Self-Awareness

The Essential Ingredients of a Good Relationship

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

I suspect you have some ideas of what a good relationship looks like. Certainly, you would identify love as a central ingredient, and perhaps things like honesty, commitment, trustworthiness, or family connections. You might think a good relationship should be composed of good communication, lots of play, or lots of work. I agree that a good and developing relationship needs to have all these things. It takes a lot of love, honesty, and all the rest to have a good relationship, and without these ingredients, no relationship can mature into something great. However valuable these very positive things are in a relationship, they often take a lot of work. It might not take “work” to fall in love, but it takes work to stay in love. Likewise, it is easier to be honest and open in the initial stages of a relationship, but it takes work to keep open and stay honest as the relationship grows. I think that a good relationship has a good mix of work, play, talk, and graciousness all in the context of being loving and honest.

Deb and I often say to couples that “they were married for the wrong reason: they loved each other.” We say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek not really believing that there is something wrong with loving your partner. What we mean by this “wrong reason” is more about the lack of what we believe is the right reason for marrying someone: understanding that person. Frankly, it is easier to love someone than to understand that person. Love comes from the heart and it is gift that we need to receive with gratitude because we can never earn someone’s love. If someone loves me, I didn’t deserve it, I didn’t earn it, I can’t pay for it…but I need it. So, I’m all about loving someone. The problem with loving someone is that “love is blind.” And so it should be. I don’t love someone because; I just love someone. We might justify our loving someone by saying all the things we like about that person, extolling that person’s virtue, intelligence, or kindness, but these are not the ingredients of love; they are the ingredients of liking. Love does not a good marriage make….or any relationship. Love is good? Yes. Valuable? Yes. Essential? Maybe not. I think you can love anyone if you understand that person because I believe that when I really understand someone, I understand his feelings, his nature, his passions, his loves, his losses, his hurts, and maybe his soul. But love is not enough. You need disinterest, disagreement, and dislike. At first glance these three things must seem “negative,” but however difficult they are, they are also essential in any maturing relationship. Let me explain.

Disinterest

Simply stated, two people cannot be interested in the same things. Granted, couples find each other through some common interest. They might meet in a bar with a penchant for having a few beers watching a football game or a glass good red wine after work; they might meet at a co-ed volleyball game, a biking event, a volunteer group, hiking the canyons of Utah, or in church. People that start a relationship on this common ground have a leg up on people who find each other physically attractive or good sexual partners, but may not actually have anything in common. Whether a relationship began with some common interests and/or sexual attraction, people soon discover that they are not interested in the same things. However obvious this fact is, it can be of profound importance in a developing relationship. For instance, Deb and I share a great deal of common interest in psychology, theology, traveling, reading, working on the house, and writing as well as many other elements of life. Each of us, however, has interests that the other doesn’t have, like Deb’s passion for nature and flowers that I don’t share, and my passion for basketball that she doesn’t share. I just don’t care much about flowers although I certainly enjoy seeing them from time to time. I just don’t have the deep appreciation of Mother Nature that she has. After knowing Deb for 42 years and knowing for most of these years that she is a person of the earth, it was always a stretch for me to appreciate her appreciation for nature. In our recent trip to the Netherlands in the height of the spring flower season, I had what seems to be my first glimpse into appreciation of flowers as we perused the Keukenhof gardens and the acres of tulips, hyacinth, and other spring flowers. It might not seem terribly important that Deb liked flowers and I didn’t care much, but this difference between us is actually quite profound because Deb’s sense of the world, the universe, and God is centrally related to nature. Consider how it has been for her to live with me, whom she loves and appreciates dearly, when I didn’t really give a hoot about the likes of tulips. In a similar fashion, Deb has little interest, and certainly no passion in playing basketball. She kindly asks me how my game went after Tuesday and Thursday morning games and Sunday night games, but she doesn’t really care about the game. She cares about me.

A good relationship needs to acknowledge the fact that we are not interested in the same things…nor should we. But if I say that I am bored when I hear Deb talking about flowers or she says she is bored when I talk about a pick and roll, we would unnecessarily hurt one another. It’s nice that I have some recent history with appreciating flowers, but I most certainly will never spend the hours she spends with them, nor am I capable of finding God in a new rose. A rose is, well, just a rose. Someone once said that, I believe.

This business of being passionate about some things but not others has to do with our value system. Deb values flowers, and I value basketball, but the value that each of us has in these matters runs quite deep and is quite passionate. Yet it is hard for couple to grant to one another these differences as well as the disinterest one partner has in the values and passions of the other partner. However difficult it is to admit to disinterest, it is even harder to admit to disappointment.

