Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and be who you are.
-Brené Brown
It can be disconcerting to feel distant from your partner or friend and not know what’s causing it. While you’re struggling to understand what’s missing, the distance grows and it gets harder and harder to cross the divide.
While it may be true that with time and reflection you’ll make sense of the distance, there is a way to get back to connection before you’ve figured it all out. Name what’s real. It will sound something like this. “I want to be more connected to you right now and I don’t know how.” or “It feels like something is going on between us but I can’t figure out what it is.” or “I wish I felt closer to you right now but I don’t know how to do that.” You may be asking yourself, “Why would that work?” It works because it’s honest, vulnerable and lets the person know you value the connection and have noticed it’s missing. This kind of admission automatically creates a bridge to reconnect. It might also open a new conversation about what’s really going on.
And for those of you in the dating world, you may be surprised by how much power lies in naming what’s real in the moment. When you don’t have a lot of history with a person, trust and connection can be built quickly by saying something like “I’m really enjoying being with you but it got quiet and I felt something shift. Did you notice that?” There are a million things that could have happened but now you’ve opened a real conversation and there’s an opportunity to learn something about each other. If you don’t say something, the awkwardness builds, you tell some random story about a bad date, they check their phone and the moment is lost. So why not just try acknowledging what happened?
An additional benefit to ‘‘naming what’s real’ is how it organically connects you to a more authentic place in you rather than any attempts you may make to avoid the discomfort.
So while there is a lot of complexity in human relationships and while they do take work, there are simple approaches like ‘naming what’s real’ that will move you much faster into connection. Try it.
