Closeness is a gift of long-term love. But intimacy can also challenge our relationships. It can lead us to overlook our partners, or to find them more irritating than our friends when they are late, or tell the same story for the third time, or borrow then misplace our phone chargers. If togetherness is the goal, we need to understand the potential threats it poses to a relationship too. Which is why I decided to ask relationship coach Susan Quilliam to delve into one of the biggest challenges we face in love: to balance distance and closeness.
You see clients who are struggling with the challenges of sustaining love. What are the common mistakes couples make?
This is going to sound like a cliché – once I’ve said it I will expand on it because it’s complicated – but what people lose in a long-term relationship is kindness. They lose it for a number of reasons: because once you’ve got close to somebody, they can much more easily push your buttons than a stranger can, and vice versa. You’re unlikely to throw a temper tantrum if a friend does something that irritates you. But with somebody you love and who loves you, often it’s easier to shout than it is to step back and think, “No, I ought to treat my partner almost as if they were a stranger, I should be kind and keep a little distance.”
The technical term for this in therapeutic circles is that couples get ‘enmeshed’ – they get so close that they start treating each other badly because it feels like a betrayal when they don’t feel the same about something. The initial stage of falling in love is about finding similarity, but as the relationship progresses, and you start trying to individuate, a partner might say, “Hold on, you disagree with me? That must mean you don’t love me, because you never disagreed in the beginning.” You can either react to the threat of difference by nagging each other all the time, or by shutting down, having no connection at all and putting your attention on work or children or elsewhere. A constant problem for couples I see is that balance between keeping the connection while also keeping sufficient distance, so that you can be kind to one another. Whereas other things can vary, this underlies most of the problems I’ve seen.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that the security of the relationship is also its enemy? Because the safety net of being together allows you to treat a partner unkindly, whereas in the beginning stage of a relationship, where there’s no security, we make more effort to be kind?
Exactly. We get seduced by the fact that, in the beginning, we are completely kind and try to please our partner. Therefore, when that starts to fail, because we feel secure enough to fail at it, we don’t understand why.
When you first meet, you’re two independent people moving towards being part of a couple, which is wonderful. But there is a double danger: 1) of becoming too dependent, or 2) trying to run the relationship as two completely independent people. The clinical psychologist David Schnarch describes the delicate balance you need as “interdependence” – a balance between you where your lives are intertwined, but they’re not so intertwined that you lose your own identity and the elements that brought you together in the first place. There will always be times when you come together and connect, and times during even the best relationships when there is distance between you. You have to be grown up about it and say, “Right, we’ll work at coming back together, but we’re not going to panic, because we trust each other.”
Once you get to a stage in a relationship where you feel secure, how can you stop yourself from getting irritated and treating your partner unkindly?
The first step is the ability to self-reflect, which a remarkable number of people don’t have in a relationship. They can be wonderful when they’re analysing a project at work, but ask them to reflect on what’s happening in their relationship and they flinch. They say, “No, it should be spontaneous.”
The second step is self-regulation. Notice you are being mean and calm yourself down before speaking to your partner. Once I’ve got a couple or individual doing that, the rest often falls into place. I also challenge the statement, “He or she made me feel X or Y’ — for example, “She makes me feel angry,” or “He makes me feel like a failure.“ Actually, your partner can’t make you angry, because you have the ability to control your emotions. As soon as you rely totally on your partner to make you happy, you run into trouble. Because your partner has no hope of fulfilling that expectation; no one person can ever meet all your needs.
If someone is self-reflecting and self-regulating, what are the next steps?
I reteach communication (because at that point it’s probably got a bit mean) and negotiation, which allows them to see that in most situations, apart from ultimate deal breakers (eg whether or not you want kids), you can both get what you want in a relationship. Then it’s also the ability to take responsibility for your own feelings. To keep yourself together. To be mature and balanced. To not just think, “Right, you’re going to have to put up with every single flicker of emotion I have.”