Disappointment

An unavoidable phenomenon and an essential ingredient in a good relationship is disappointment. Let me explain. Disinterest is difficult to accept in a relationship, but disappointment is much harder to accept. I am disappointed when my partner does something or says something to me that is hurtful and unexpected. We will unavoidably disappoint each other from time to time. I think it happens every day in every relationship. The difficulty is that most of us are not equipped to deal with disappointment. If I come into a relationship primarily because I love that person, it is likely that I have seen a good bit about the person that I like. And I probably have come to understand a lot about this person that I have come to love. It is also likely, however, that I do not understand enough of the person to know that he or she is like me in some ways and different from me in some ways. We might say that “after the honeymoon phase” of a developing relationship there come times of disappointment. I begin to see that my partner and I are different, perhaps substantially different. This can come as a shock to someone who is madly in love with his/her partner because of the “love is blind” thing that often operates at the beginning of a relationship. So, how do I get disappointed?

I get disappointed when my partner doesn’t live up to my expectations. I may not have even known that I had expectations, but when I am disappointed, my partner has not lived up to my expectations. Very often these expectations-come-disappointment are surprising and even shocking because I didn’t previously see my partner in all situations of life. If we come to live together not having ever lived with him/her, I might be surprised and disappointed that he always throws his underwear on the floor when undressing for bed. Or it might be something that is not so offensive, like using a knife and fork in a way that does not fit with your kind of manners. There are many others, of course, some minor, some egregious. And they all lead to disappointment. There are also some disappointments that are those that erupt out of a misunderstanding what a relationship is. In summary, some of our disappointments are minor, some major, some unforeseen, some obvious, and many self-created. Sometimes, however, the feeling I have about my partner goes beyond minor disinterest and minor disappointment: I actually dislike my partner is some way. Wow.

Dislike

You might be able to find ways to be disinterested in what your partner likes, or even disappointment when she doesn’t do what you would like her to do, but it a larger step to admit that you actually dislike something about her, like the ways she speaks or acts. Unfortunately, dislike is also an essential ingredient of a good relationship. I often say it this way: “When you first admit that you don’t like something about your partner, the dislike seems huge, but over time the dislike tends to diminish if never really disappearing.” I might name something that I dislike about Deb, and she certainly dislikes things about me, but I will use some discretion in being specific except to admit that there are things about each other that we simply dislike. Some of these things might be old habits that are not so good, but some of these things are simply unavoidable and even necessary. Consider your children.

Who “likes” waking up for the third time in the middle of the night with a hungry screaming infant? No one that I know. You could say that you “dislike the action but not the person,” but I think these are just nice ways of saying you don’t like the person…at least at the moment. I don’t think there is a real distinction between dislike the infant’s crying from disliking the infant…at the moment. Furthermore, I think there is nothing wrong with that feeling. It passes. Disliking something about your partner, however, is much more difficult, and it can lead to disliking the partner himself. The way to avoid coming to that dreadful point in a relationship is to admit that you don’t like something about him. You might not like the way he eats, sleeps, or talks. You might not like the way he walks or sings. You might not like the fact that he works a lot or doesn’t like to work at all. All of these things are behaviors or mannerisms of someone you might dearly love but not actually like all the time.

What do we do with feeling dislike, disappointment, and dislike?

We feel these feelings. We admit to them. We see these as honest feelings. And most importantly, we understand that when I am disinterested, disappointed, or disliking, I feel sad. Why do I feel sad? I feel sad because I have lost something, which is what sadness is always about. You have lost interest when someone is talking about something you really don’t care about. You have lost the hope that your partner forgot your anniversary or came late to dinner. You lost the feeling that you love “everything about” your partner when you discover that she isn’t perfectly like you, and as a result, you just don’t like something about her.

It is very hard to let the feelings of disinterest, disappointment, and dislike be there along with the accompanying sadness that always accompanies these feelings. We Americans are not particularly good at simply being disappointed or sad, and we are certainly not good at being wrong, even if the definition of “wrong” is in our own eyes. So, the first and central ingredient of being disappointed is to own up to it, to call it “disappointment,” and to allow the sadness come along with it. Deb and I have written (The Positive Power of Sadness) about how sadness ends. To have sadness end, one must feel it, feel it, and finally finish it. This “feeling it” is difficult, and no one wants to feel sad, much less disappointed, but it is the only way to finish feeling sad. And it is the only way to finish the disappointment, as well as the easier feeling of disinterest and the harder feeling of dislike, that often cause sadness. Too often, people try to fix something in the relationship before they have admitted to feelings of dislike, disappointment, and dislike.

