When Insecurities Threaten Relationships, What Do You Do?
As soon as we think we are in the perfect relationship, human flaws get in the way. Drama, ego, and life differences threaten romantic bliss. We have a choice — to work through the muck together until we reach clear waters or abandon ship.
“I can tell something’s wrong,” he says. He walks over to the kitchen to pour scotch while avoiding her eyes.
The midnight rain pummels the window, accenting his words, making them feel accusatory. She is not her emotions’s shepherd. Is she?
Of course something is wrong. Her insecurities are wild animals that dart across the room with fearful eyes. They may have sharp teeth, but they aren’t cruel. They just need to be tamed by a loving hand.
He sits down by her, leaving five inches between them. Those five inches seem like the Atlantic ocean.
She wants to be held but feels brittle… if he touches her the wrong way she might shatter.
They talk. She watches him as his head bends down to look at his hands. He explains his side but she can barely hear his words as she is suddenly distracted by his silhouette. Can you fall in love with the shape of a distraught man’s head? Or the way his hair, so in need of a haircut, curls around his left ear?
She wonders why they were even having this discussion when they could be making love. She desperately wants to stop him mid sentence and kiss him. Yet she is frozen. Her mind scrambles to make sense of the verb, adjectives and nouns he has just strung together.
Do they want different things? Is their timing off? Will she ever feel as important as she desires? Will he? Or will they always be accessories in each other’s life? The wild animals circle and howl.
She cries in the way she has trained herself–Inside crying. Her tears, instead of falling down her face, fall back into her eyes and down into her heart. She longs to take the words and actions of the night and toss them into the Atlantic, where they’ll sink to the ocean floor. She desperately wants to go back in time when they were united, before the rain split them apart.
But the rain existed long before they did. And the rain will always come, in every season.
Past voices echo in the chamber of her mind as she decides what to say.
“Well, you need to have boundaries,” once said her therapist. “Otherwise you will turn into a miserable carpet and people will drag the street’s excrement on you.”
She doesn’t want to be a carpet.
“Too much self-centered attitude brings isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering,” wrote the Dalai Lama. “On the other hand, a firm confident sense of self can be a very positive element. Without a strong sense of self…nobody can take on significant responsibilities.”
She would like to master the self like the Dalai Lama, yet she was running out of time.
“Stop trying to control things,” said her friend, who is a wild animal himself. “As soon as you try to control things you lose control. But when you relinquish it, you are free. And freedom is control!”
She likes freedom. Although if she is honest, she’ll admit sometimes she wants to put freedom on a leash.
“If you cannot compromise through a shared value of protecting each other’s heart, then you have no real relationship,” said her book club colleague, who reads one self-help book a month.
Perhaps they can make a Venn diagram of their needs and tape it to the wall?
“You’re raw, which is beautiful, but you can also be damn adversarial,” said her old ex boyfriend who doesn’t talk to her anymore.
Rawness is her double edged sword, freshly sharpened. Blunt ones may not cut as deep, but they also cannot carve beautiful things.
She wishes she could drop all swords and transform herself into a wizard, concocting the perfect alchemy of boundaries, love, freedom, compromise and rawness.
But she is not wizard. She is a small human, struggling to balance her needs with the needs of her lover and the awful demands of life.
Every word holds undue importance. It is time to shut up.
A freight train of syllables comes to a halt. She puts on a blue nightgown and slowly brushes her hair. He dumps the remaining scotch from his glass into the sink. They go to bed.
“We’ll be okay,” she says as they haul the heavy quilt on top of them. She puts her head on his chest as he falls asleep. His left arm wraps around her side. She stays awake and listens to the rain. It intermingles with the sound of his breath.
