Do you even like them?

Hello! I committed to twice monthly blog posts at the beginning of the year, and I’m getting this out on the last day of the month—but I’m doing it! We had a very sweet 2 year old birthday party for my littlest guy, and Western North Carolina has also been navigating several wildfires just six months after a hurricane destroyed our beautiful mountains. This coupled with some extended family health challenges have made for a stressful month, but I’m proud to show up for my clients and here with you. Thank you for receiving me gently, as always.

“Do you even like them?”

I wish someone would have asked me this question for at least 3 (if not more) dating relationships while I was in college. Maybe someone did and I totally ignored them or insisted “yes, of course!”

Now that I know it’s a possibility to full on pursue a relationship with someone who you actually have no real interest in, I try to ask it regularly in my practice because it feels important, doesn’t it?

So often in dating, I neglected the compatibility aspect of relationships. I didn’t really consider our shared interests, what we had in common, whether we had a similar sense of humor or if what we wanted in our lives truly aligned. You can absolutely date someone just for fun, not considering whether it will be a long-term partnership because you are enjoying the time right now, and that’s okay too—but that’s not what I was doing. I really just wanted the validation that I was lovable, even if I had to work hard to get it (see the next paragraph for more on this!). I was getting completely caught up in the chemistry (and maybe there wasn’t even that much chemistry, but there was definitely a story that I’d written and a desire to pursue) and there was no safety net whatsoever to catch me when the chemistry started to dissipate. The safety net being shared values, shared interests, shared understanding of each other—anything other than New Relationship Energy (NRE), which is that “getting attached” feeling that happens at the beginning of a relationship, where you are infatuated with your new partner, and they are reciprocating those feelings. It’s a place where our young parts can become very excited about the possibilities and projections we create about where the relationship may go, or who we believe this person could be. It’s an important part of forming connected relationships, but it can also make us feel, for lack of a better way to describe it, completely ungrounded and out of our minds. I’ve noted that new relationships can be very difficult for those of us who have the anxious attachment style, and you can read more about that here.

When your attachment system gets activated, you can go through the motions of pursuing a relationship, ruminating about the person and the outcome, and fixating on what they need to do differently without even having actual romantic feelings for them. You may have heard of the concept of limerence, which at it’s core is an intense obsession with another person and a strong desire for them to reciprocate. There can be significant emotional ups and downs with limerence because the focus is solely on how that person responds and entails a LOT of examination of their behaviors, body language, responsiveness/non-responsiveness, etc. This differs from NRE in that the interest between the people involved is unbalanced; one person may be extremely interested in the other, and the other may not be interested or may not even know that the first is interested. Having experienced some version of limerence myself, it feels like getting tangled up in a rope of my own making—and I just keep knotting it and tangling it more, feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and like my emotional well-being depends on whether I saw the person and if they gave any indication that they were interested in pursuing a relationship with me. I was making a huge deal about our interactions in my mind, and I imagine now that the other person hardly thought about them. It was torturous and I wish I had been able to focus on something much more worthwhile than the very mediocre people I was interested in, but this is how we learn.

I’ve also learned that navigating these challenges in potential or new relationships involves deeply examining the stories we tell ourselves about relationships as well as our beliefs about getting our needs met. Relational health is definitely about who we choose to partner with, but it’s also an inside job that requires us to be curious and compassionate with ourselves and really get to the root of why we do what we do in relationships. Possibility is a lovely idea and can feel expansive and beautiful, but when it comes to being kind and gentle with the younger parts of ourselves in relationships, we need to have more than just possibility if we are going to be vulnerable and open and real. We need to have concrete examples of how the other person is going to hold our vulnerability and trust that we have a foundation that we have created together that we can build upon.

I’m here to support you in building the kind of relationships you want—whether you are looking to build community where you live or you are dating or you are in a long-term partnership that needs some work. I’m still accepting a handful of new therapy and coaching clients, so please respond to this email if you’d like to connect.

Sending you so much love.

Warmly,

Elizabeth