Undead Redhead and the Death of Relationships

The moral case for finding out how to end a bad relationship.

Editor’s Note: This marks the first book to be featured in the newsletter. There have been a few movies and TV shows based on books, but directly on books. Feel free to comment whether you’d want more books featured.

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Despite the obvious mental disconnect, lost causes are surprisingly attractive.

Who hasn’t had a relationship or job or love affair that is objectively awful, and yet you stick with it? Sometimes you only understand just how bad the situation was in retrospect, even years after it ends. Sometimes, it’s impossible to understand the damage it does to you while you’re in it.

It doesn’t help that while you’re in a bad situation, the people you trust most are often the least forthcoming about how dire your circumstances actually are. Who hasn’t finally emerged from a bad romance just to hear that all your friends thought it was terrible? Humans, it seems, are rather well trained to put a good spin on even the worst events.

It also doesn’t help that we are also the least able to see the truth in our situation when we’re living in the middle of it. That’s not just because it’s hard to have perspective when you’re so close to what’s happening. It’s also because we invest in relationships, psychologically, emotionally, financially, and physically. It can seem like there’s far more to lose than to gain by walking away. We could be out of a home, be instantly poorer, and mostly importantly end up feeling alone.

Why do we do it? We don’t invest in relationships because we want to be unhappy. We invest because being alone can seem like a worse choice. And I think that when we see a friend in a bad situation, that logic can overwhelm our sense of protectiveness. We are afraid of the toll it will take on our friend to leave the bad job, the bad living situation, the bad love affair. We place ourselves in the same dilemma — alone or unhappy — and it can feel like a wash.

I think most of us understand that hard things are not always bad, and easy ones aren’t always good. But humans are also pretty good at suffering in the hope that things will get better. We’re also pretty good at fooling ourselves into believing that suffering is somehow essential to being in a relationship. And this is where having friends who are willing to call it like it is are an absolute necessity.

It would seem that our moral obligation is to help the friend we care about and tell them honestly what we see, warn them about the harm we see being done to them, and the worse harm likely to come. And yet, we equivocate and minimize. We justify the bad things being done to our friend and the worse effect it may have on them in the long run.

In my book UNDEAD REDHEAD, Sharon Backovic is a ginger, vegan young woman with an excess of kindness and understanding for everyone but herself. It’s only when she dies and is resurrected as a zombie that she’s able to see her previous situation for what it was, and move beyond unhealthy relationships.

It’s not easy, because it requires Sharon to stand up for herself for the first time. And that means beginning to know herself for the first time. How can you assert your own desires if you don’t know what those are? In a strange way, Sharon is helped by the fact that her death has made the people in her life move on from their relationships with her. Because they no longer try to tell her everything is okay, she’s finally able to see everything wrong with the way she had been throughout her life.

Magically, when Sharon is able to divest herself of the people willing to lie to her, she starts to encounter people who care about her for real and see her as she actually is. It’s a lesson we all need sometimes: if people don’t like you for who you are when you’re trying to be your best self, go and find some who do!

You can read Undead Redhead via Kindle and get the paperback. A scene from the book was also filmed for you to check out.