WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE IN RELATIONSHIP WITH A DOORKNOB

Everyone has a relationship pattern. Your relationship pattern is the inevitable dynamic that your relationships fall into, given enough time and intimacy.

Your relationship pattern is a function of you and the people you will be drawn to. And, the degree to which your relationship pattern will manifest and be obvious is a function of the amount of intimacy inherent in any given relationship.

So, let’s say that part of my relationship pattern is that I make myself smaller so that the other person can have the space. (Our patterns tend to have way more nuance than this, but just stick with me for now). Every relationship that I enter into will fall into the orbit of this pattern on some level.

If this is my pattern, then I’m going to be a natural fit for other people whose patterns tend to be about taking up all of the space.

The more intimate the relationship I am in with someone, the more visible this pattern will be. If I’m with someone that I’ve just met, most of our interaction will stay on the surface. We’re not particularly comfortable revealing too much of ourselves, we play quite safe, and we tend to be fairly generous with our goodwill.

Another way to put this is that at the beginning of a relationship, we tend to keep our judgments much more in check than we do as time goes on.

At the start of a new romantic relationship, I may notice that the person I’m dating has a tendency to talk over me sometimes, but I might afford her the benefit of the doubt. I might even think that’s cool at first, because this is a trait that I struggle to exhibit myself.

I might acknowledge that maybe they’re just feeling urgent and want to share. Because we’re new in our relational dance, I’m more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But, as time goes on, and our relationship deepens, we will both naturally fall into the rhythms that we are comfortable with. Our guard goes down, our best behaviour gets put away, and we start to act more in alignment with what is familiar.

When I’m in relationship with my family or origin, or with someone I’ve committed my life to, I’m going to see this relationship pattern show up in spades.

One of the things that makes our relationship pattern so entrenched is that it doesn’t occur to us like a “me problem”. It occurs like an issue over there with the people we seem to be meeting.

“Suuuuuuuure”, we’ll concede, “maybe I have a role to play in the kind of people I’m attracting, but genuinely, there was zero indication that they were such a narcissist!”

Not our fault. Not our pattern being perpetuated. We’re just a victim to the kind of people we seem to meet.

The game becomes one of two choices: try to get better at filtering out people, so that we can find someone that doesn’t fit inside the pattern, or, find ways to create barriers between the level of intimacy that can arise in the relationship.

I had one friend in a relationship where he and his partner had agreed they were better off not moving in together. This allowed them to get along better. Makes sense; moving in with someone will definitely increase the intimacy you share. Stay separate, less space in which your pattern can make itself known.

If this is empowering, then great. But, if you want more and more intimacy in your life and an ongoing deepening in your relationships, these strategies move you in the opposite direction. They are ultimately about avoiding or managing your pattern, rather than healing it.

Your relationship pattern has something to teach you about yourself. 

It reveals the way you were trained to show up in relationships — where you stop yourself, where you hold yourself back, where you judge yourself and others.

So if you want to deepen your intimacy, the first place to look is often at your judgments and complaints of others.

What are the perennial complaints you have in your relationships? What do you tend to judge your partners for?

These complaints and judgments represent the parts of your own humanity you can’t bring love to. The parts of yourself that you’ve suppressed and have no space for.

Take on the practice of discovering the way you show up the same as your partners, and then, when you catch yourself, practice holding yourself with grace.

The more you heal these parts of yourself internally, the easier you can be with other people doing the same. 

By growing your capacity to be with more of life as it shows up, your journey becomes one of expansion into more of what life has to offer, rather than shrinking and contracting from it.