It is the time we all fear right? It is the thing that keeps us up at night, reviewing each tiny change of behavior, searching for some inkling that this time, the change is significant in the way you fear it might be. We have all become so intuned with the micro behaviors of others. I think this is especially true if you have been single over the past decade. Online dating behavior requires you to decipher a lot. There is almost a morse code of dating behavior...
Days of silence could mean they are not interested anymore and you have been ghosted (the most likely and familiar actual reason). It could mean they are busy working and/or traveling but mostly this is the lie we tell ourselves to at least keep the dream of connection alive. What we all fear, what we all are reviewing each tiny microcosm of behavior against is the idea, the fear, the desire to not have the connection you feel and you thought they felt wane. We do not want the relational current interrupted.
We have become hyper awarely tuned to the subtle shifts in behavior in others. And then making the attendant adjustments in our own behavior so that we can all avoid one thing: the connection we feel to this other person, getting lost, maimed, disconnected, replaced or evaporating altogether. We dial into others and attempt to discern what that brief text meant - portending the end or encouraging a beckoning forward. And, in my opinion, we have all lost the plot.
We have so tuned ourselves to others' radio dials that we have completely lost touch with our own. We are so locked into when they texted last, what they said, or didn’t say, that we have lost the ability to laser in on what might be going on with us. We have ceded our autonomy to someone who holds the keys to connection and safety that we aren’t even sure is capable of giving us either! We pretend the texts mean what we want them to mean and when there is the dashing incongruence between what we know, and what we fear, we either double down, thereby moving ourselves even father from ourselves or just disconnect under the guise of “better to be the leavor rather than the leavee.”
But what scares me most about all that is trending today in relational connection/disconnection is that we have lost what it means when the connection wanes. First, we owe it to ourselves and the other person to not just go off half cocked, but to use our communication skills to inquire why the shift? Why the sudden departure from what had become normal? If the other person we feel connected to can’t explain it, won’t explain it or provides such a ridiculous explanation, we need to take the power back and reevaluate what we are doing in this whole endeavor to begin with...
I believe it is incumbent on each of us to tend to our connections. To ensure they are watered, lighted and manicured. Connection requires communication and sometimes that means paying attention to what is being said as much as to what is not being said...
For me, when connection wanes, for me or the other person, I use it as an opportunity to check my reality with the fantasy I have created for me and them. Do they match? Have I decided we are spending the rest of our days together and wholly ignored the fact that the other person has not even made the effort to be in the same room with me for weeks? (Painful to admit that I have done this, but alas I have, the pain of admitting it is not greater than the pain I lived with living it).
Similarly, does this other person have a dream for me that I am encouraging but not really sharing. Is this other person’s dream for us really more of a back up plan for me. Something I will pick up if all my other options don’t work out? Does the other person know this? Do they want to? Have I been clear about where I stand all along or have I muddied the waters so badly that no one knows much of anything and it is all just wildly speculative?
I have dreams and fantasies with and for the people I date. It doesn’t really vary all that much. We fall in love, we dedicate our lives to each other and then we both commit to co-creating the next however many years we are granted. There is a sharing of burdens, finances, joys, sorrows, losses, gains. It is a shared vision with mutual responsibility, care, concern and authorship. And implicit in this whole endeavor is the fundamental truth that whomever I love shall always be a sovereign to themselves. I do not want to own them, anymore than I want to be owned. I live, I love and I have manifest freedom to change my mind. As do they. Any love that does not recognize and honor this other as having their own sovereignty, fails to really meet the definition of love.
It is in your sovereignty, your unique youness that I fall in love with you. And then because I love you, I celebrate you being you: doing things you enjoy that don’t involve or concern me. I want you to go away and do the things and come back and tell me all about them. I want to trust myself and you so much that I feel no need to punish or demand or lock you down so tightly that the love that felt like it would save us, instead, becomes some sort of prison no one escapes from...a love Alcatraz, if you will.
True intimacy can only be found between two whole individuals that love each other while also loving themselves. True love requires the support and nurturing of free will. We are not together because we have to be, but because we want to be. Because to both of us, each new day, the selection of you seems like the best use of my life, my heart and my time. And hopefully, you wake every day making the same decision regarding me.
I believe that when you have a mutuality of affection and respect and love, you find a love that is intuitive and clear, leaving no room for all the doubt about whether or not you are a priority...you are a priority enough to withstand and understand those very rare times where you just can’t be due to circumstances, life, work, children, family, illness or just plain exasperation.
Aren’t we all seeking to choose a love that choose us. And don’t we all get completely sideways when we cannot discern whether we are just attempting to hold onto a very one sided dream...and in truth, the only person choosing anything is you, choosing to limp the fairytale that more resembles a nightmare, along another hour, another day, another year.
Hopefully, you meet your other at a place and time that when the connection wanes, if it ever does, you are capable of taking a deep breath and trusting that if this is the place it all ends, it has been a good run. And that as painful as it will be to lose this person, this love, this intimacy, you would rather allow it to come to pass, rather than begin cutting all the bad deals we all do to remain in something that isn’t right, doesn’t fit and isn’t really about love at all. Loving is not dependence. Loving is an interdependence of equals brought together and forged into something stronger, harder and more reliable than what existed before. It is always made of two, and though those souls may merge into one in moments, there shall always need be respect and clarity that the autonomy of each to be sovereign to themselves, is the only way you can ever prioritize them and they you.
If the connection feels like it is waning, perhaps ask why? Is it you that moved? If not, is it them? Can you discuss it with them? Why or why not? To me every relational issue, difficulty and problem would likely be resolved if we could stop the relational circus from spinning out of control due to the projected dreams which become demands that seem to spring up overnight when our minds ignite our hearts which then stokes the desire of perhaps, maybe getting everything we ever wanted...
And I myself have cut some pretty awful deals because I refused to see what it meant when the connection waned...but I am older and wiser now and mostly healed from all the shit I put myself through limping along a connection that was really more of a manipulation...
Today, I stand taller on firmer ground, autonomous ground that I worked very hard to get to. And I will never confused the idea of connection and fantasy again...and how the interplay of fantasy/connection interferes with my reality and ability to truly connect...
Again...but not still, this time I know what to do and I have the autonomy to do it.
Wow, pretty amazing when the work you do, the emotional shit you trudge through, pays off. You walk the life of a free person...no longer enslaved to the ideas that kept you forever stuck in dead end connections that never served you well at all.
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