She Can’t Read Your Mind!

I’ve found one of the strangest things about being a human is that although my own world of feelings and emotions is ever-present in my life, the inner experiences of others are mostly hidden from me – at least until I get to know them well. So, they can appear as relatively bland beings, less troubled than me by life’s complications and contradictions. I forget that I’m not the only one who’s trying to keep my ‘life-boat’ afloat on an ever-changing tide of emotions and reactions, as well as a lifetime’s memories, plans, dreams, and reflections.

A big part of what’s wonderful when we begin get close to someone is that we can both start to explore and recognise each other’s worlds, finding out the ways we are similar, and different, to each other. Until then we have to fill in the gaps in what we know about them with guesses and assumptions based on our own experiences and what we know about anyone they remind us of. The risk is that these projections may blind us to the reality of who that person really is.

The initial period of meeting and connecting with someone romantically can feel liberating and reassuring. We feel that we’ve finally met someone who seems to like us and is like us; someone from that outside world we’re floating around with so much uncertainty, that thinks we’re basically OK. When that is combined with floods of hormones, we’re likely to fall in love – forgetting that we may be making all kinds of assumptions about their world – and vice versa.

When that initial ‘honeymoon’ period inevitably begins to fade, we start to find out more about the actual person we’re with – things that we might not feel all that good about. Best-selling relationship writer Jed Diamond calls this the ‘disillusionment’ stage, and he says it’s at this point that too many people give up on their relationship (maybe going on to repeat the process with someone else) when in fact, with patience and kindness it’s exactly when they could progress to a deeper level of mutual acceptance and love.

The best way to counteract this cycle of beginnings and premature endings -one that I went around many times until I began to understand how I was sabotaging my relationships by hiding my feelings – is with honest communication. The child-like part of myself used to think that if my partner really loved me, she’d know how I was feeling without me needing to tell her. This is why it’s so important never to bury our true feelings or hide them from our partner – even when we think they might be surprised or upset, or whether we think they can be ‘justified’. Unless I share my truth, and she does the same, we are both likely to make up stories about what we think is going on for each other, and the foundation for our relationship will be a fragile one, built on guesses rather than understanding,

I’ve learned that, even though it goes against my early life ‘training’ as a man, and makes me feel painfully vulnerable sometimes, it’s always better to reveal my feelings – as long as I’m not blaming my partner for them. And if she does the same, we’ll have the chance of understanding each other in a deeper way. Then any decision we make about whether or not to stay together will be based on the solid ground of knowing each other- not just on wishful thinking. The worst that can happen is that she’ll walk away from me, and that will just tell me for sure that she wasn’t really right for me in the first place!

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