After recognizing and admitting to feeling dislike, disappointment, and dislike, and hopefully finished the sadness that resulted from these feeling, you need to think clearly. Importantly, you cannot think clearly if you are still sad, much less angry or afraid. If you try to think when you have these emotions, you thinking will not be clear-headed because it will be infused with some kind of residual emotion, usually anger at the top and sadness underneath. However, this “finishing” of sadness is very difficult. By the way, finishing sadness doesn’t mean that disinterest, disappointment, and dislike go magically away; they don’t. These feelings never “go away;” they diminish. Small disappointments diminish over time, and even huge dislikes can diminish over time, but they never go away. If you’re one who uses your knife and fork in what we might call a “European style” with knife in right hand and fork in the left hand, but your partner never moves from the American way of knife and fork, you will never be pleased with his handling of utensils; you just won’t be very disappointed very much, and you won’t be sad anymore because you will have come to accept your differences.

What about change?

You might think something like, “Well, what about someone maturing, growing up, or simply changing” what he or she does? Shouldn’t we all mature? Yes, we need to mature, grow up, and get better. Some of our maturing can come at the hands of our partner’s feelings of disappointment or dislike, but ultimately, any kind of maturing or change has to come from the individual because the individual finds it valuable to change in some way. You can never change your partner and you should never try. You can carefully express your feelings of disappointment or dislike kindly, and then see if your feelings change or, over time, you partner’s behavior changes.

I know of a man who gave up a vibrant part of his recreational life to please his wife who simply said that he shouldn’t be involved in those activities anymore. She said that if he really loved her, he would give up his sports. He did. He never recovered from the loss. She got what she wanted but lost what she needed: the person she married. Now he was doing what she wanted, not what he wanted. There are other examples of expectations that come along with a newly established relationship. I am reminded of one of my favorite cartoons, Kathy. After a couple of shots with Kathy being disappointed in Irving, her boyfriend, she said, “You’re not the person I was pretending you to be.” Many people do a lot of pretending. There was a book written some time ago entitled, “I Love You the Way You are; Now Change.”

My encouragement for you is to know how your feel as I have written so many times in the Feelings Blogs. Knowing the feelings of disinterest, disappointment, and dislike starts you on the road to loving better, and even liking better.

 

 

Feelings XI: Paradoxical Feelings

Ron Johnson Discovery, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

We have been studying “feelings” for some time now, and this is our latest edition. Readers may peruse the previous 10 contributions to the topic. Deb and I are furiously working on a book incorporating all what we have written about and more, but the publication of that work will be sometimes in the future, hopefully near future. We I want to discuss with you today is what we call “paradoxical feelings,” namely feelings that seem to contradict one another. Importantly, the seeming contradictory appearance of feelings has mostly to do with words.

Words aren’t feelings

This is a very important concept that is at the heart of many successful times of communication and even more times of unsuccessful times of communication. To say that words are not feelings is to say several things, not the least of which is neurological, but also relational, and even spiritual. A very brief neurological review regarding this matter is to note that the left side of the brain (actually the cerebellum, the left front part of the brain) is the “housing” of language. We know this because if someone has a stroke, that person often cannot speak well or cannot speak at all. Such a person, interestingly, however, has a sense of self, has a sense of what s/he wants to say, but is unable to put these thoughts and feelings into words. Thoughts and feelings actually reside largely in the right hemisphere of the brain (the right cerebellum). So when I speak something, whether thought or feeling, those thoughts and feelings originate neurologically in the right hemisphere of the brain and then are processed into the left hemisphere of the brain in the form of words. Understand, this brief explanation is roughly true, and true neuropsychologists would be aghast at my simplifying this complicated neurological process. This simple understanding, however, leads us to the statement, “words are not feelings” because feelings (and most thoughts) are not naturally words.

Words are one way of expressing feelings but words are not the feelings. If I could get this across to people, they would reduce their disagreements, arguments, and divorces by 90% because it is the communication of feelings in words, or rather the lack of communication in words that causes all three of these unfortunate experiences. Words express feelings approximately, but the words themselves are not feelings, only one way of communicating feelings. Not only is it true that words are not feelings, they are not the only way feelings are communicated.

