What is an Irrelationship?
False intimacy is not a serious psychological term, but it is a fairly vivid description of the kind of scene I often see: on the one hand, two people’s lives may be very closely linked, all daily activities are arranged around each other, living under the same roof. On the other hand, I don’t know when to start, there are more and more topics that can’t be discussed, emotions that dare not be expressed, and distrust and insecurity that can’t be concealed between me and my lover. Fake intimacy between partners is so common
these days! Especially between husband and wife, although under the same roof, there are many examples of seemingly divorced.
I believe that no one wants to spend the rest of their life in such a relationship, and I believe that those who are not married want to prepare in advance to avoid this situation.
So in the following answer, I will list the problems I think we should pay attention to and the things we should do. Over the
past three years, as a counselor and relationship trainer, I have helped many couples overcome obstacles in their relationships and build closer relationships. Many
of them have formed relationships with a sincere desire for love, and have once felt very close to their loved ones, and have formed families because of this feeling of closeness.
But never know when, their relationship stopped growing, round after round of challenges and contradictions so that the feeling of closeness began to fade.
Intimacy has become a beautiful memory of yesterday, and for the future development of the relationship, there are only more and more worries about how to get through the suffering. In
our time and society, we have made a lot of descriptions and definitions about what is intimate relationship.
Weekend candlelight dinner, nervous confession, shy hand-holding and first kiss, Valentine’s Day chocolate and roses, snow-white wedding dress and grand wedding.. It seems that when two people go through these processes, the relationship will naturally be very close.
But the fact is that everyone does these things, but not everyone’s feelings become intimate and happy because of these things.
This is because true intimacy is actually established by other processes and behaviors.
These processes and behaviors are related to the quality of the relationship between two people, the depth of communication, and the understanding and trust of each other. Regrettably
, these abilities to establish and maintain relationships have been generally lacking in our family and school education from childhood to adulthood. Many friends do not know exactly how to do it, so they can only observe and imitate what others do, that is, those procedural and ritualistic things. In the context of
emotional problems, in a society where consumerism prevails, the pressure of parents to force marriage is still widespread, so the formalistic feelings of being driven to the shelf are very common.
But the human heart is very sensitive, feelings are also very fair, intimate or not, is ultimately entirely determined by internal, relationship factors, and how many rituals you have completed, how many forms you have gone through are not necessarily related.
What Causes False Intimacy? Among
my clients, the partners who are experiencing problems in their pseudo-intimate relationships tend to have the following characteristics: First, they don’t really know themselves.
Many people don’t know why they fall in love and get married, and they’re not sure what they want from their relationship.
When I ask them, “What is the best relationship you can imagine?”?
They often look blank and hesitant.
Second, many couples don’t really know each other. Although
their feelings and bodies have been very close, and even accustomed to each other’s existence, they do not know each other’s views on many issues.
In particular, many people are confused into marriage, and do not realize that as a couple, two people need to reach a tacit understanding on what issues.
When problems arise, they realize that “he (she) is actually such a person,” and they feel that they are in a dilemma.
Thirdly, many people have emotional barriers and problems that hinder the growth of intimate relationships.
Many people have some problems with their original families and growing experiences. These problems have not been reflected on and dealt with, and have always affected the way they get along with each other. To put it in a vulgar way, “love is incompetent.”. The expression and flow of emotions in
intimate relationships, the establishment of trust and acceptance, and the handling of conflicts are all the hardest hit areas widely affected by personal psychological problems.
These problems may not be so prominent at the beginning of the relationship, but after a long time, all of them will be exposed in the relationship. The ideal relationship in
my eyes should be growing and maturing.
But because of these reasons, many people’s relationships stop growing very early, or even go backwards.
Two people’s understanding, acceptance and trust of each other have not increased with the increase of communication time, so getting along with each other has become more and more a habit, obligation and responsibility.
As a matter of fact, the reason why parents generally believe that “love will eventually become family affection” is that they mistake pseudo-sexual intimacy as the inevitable destination of affection. When I was
very young, I decided silently in my heart that when I grew up, I must not experience the misfortune of the previous generation.
I’m sure you’ve had the same idea.
My generation is lucky because we have more opportunities to read and think about feelings than previous generation.
Now is a chance to avoid repeating the same mistake! First of all, they don’t really know themselves. Friends who
come to me for help often say they don’t know what they want and what kind of person they are suitable for.
That’s why we have those familiar but never clear struggle: I should find what I like or like me?
Should I find someone who has feelings or good conditions? The reason why
a person has such confusion, I think, is largely because he is not clear about his emotional needs and expectations.
Why is it important to know yourself in a relationship?
I think there are two reasons.
One reason is that if you don’t understand your emotional needs, it’s hard to be emotionally satisfied. When I was
younger, I went through this stage, talking about one relationship after another, the same beginning and the same ending, and I didn’t feel much difference. The degree of happiness
in every relationship can only be summed up as “nothing more”, and I feel powerless to break the repeated cycle of every relationship from the honeymoon period to the bottleneck period and then to the final decline.
This powerlessness is not because the other person is not good enough, but because they can not know what kind of relationship will satisfy themselves.
