Close & closer
BENGALURU: What is the one thing that differentiates a partner for you from other people in your life? What makes the partner relationship a special one?
If we are lucky, and if we have taken the time and effort on top of what luck brings into our life, we might have a great bunch of people in our life as friends, family and others. You might have inner and outer circles of connections with increasing levels of closeness and comfort as you get closer to the centre of the circles where it is you. The closeness is what we cherish, the intimacy with which we gather people into our life and hold them like protective shields as we face the world with all its complexities.
In a partner, it is this closeness that becomes a bit extra special, even if there are a whole lot of other people we might consider close to us. A partner is expected to be closer, more intimate than others.
For some of us, being emotionally close comes more easily than it does for others. If we think of how easily we get close to people as a scale of 1 to 10, some people are happy to be at a 7 or 8 with a lot of people, feeling pretty close to a large number and actually practising that degree of closeness and connection on an ongoing basis, constantly checking in, remembering things, dates, events and anniversaries, making sure they turn up when needed and just being awesome in how it is a genuine, authentic and very felt closeness.
For a lot of others, this closeness might cap out at 5 or 6, and for quite a few, the degree of closeness doesn’t go beyond 3 for pretty much everyone in their life.
When you are in the happy middle, intimate partners get boosted up to a 8-9 on this scale of closeness, connection and intimacy, when other important people are at a good 5 or 6, and that difference between who is close and who is intimate, is very clear. Everyone can see it – your friends and others can tell who is special, and more importantly, the special someone knows they are special to you because of this difference.
The problems are not in the middle of the curve, they are with those on either end of the spectrum. For people at 8-9 on that scale, the chosen partner might not feel special enough and wonder if they are important at all. For people who are quite private, and rarely let anyone closer, where friends and others are at 3-4, and a partner gets bumped to a 5 or 6, while they might feel that they are double as intimate as they are with others, the partner might still feel as if they are quite distant, with huge parts of one’s inner life not accessible to another, and that might leave the partner feeling like they are being excluded.
Check for yourself how you are doing on this scale, and maybe it might just spark a connection!
(The writer’s views are personal)