Other ways of communicating feelings

The other ways of communicating feelings include emotion, music, art, work, play, physical expressions, and even silence. Many of these means of feeling expression are valuable and often it is better to communicate feelings through means other than words. Poets and composers of music work diligently to communicate feelings, sometimes very successfully although they would admit that the feeling that someone has when reading their poetry or listening to their music may not be the feeling the composer had in the composition. Feelings can be communicated by a facial expression or in some kind of work or play that often communicates one’s feelings better than words. A couple of days ago a man told me that the absolute best moments in his life were when he won a stack car race. I can’t quite imagine the feeling he had because race care driving certainly is not among my passions, but it has been one of his for many years, and when he told me about this feeling, he also noted that he hadn’t race car driven for more than a decade. I know of several “bikers,” especially those who drive Harley’s, who say that the wind in their hair, the meeting and greeting another biker, and the hobnobbing that they do at biker rallies communicates their feelings better than anything else. I have heard people express their feelings over this past week or so in the love of a sports team, the affirmation of one’s transsexual nature, sexual contact, art, music, video games, and silence. I aver that many people communicate their feelings well but not necessarily in words, and yet it is in the realm of words that people struggle to communicate feelings more than any other modality.

The paradox of paradoxical feeling expressions

Expressions of feelings are often paradoxical, seemingly inconsistent, and sometimes downright contradictory. Over the past few days I have heard the following paradoxical expressions of feelings:

  • From a man whose wife has left him for another man:
    • “I really want Joan home under almost any circumstance
    • “I can’t imagine having Joan home. I don’t think I would allow it.”
  • From a man who is in the midst of a possible life change:
    • I have to leave San Francisco. The place is bad for me
    • I can’t imagine leaving San Francisco
  • From a teenager:
    • I hate my mother more than anyone else in the world
    • My mother is the most important person in the world to me
  • From a man in his early 30’s:
    • I can’t stay with my partner (because it is essentially without sex)
    • I can’t imagine leaving partner (I can live without sex)
  • From a gay man:
    • I can’t leave my wife. She is the most important person in my life
    • I can’t see spending the rest of my life pretending to be straight
  • From a man in his mid-40’s:
    • I can’t live with my wife anymore, and I know that my staying is not good for my kids.
    • It is absolutely impossible for me to leave (largely because of the kids)
  • From a lifelong Democrat:
    • I can’t think of any possibility of voting Republican for the rest of my life
    • I truly believe that I will vote for this one Republican
  • From a mother:
    • I can’t stand my child
    • I can’t live without my child
  • From a sports fan:
    • I have given up on my favorite team
    • I will never give up on my favorite team

These seemingly contradictory statements came from intelligent people, often from people who are quite emotionally mature and spiritually mature. Why would people make such statements, sometimes in quick succession? Wouldn’t they think that one of these statements is true while the other is false? Many people get caught in this dilemma and end up quite confused and frustrated. I try to help them understand that words are not feelings, that feelings often represent the deepest part of who we are, but that it is necessary to muddle through the murky waters of feelings with approximate, even contradictory statements until these deep feelings can be trusted.

Feel, Think, and Act

Feeling, thinking and acting are the three ingredients of psychological functioning. We have to feel something, need to think about things, and need to do things. Thinking about things lends itself well to words, and doing something is also the result of talking and musing about what might be done, but feelings do not lend themselves very well to words. When I “feel something,” I feel this first physically and then emotionally, but the initial sense of feeling has nothing to with words. It has to do with a sense of something, the right about something, the wrong about something, the beauty about something, the ugliness about something, and may other ways of getting to the understanding that feelings, however important and central in human existence, are not words. So when I put my feelings into words, not only do they pass first through my physical experience, but also my emotional experience before they get to my left brain when I construct words to express these feelings.

Some years ago Deb came up with the 10-2-1 program of doing the right thing. What she meant by this is that to do the right thing, you need to think clearly about what you should do, often choosing between two different possibilities. However, in order to think clearly, you need to have felt through the matter ten times. So, the program is: feel about ten times, think twice, and then act once. It is the “feeling” part of this that is hardest because feelings do not lend themselves to exact words. The task is to allow the feelings to be expressed in approximate words that is hardest. What we tell our patients is this: Feel, feel, feel, and finish feeling your feelings so you can think clearly and ultimately act appropriately. But how do you do this? You allow for the expression of paradoxical feelings.

