Relationships, Intimacy and the Difficulty of Being Close
Thoughts on closeness, separateness and the patterns we find ourselves repeating.
We discover ourselves through other people
We come to know ourselves in the presence of other people. Before we have much capacity to reflect on who we are, we are already responding to how others meet us.
A child who finds that distress brings somebody closer is having a different experience of relationship from one whose needs seem to create distance. Being valued for being capable, accommodating or undemanding can become entwined with how we understand ourselves. Over time, these experiences contribute to our expectations of other people, our sense of ourselves in relationship, and what seems possible for us in their presence.
This might help us understand why particular relationships can feel strangely familiar. Someone’s distance may be compelling to one person and intolerable to another. Being needed can make us feel valuable, trapped, or some complicated combination of the two. We are responding to the person in front of us, while meeting them from within a history.
Through our relationships with other people, we also come to know something about ourselves. To be desired is to experience ourselves as desirable to this person; to be trusted is to occupy a particular place in their world. Our relationships can become involved in maintaining a sense of who we are. When an important person begins to withdraw, what becomes uncertain may extend beyond whether the relationship will continue.
Who am I to you?
There is something powerful about being recognised by another person. Someone knows us in a way that other people do not. We become part of their understanding of the world, and they become part of ours.
A relationship can therefore provide a sense of continuity and coherence. I know something about who I am with you, and perhaps something about who I am because of how you see me.
When that recognition becomes uncertain, we may become unusually attentive to the other person. A change in tone, less affection, an unanswered message or a desire for more independence can take on considerable significance. We may begin trying to understand what has changed and what it says about us.
For somebody who has previously experienced people as unreliable or easily lost, this uncertainty may already carry a particular meaning. Someone else may have learnt that relationships are maintained by being useful, agreeable, sexually available, undemanding or attentive to the needs of others.
At some point, a question can emerge: what do I need to do to keep you here?
The answer may involve seeking reassurance, concealing something about ourselves, becoming indispensable, making ourselves smaller, or leaving before the other person has the opportunity to leave us.
The problem of the other person
However close we become, the person we love continues to have an experience of the world that is their own.
We are who we are because we are not the other. There is a boundary between my experience and yours, even where there is great intimacy between us. I can listen to you and try to understand the world from where you stand, while something of your experience will always remain beyond my reach.
Another person’s separateness brings uncertainty into a relationship. They can change their mind, misunderstand us, want something different, become interested in somebody else, need more distance or ask for a kind of closeness we cannot give. Their choices remain partly outside our control.
Our attempts to manage this uncertainty can take many forms. We might pull somebody closer when they move away, monitor their attention, retreat into independence, or adapt ourselves around what appears most likely to preserve the relationship.
Possession can enter here too. We speak quite ordinarily about someone being mine, and about partners as our other half. There is something appealing in the possibility of overcoming separateness and becoming part of a larger whole. Difficulties emerge when the person we experience in this way asserts a direction of their own. Their separateness becomes visible again.
What we give up to remain close
People sometimes describe having lost themselves in a relationship. Often this develops through a series of small accommodations whose significance becomes apparent much later.
Perhaps you stop raising a particular subject because you know where the conversation will go. Something you want sexually becomes difficult to mention. You take responsibility for maintaining harmony or become increasingly attentive to another person’s emotional state. You gradually occupy less room in the relationship.
There will always be adaptation between people who share their lives. We affect one another and change through knowing one another. The question I find interesting is what becomes difficult for us to acknowledge or express in order to preserve closeness.
This can happen around dependence as well. Someone who has learnt to value themselves through being capable and independent may struggle to recognise their wish to be looked after. Depending on another person can expose us to disappointment and loss, particularly when earlier experiences have made that dependence feel precarious.
There can also be something frightening about discovering how important another person has become. Their importance gives them the capacity to affect us.
Dependence and independence coexist in intimate relationships. We can be capable of standing on our own feet and still need somebody. We can want closeness and also want distance. We can love somebody and sometimes experience their needs as burdensome. Allowing these experiences to coexist may give us a fuller sense of ourselves within relationships.
Why do the same relationship patterns keep happening?
A person can have considerable insight into their relationships and still find themselves repeating something familiar.
You might understand your attachment pattern, recognise that you seek unavailable partners, or know that reassurance only settles your anxiety temporarily. The understanding can be genuine while the experience remains powerful when it happens again.
Our histories shape how situations appear to us in the present. An unanswered message carries different possibilities for somebody expecting abandonment than for somebody who feels relatively certain of the relationship. A partner asking for closeness may feel loving to one person and engulfing to another.
This also influences who we think the person in front of us is.
We inevitably encounter people with expectations that have developed through previous relationships. Someone can begin to occupy a familiar position in our world before we have fully discovered who they are. We may expect them to reject us, control us, need us, disappoint us or save us.
Becoming aware of the person we expect to find can create greater openness to the person who is actually there. Sometimes they may surprise us. Sometimes our fears will prove well founded. Either way, there is more to discover about how we came to understand the situation and what possibilities we can see within it.
Intimacy and the boundary between us
I think there is something important in the boundary between ourselves and another person.
Our inability to completely inhabit another person’s experience leaves us communicating across a gap in subjectivity. We can become extraordinarily close, share much of our lives and know one another over decades, while continuing to encounter somebody who is not ourselves.
That boundary allows for difference. The other person can show us something we had not seen, resist the role we have imagined for them, and remain capable of surprising us. We do the same for them.
This also gives relationships their vulnerability. Loving somebody means allowing their existence to affect ours. Their attention can bring pleasure, their absence can be felt, and their choices may alter the life we imagined.
There is responsibility within this encounter because the person before us has an experience that is as real to them as ours is to us. Where there has been lying, infidelity, withdrawal, attempts to control, or other forms of hurt, understanding our own experience can help us consider what happened and what responsibility we want to take for it.
Intimacy may have something to do with how we navigate the boundary between us: remaining open to closeness while allowing ourselves and the other person to remain distinct.
Thinking about relationships in psychotherapy
People come to psychotherapy with relationship difficulties for many reasons. These might involve attachment and abandonment, intimacy, jealousy, trust, infidelity, boundaries, separation, recurring relationship patterns, or uncertainty about whether a relationship is one they want to remain in.
We can begin with what is happening in your relationships and how you experience it. Earlier relationships may become relevant as we understand more about the world you have come to expect from other people and the ways you have learnt to position yourself within it.
Over time, aspects of this may also become visible in the relationship between us. You will form impressions and expectations of me, and I will have an experience of being with you. If something familiar begins to happen between us, we can become curious about it together.
Through dialogue, we might understand more about how you experience closeness and separateness, what you have needed from relationships, what you have given up within them, and the possibilities you can see for yourself now.
This may include accepting parts of yourself that have previously been difficult to accommodate. Need and independence, closeness and distance, sexuality, anger, vulnerability or the wish to be cared for can all form part of how we relate to others.
The relationships we form are significant sources of meaning in our lives. They are also encounters with people whose lives can never become entirely ours. There is much to explore in how we live within that distance and how we reach one another across it.
Individual psychotherapy for relationship difficulties in Manchester
I offer individual psychotherapy for adults and young people aged 16 and over from my practice in Levenshulme, Manchester, as well as online across the UK. I offer a free 20 minute consultation if you would like to speak before deciding whether to arrange a first session.
I work with people exploring relationship difficulties, intimacy, attachment, recurring relationship patterns, trust, jealousy, infidelity, boundaries, sexuality, separation and questions around closeness and independence.
Sessions are 50 minutes and usually weekly. My standard fee is £60.