other acceptable response possible. If you don’t have a say in a relationship as equals then it is not worth it. Generally, this response is the natural response when some sort of violence is involved. The bearing capacity for violence increases with length of relationship.
• I can’t hurt my partner, yellow is dead to me, my favourite color is blue: This is the worst response one can have but sadly the person closest to me chose this response. You put the person so much above yourself that you destroy that part of your identity that they do not agree with and remove anyone and anything that reminds you of that. You accept their choices as your own.
• Let’s make a compromise, half the walls will be blue and half the walls will be yellow: This is something most of people in stable relationships do. They make compromises, the other guy makes a compromise and life goes on. The topic of debate changes from blue vs yellow to which will be which and life goes on one debate at a time. Ultimately the house becomes a joke and so is the relationship. People don’t realise consciously but neither of them wants to go back to the comical house.
• I don’t hate blue that much, do I? It is not worth giving up the relationship for: You may not care a lot about the walls but slowly you will find your entire existence disappear. Small things which do not matter a lot are the ones that condition us to accept the worst as normal. You will not have a lot of debates in your house, but you will never find happiness in the relationship either.
• If they didn’t pay the down-payment then we wouldn’t have the house, they shall do what they want: It is not about the walls as much it is about your identity in the relationship. They may very well own the walls but you cannot write off your identity along with the walls. Money or any such other external influence will degrade your self respect very fast.
• You can have the walls, but I will decide the furniture: You may lie to yourself how much you want but you are not really in control. You have replaced something that mattered to you by something you didn’t initially care about. You are living in their world and every time they want to take control, they will. You will lose your life and your identity piece by piece while you fill it up with stuff that you don’t need just to make yourself feel complete. One day you will wake up and realise that you have lost yourself and are full of garbage you don’t need.
• Let’s divide the house, you can have your rooms blue and I will have mine yellow: It is still toxic and you know it. Anyhow what about the shared spaces? What colour will they be? To be truthful this is me. This is how I am managing a toxic relationship I can’t simply walk out of. And every time I have to spend time in one of blue walled rooms, it hurts me. And only my room is yellow, most of the shared space is randomly colored. You are going to be disenchanted, you surely will find your identity at risk every time you walk in one of those blue rooms and you will continuously seek a way out.

A good question now is then what is the right way to handle it?

The trick is, there is none. The moment it reaches a point where they demand something because they believe they own a part of your relationship, it is over. Can people have no differences? They can and they will have. They will have to understand and accept each other’s opinion and try to change it but without asserting their ownership of the other person or a shared asset in relationship.

And I think a pattern involving both blue and yellow can make a lot of sense. Two of you can pick up the brushes and get to work together make your walls pieces of art. And irrespective of how shitty the job you do, you will remember the fun you had. The walls really don’t matter, you do.

PS: In most of the situations corresponding to above scenarios, it wasn’t a trivial decision like walls of the house that was being debated. It was life of one of the person and how they live it. Decisions like whom they can marry, their career choices, what the priority of government in times of crisis shall be etc. were being debated. Decisions that leave a lifetime of impact. You may repaint the walls but these decisions they can never be undone.