Allowing for paradoxical feelings

This is quite simple: give yourself a wide berth in expressing your feelings knowing that whenever you express feelings in words, the words are approximate at best, that the words are imprecise, and the words are but a vague expression of the murky waters of feelings. This means, quite simply, that you need to say something one day and quite different thing the next day. And sometimes it isn’t days separating these statements; it might be minutes or seconds. If for instance, I find myself something like, “I can’t stand where I live” at one time and “I love where I live” at another, allow these statements to be feeling statements, not factual statements. Both of these statements are true to some degree and false to some degree. If you allow yourself the freedom to say both of these imprecise statements, you will eventually finish your feelings and be able to think clearly. The danger is jumping from “I hate where I live” to moving, or “I love where I live” to staying. You can get to the truth of where you should live if you simply allow these feelings to come out in imprecise words knowing that the words are but a poor reflection of your inner feeling. This is no easy task because people either want to race right through their emotion and make a rational decision, or stay with their emotion and make an emotional decision. What you need to do is make a feeling statement, or statements until it makes sense to you what you should do. Of course, you want it both ways.

Wanting it both ways

The essence of feeling-based statements is the fact that you want it both ways. If you are in a quandary about moving, for instance, you want the joys of staying and you want the joys of leaving. Likewise, you want to get out of the difficulty of staying while at the same time you want to avoid the difficulty of moving. Moving or staying can only be a rational and right decision after you have rambled through the difficulty of feeling through the whole matter of moving. You will be sad if your stay because, perhaps, because you will miss out of what you might have in a new place. You will be sad if you leave because you will miss out on what you have had in your present location. You will be sad on either account. Likely, you will note the fear associated with staying or leaving first before you can allow yourself to feel the sadness of both of these actions. So when you ramble through these paradoxical statements that erupt from your inner feelings, give yourself the freedom to feel the implicit sadness of any decision you have to make. In fact, Deb and I don’t think it is really a decision so much as it is a discovery.  You can discover the right thing to do when you have given lots of room for your inner feelings to be expressed, albeit imprecisely and paradoxically.

 

 

 

Temperament VII: Lovers: Challenges and Opportunities

Ron Johnson appreciation, Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, mindfulness, Opportunity, Personality, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

This is the seventh of a series of nine blogs on “temperament.” Previously, I have discussed the four temperaments that we have used to understand people for the past nearly 50 years. As we have defined these four temperaments, we identify players, lovers, analysts, and caretakers. Briefly stated, players seek experience, lovers seek connection, analysts seek truth, and caretakers seek effective use of property. For a more thorough review, see my previous blogs on temperaments, particularly on “lovers,” our current discussion. I also want to note that no one fits perfectly in any one of these categories, but rather people tend to be somewhat like other people in one of these categories, and sometimes two of them. Furthermore, people have characteristics of all of these four temperaments. And even more important, temperament theory is only one way of understanding psychological make-up. We will eventually discuss personality “type”, which was originated by psychologist Carl Jung and popularized by Elizabeth Briggs-Myers in the popular MBTI instrument. Other ways of understanding people would include gender matters, cultural matters, intellectual matters, and personal development. You will note, however, that our interest in understanding people is not particularly oriented towards psychopathology, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and the like. We have done a bit of such study in previous blogs as well.

In very brief review, the people we call “lovers” are people whose primary orientation is towards human connection. This is a concept that is hard to explain in objective terms because it is so subjective by nature. Like, what does it mean to be “connected” to someone? Lovers use this term all the time, using it as if everyone understands it. But not only are there widely different understandings of what “connection” means to people of different temperaments, we won’t be successful in actually defining this concept except to say that connection is a “feeling” (there we go again with an undefined, but important word) that happens when one person feels a kind of unity, closeness, or deep understanding of another person. We might call it a “spiritual” thing that happens to people, but this word is also undefined. So, let us proceed with this discussion in the murky waters of human connection that is certainly very real but just as certainly undefined, at least in objective terms.

Our current discussion is how one can be a “lover” in temperament and find success in life, i.e. relationships, work, play, and personal life. To be successful at anything one has to understand what he/she is by nature, which includes temperament among many other things. I just talked to a guy who is a “biker” among other things (also a mechanic and a truck driver; also a pretty intelligent person). He told me that an important female relationship didn’t work out with his former girlfriend partly because she didn’t understand his passion for all that goes with being a biker. I think that if he could have adequately explained his biking passion, he might have better at succeeding at his relationship, but he admits that he has very little skill at such things. Importantly, biking is important to him. So, there are many things that are important in what it means to be a person, among them passions like biking, but also temperament. The first thing that a lover person needs to know and do is to understand the nature of being a lover, which means seeking connections. But what does that mean? We discussed this somewhat in the previous blog about the Lover Temperament. In a nutshell it means that the person with this lover nature needs to see its connection-based nature, see that this is a good thing, a godly thing, and a valuable thing. This is the beginning of success in life: knowing my basic goodness.

