When I talk to people about their biggest struggles with relationships, an all too common complaint is struggling to deal with someone who is not willing to go the distance with intimacy and commitment. Each time they feel as if they’re making progress, this person gradually or even very sharply rolls things back to what I call their ‘status quo’ in my book Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl.
Imagine relationships on a scale of 0-10. The type of person who struggles with progression, balance, intimacy, commitment, and consistency – the landmarks of healthy relationships – wants to keep the relationship at 5. It’s like Goldilocks and The Three Bears: not too cold, not too hot, just right. “Just right” being right for their comfort zone not necessarily for their growth or that of the relationship.
As a result, someone who is afraid of intimacy and commitment will always manage the relationship back to their comfort zone.
Temperature ‘too high’ and not fitting with the perception of their self-worth? Cue lowering the temperature through sabotage and passive-aggressive behaviour. Things get ‘too good’ and ‘intimate’, they’ll undermine things in such a way that it gets back on their terms. Like when you meet their friends or go on an amazing holiday, and they pick or fight or disappear afterwards…
Told them to jog on? Cue them suddenly blowing hot and you feeling as if you’re approaching 8 or beyond. You think the fantasy is finally going to come true. And then gradually the relationship slides back down to 5. Like when you end it with someone who refused to commit or who mistreated you. Next thing, you’re experiencing an onslaught of effort and big declarations about the future. And then poof, you’re back to square one again.
The frustration in these situations unreal but also is the clue to our own liberation.
One of the single most significant changes that we can make to our relationship experiences as well as our self-esteem is to be more emotionally honest and to maintain our integrity.
When we’re in an unavailable relationship, we gradually lose our integrity. If we were truly being honest with ourselves (and them), we wouldn’t stick around in the relationship for as long as we have. Being someone whose actions and words match would matter too much to give it up. We wouldn’t say, “I need this and this and this” and then stick around when it’s clearly not there on the basis that we can see so much ‘potential’. We wouldn’t say that we’re “done” if certain things don’t happen and then stay anyway because we’re too afraid to honour ourselves.
How can we expect someone to be honest with us when they’re not even honest with themselves?
It’s like knowing the signs of fire but wondering whether you’re being melodramatic as the place is burning. So many of us have a fear of not only making a mistake but also just straight-up listening to ourselves.
Picture it, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 2005 (pulling my best Sophia from Golden Girls imitation). It’s just one month the epiphany that changed my life and a couple of months before I started Baggage Reclaim. I’m on holiday with one of my best pals, and we’re looking for a club after dancing in a bar to Gorillaz’ ‘Dare’ (epic tune). We’re giggling at two guys wearing matching trainers that made them look as if they were wearing flippers.
In some cases, it’s not they changed but more that we got to know them enough. That would be enough that they were in very real danger of us seeing past the pomp and bluff.
Love can seem very complicated and painful but the truth is, it’s only like that when we use our feelings to try to control the uncontrollable. We say that we love someone and next thing, we’ve rolled out a whole load of expectations about who and what we think that person ‘should’ be and do due to the fact that we love them (or that they’re supposed to love us). So, with family, we do the things that we think fulfil the role of dutiful daughter/son etc., and we expect them to play their part(s) because we, after all, have met our obligations based on the assumption and expectation that [what we’re being and doing] is required in order for them to be who we want them to be. This is a hangover from childhood where we see people and in fact life, as being a reflection of our worth, of what we think we did or didn’t do.
Are you looking for a relationship right now? If so, consider whether you’re coming from an empowered place, or whether you feel inferior in some way and as if this potential future partner, who you might not have met yet, holds the power to determine your future. If it’s the latter, you are falling into the trap of behaving like someone who has to do ‘all the right things’ in order to be chosen. You’re hoping that someone will give you a home.
One of the trickiest situations can be when you know that you need to break up but you stay together or keep going back because you feel that the person is ‘too nice’ to break up with. It’s like, if they were treating you badly or there basically wasn’t something about them or the relationship that made remaining beneficial, you would have finished it, and so as such, you feel caught between a rock and a hard place. As I said to a close pal earlier this week, you end up feeling as if you’re going to kick a puppy in the face and of course, no one wants to think of themselves in this way!
One of the issues that becomes very evident when talking to people who are struggling in a relationship or who have been through a series of painful relationships, is that loving themselves and being in a relationship are seen as mutually exclusive. Now sometimes that’s due to the nature of the relationship and so it has issues that are having a knock-on effect on their self-esteem but equally, it can be down to the fact that they tend to give themselves up no matter who they’re with.