“To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart, and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.”
~Anonymous
You can be a million miles apart and feel as close as the next heartbeat or in the same bed and feel hundreds of miles apart. Have you ever had the experience of feeling really separated or far apart from your partner even though you were within touching distance? Have you ever felt really close to someone that you see infrequently?
How can you explain this paradox? I have had both experiences in my life and I have tried to determine the root cause of these feelings regardless of the distance that separated me from my loved one’s. I can’t give you a definitive answer, but I think I am getting a lot closer to the heart of the issue.
There are several types of closeness or distance. There is: physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and psychological. I have felt really close emotionally to someone yet a million miles apart physically. I have felt a great valley of distance between a spouse spiritually yet a closeness in family or financial agendas. If you are in a relationship and do not feel intimately close to your significant other in any of the above ways, I suggest you consider why you may be experiencing this distance.
The real problem here is – to be close in some ways and yet distant in others. For example if you have a greater need for more affection, emotional closeness or romance and your significant other has a greater need for more sex or physical closeness, you will never bridge this gap focusing on a totally unrelated common area in your relationship such as money, career or children. You will tend to bring the unresolved resentments, baggage, expectations, guilt etc. into the other areas of your relationship. You may not do this consciously, but you will certainly do it unconsciously.
There are a number of causes to these feelings of distance and or closeness. They can be summarized in just 3.
1. Expectations. You want or expect a certain type of attitude, response, action, word, feedback from your spouse and it doesn’t (hardly ever or never) comes. You have an expectation and are constantly disappointed. These unfulfilled expectations can lead to a variety of resentments, disappointments then anger and finally apathy.
2. Needs and/or desires. You or your significant other has no interest in knowing, understanding or satisfying some or any of your basic emotional or physical needs or wants.
3. Your agendas are purely self-focused and you therefore set your partner up for disappointment wherever you go or whatever you do.
During a break in one of my recent seminars I recently overheard a conversation between two female friends. One person said, “The passion is gone in our relationship.” This simple comment caused me to think for a few minutes. Passion is not in a relationship any more than fun is in a job. If there is no more passion in the relationship it is because there is no more passion in the two people in the relationship.
A relationship doesn’t have feelings or emotions. People in them have these things and they either bring them to the relationship or they don’t. So if there is emotional distance in your relationship it is not because these are missing in the relationship but because they are in one or both of you.
In His service, Tim