I’m not saying we should be able to do this 100% of the time; we’re not robots. It’s about getting into the habit of thinking, I can feel myself getting angry. It’s fine to have this feeling, and it’s important, because it’s telling me something. But what should I do with the feeling: do I snap at my partner? Do I walk away and slam the door? Do I lash out verbally? And crucially, Do I lose the sense of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’? Or, instead, can that person think about how both parties are viewing the situation, and say, “Look, I’m feeling angry at the moment. I need to find a way to calm down and then I can listen to you, I can reflect on myself, I can start taking responsibility and we can have a conversation which includes both of us.”
Why do you think some people lean so far into togetherness that they become enmeshed, and then find it difficult to allow space within the relationship?
If we’re very lucky, as a child, we’re safe and supported. We need to be compliant with what’s happening around us, but we’re looked after, we’re cared for, we get attention. And often when we find a partner, we’re searching for the force of love we got as children: total security and validity. In the end no other human being can give us that particular love we had from our parents. But some people try to, so they get closer and closer. They ask for more and they give more, and then it becomes dependence.
Do you think we argue less in the beginning of a relationship, because we don’t feel secure enough to say what we really mean yet?
It is that, but at the beginning, it’s also about focus. Your attention is on all the ways your new partner understands you. That powerful feeling can distract you, or encourage you to overlook issues you disagree about. You both collude in doing that. If you’re on the fourth or fifth date, and one of you goes back to the other’s flat and it’s a tip, it might not feel like a big deal in that moment. Perhaps you’re too busy thinking about when – or if – you will move into the bedroom. But over time, as you become not only more secure but also less focused on the things that brought you together, you start to think, “Well, would this mess be a real problem if we lived together?” While the big things – like your political values – are likely to come up early, these small niggles only become important later on. They can start to dominate, and if you’re trying to regain interdependence rather than dependence, you will often begin to stress the differences as a way of saying, “Look, I’m an individual. I am not you. Don’t ask me to agree with you on everything. I need some personal space or identity.”
But in a positive way, should we see the fact that we are able to voice our frustrations as a sign that we are being our whole selves in a relationship?
The healthiest couples are those who can argue without feeling threatened, come back together quickly after an argument and see the conversation in context. Arguing itself is not the problem, it’s the attitude to arguing that can be the real issue. In a healthy fight about who is tidy and who isn’t, one person might say, “You know what? You’re allowed to be untidy. I’m allowed to be tidy. How are we going to find a practical solution? I don’t mind you being untidy, but please don’t be unhygienic.” And the person who leaves their coffee mugs all over the place says, “Okay, I accept that in my office I can do that, but I promise not to leave mugs around so long that they grow mould on top.” The distinction is that both people are working together and making compromises —there’s a devotion to ‘we’ instead of just ‘me’. But if what you are really saying in an argument is, “Do it my way,” and “No, do it my way,” then it can damage a relationship in the long-term.
On one hand you’re saying that it’s important to retain a sense of ‘I’ and not ‘we’, but in arguments you have to go back to the ‘we’ to understand it’s no longer only your needs that are a factor.
That’s an important point because there is a contradiction. Every relationship – not just intimate ones — is an unconscious negotiation around that balance between ‘I’ and ‘we’. Sometimes both or one of you needs to say ‘I’. But if you’re only ever saying ‘I’, then you don’t have a relationship. On the other hand, if you’re only ever saying ‘we’, you’re enmeshed or you’re co-dependent. All the time you’re balancing this out, and when something big in your life changes – if you have children, for example – you have to renegotiate that again. It’s about being close, but not so close that you treat each badly. It’s the ability to take responsibility for your own feelings, to step back and treat your partner with respect and kindness. If you can do that, and your partner can reciprocate, then you can get back on track.
Reprinted with permission from Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings by Natasha Lunn (Viking, 2022). Available from Amazon and Bookshop.