When you don’t know how you can be satisfied, of course, you can’t find a satisfactory relationship, or you can only live in a seemingly satisfactory relationship, and attribute your unclear understanding to your partner who doesn’t understand you and doesn’t understand you. It’s hard to really feel close to your partner when you have such a mentality in your
relationship.
The second reason is that for intimacy in a relationship to persist, the relationship must continue to grow.
Optimistic people think that when the relationship is confirmed and married, two people can be intimate all the time.
Pessimistic people think that the love period is very sweet, but after the love period, the relationship begins to go downhill, how far you can go depends on how long you can protect the relationship.
But both of these views ignore the dynamic and developmental aspects of emotional relationships.
Relationships need to grow, first of all, naturally, the people in the relationship need to grow.
If one party in the relationship is in a state of psychological and emotional stagnation, the other party will obviously feel disconnected and lose the original sense of closeness.
For example, some women become full-time wives after marriage, blaming the stagnation of personal growth on the management of the family, and their husbands are gradually out of touch with their experience and ideas.
For example, some men have been maintaining a similar mentality of college students, indulging in games and other entertainment, refusing to face their own growth tasks, and refusing to think seriously about the future of the relationship with their partners.
To understand one’s own emotional needs, from a more macro perspective, is also to understand one’s own growth needs, or to know why one is alive, what one wants in this life, and what one wants to achieve.
Perhaps your partner can help you think and clarify these issues, but to a large extent, these are still a homework that needs to be done independently first.
“Wants” and “Needs” I often use a simple question to test whether I know enough about my emotional needs: “Why do you want to fall in love and get married?
To this, the answer I most often get is that when I get old, I feel that I should be stable. My family also has some pressure, and I see that my colleagues and friends around me are all married, so I get married.
In my opinion, this is a sign of not understanding one’s own emotional needs, because what is given here is what one wants, but not necessarily what one needs. We need to make a distinction between
people’s wants and needs.
The relationship between the two can be understood as a path and a goal. We meet our fundamental needs by getting what we want. What
we want is often some specific things or actions, while what we need is often subjective experience and feeling.
For example, I want a lot of money, because people will respect me if I have money, so I need respect; I want my husband to be very single-minded, because he is only good to me, which will make me feel that he attaches great importance to me, so I need attention; I want a lot of beautiful clothes and bags, because I dress up beautiful, others will recognize me, so what I need is recognition.
So when a person tells me that she is in a relationship because of age, family and social pressures, I see that her real needs may be self-confidence, security, recognition, respect, acceptance, belonging and so on. Furthermore
, if a person gets what he wants, will he be able to satisfy his needs?
Many people have a big deviation in their understanding of the relationship between the two.
For example, why marriage needs to be recognized and respected, but if it meets the expectations of family and society, will it be recognized and respected?
Self-perception and emotional quality In my opinion, being able to clearly distinguish between what you want and what you need, and to understand the relationship between the two, is an important way to judge the degree of self-perception.
Why is it important?
Combined with the two consequences of not knowing yourself mentioned earlier. Difficult to satisfy in
relationships: If we can’t distinguish between wants and needs, then we will continue to waste our lives on superficial wants.
Only when our needs are met will we feel satisfied from the bottom of our hearts.
For example, I once had a visitor who married a man she didn’t particularly love because she was eager to start a family. She was not satisfied with the relationship, but she couldn’t leave it.
She told me that she went into a relationship because she wanted to start a family, but she didn’t know what she needed from her family.
Through in-depth communication, I found that she lacked support and attention from her family in her growing experience.
However, she has a very superficial understanding of her emotional needs, so she has always had the obsession of “I want to have my own family” in her heart, but she has not realized that she is too eager for the form of home and ignores her real needs.
Without our efforts to sort out what we want and need, perhaps she would have been pursuing the state of “having a home,” but would not have been able to understand where her dissatisfaction came from for a long time.
Relationships stop growing: From the perspective of satisfying needs, the meaning of life may be the process of approaching the perfect state of complete satisfaction.
From this point of view, growth is a process of constantly acquiring new abilities and ways to meet needs. Without a clear understanding of
one’s own needs, one’s emotions may be focused for a long time on things that have been tried repeatedly but have not achieved the desired results, and the opportunity to further develop one’s mind and abilities is lost. I often encounter such situations
in my consulting work.
For example, there is a visitor who makes almost all the important choices in her life to please her parents.
Later, this habit of pleasing also shifted to treating her partner, and as a result, she found that her relationship with her partner was getting worse and worse, and she felt powerless.
Through in-depth communication, I found that she actually realized that she had been pleasing herself and felt sorry for herself for doing so.
But because pleasing can always get a little recognition from others, she keeps on this inefficient mode, sacrificing a lot of time and emotion for a little satisfaction.
She has not developed other ways to gain recognition in intimate relationships, including learning to give her own recognition.
So her growth has been stagnant, and her relationship with her partner has been repeating the pattern copied from her childhood.
This pattern can be maintained in the early stage of the relationship, but as the relationship develops, new problems and challenges arise, this pattern will inevitably become outdated.
. Focus on not getting lost ~