The second thing is much harder, particularly for lovers: not all people are lovers, nor should they be. This is a very hard pill for lovers to swallow because love and connections come so easily to them, that they think love and connections should come as easily to everyone. I have to hammer away at lovers in my office to get the point across that they have a “gift”, which happens to be the gift of love (and connections), and that have an opportunity and an obligation to use this gift in the world. What does that mean?

It means that whatever they do, lovers will have love and connections at the bottom of their desire, whether this is relationship, job, friend, play, or personal reflection. So, if you are a lover, know that your approach to all of this will be to find some kind of connection. I just spent another hour with a typical lover, who is primarily distraught because his 32-year relationship hasn’t been successful. It is beyond his ability to conceive that his seeking of connection, however good and godly, was not enough, and is not yet enough to have a successful relationship. Nothing wrong with being a lover, nothing whatsoever; in fact, everything right about it. But loving and connecting is not enough. His wife, whom I know but briefly, is certainly of a different temperament, and simply does not need, and does not want, the connection that Sam wants all the time. This is a tough pill for Sam to swallow, but it is one he has to swallow if he wants his relationship to succeed. The same is true of the rest of life.

The rest of life is work, play, friends, and self-reflection. Knowing that you approach all these things, even the self-reflection part, with a penchant for connections is very important. Ideally, you have a spouse, co-worker, and friends who understand your need for connection, but it is just as likely that you do not. So finding success in these important arenas of life means that you have to know that your gift is but one of many in life, and at the most ¼ of what it means to be a complete person. This does not mean that you have to just tolerate your spouse, friend, or co-worker, but it does mean that unless he/she is a lover like you, you will not be able to forge the connection that is dear to you. You can have connections, but you can’t have them with most people, and maybe not even with your friend, co-worker, or even your spouse. You have to have connections, but you can’t have them with everyone like you would like. So, how do you cope with this? Sadness.

You cope with having less than universal connections with everyone in your life by allowing yourself to feeling sad. In fact, if you do it right, you will actually feel sad more often than most people because you love more than most people. If you don’t allow yourself to feel sad (and lonely and disappointed), you will end up feeling irritable, angry, and resentful. This is when you are not at your best, and sadly, very sadly, many lovers end up being quite the opposite of being the lovers that God made them to be simply because they expected too much of other people, namely expecting then to want connections. When lovers do not have the connections that they so dearly need in life, they can become angry, irritable, and even mean spirited.

Having discussed (briefly) some of the grief associated with being a lover, how might such a person find success in life, i.e. relationships, play, work, and friendships? First by noting and valuing this love gift, secondly by recognizing that most people don’t have it, and thirdly finding people and places where you can, indeed, have real connections. You might, for instance, find a connection with someone who is not a lover, but you feel the connection even though he doesn’t feel it. You might want him to feel it, but it can be just as good for you to feel it, perhaps entirely silently, without his even knowing that you are feeling it. You can find that moment in time when you feel something with a co-worker or boss at work, perhaps a time when you really feel what they feel, be it sad, hurt, lonely, excited, or hopeful. So, these brief moments of connection might not be what you would like relationships to be about, but it can be very good for you and keep you going in life.

Aside from taking these brief moments of connection, you need to foster one or two relationships that are mutually connecting. Lovers absolutely need this in their lives, and if they don’t find it, they will find some kind of compensation. Compensations tend to be anger, addiction, and avoidance. If you find yourself in any of these, know that you are compensating for the lack of the intimacy that is so central to your living and being. But finding that right person is no easy task and there are many confederates to the real thing, like affairs, for instance. I think most affairs occur because one or both of the parties happens to be a lover, usually a lover who doesn’t have someone with whom he/she has real connection. The addictions that people have in their lives are also compensatory, but then they become the go-to thing to do instead of doing the very hard work of developing a long-term relationship with someone, having a good friend or two, finding pleasure in work, and having good play in life. If someone has all of these things (good work, good play, good friend, and good intimate), addictions simply are not as fun and not as attractive.

All of this is very hard work, and the finding that the whole world is not made up of lovers like you is the most painful part of the work, and the most necessary part of the work. Then you will be at your best, giving, forgiving, learning, leaving, and connecting.