Psychological Love Life Defenses: 2. Keeping Your Emotional Distance in a Love Relationship
One of the easiest ways to be in a love relationship when you have unresolved emotional intimacy issues, is to keep a certain distance from the person you are in love with. Here in this article, the primary focus is on “emotional distance.” Although physical distancing, for some people, may be involved as well. There are a million and one ways to be emotionally distant in a love relationship. Think of it this way, how vulnerable you allow yourself to be with someone requires defensive behavior in a love relationship. The idea being that distance provides some kind of protection against hurt that is anticipated. Generally speaking, whenever someone is defensive in love relationships they are consciously or unconsciously anticipating hurt and trying to protect themselves.
When you are managing the possibility of hurt with emotional distance, you are walking a tightrope between being vulnerable to unpredictable and uncontrollable hurt (which is inevitable when you are dealing with love) and the need to protect yourself from more hurt. Of course the implication is, that the hurts of the past are not yet resolved. Why else would someone work so hard to protect themselves from future hurt? This is the problem with using psychological defenses while trying to have an “emotionally safe” love life. Psychological defenses always interfere with the ability to give and receive love in a love relationship.
Some people distance themselves in a love relationship with work or outside involvements, having little or nothing to do with the relationship itself. The demands of work, especially in stressful demanding occupations, is an easy way to justify “limited” emotional involvement. Work is blamed, and not a hidden discomfort with deeper emotional intimacy. Another, somewhat more precarious focus, is an unresolved attachment to one’s family of origin. It’s common for people to marry, for example, while still negotiating a dependency on the family of origin, or select members of the family of origin. When emotional distancing is involved and the family of origin is complicating the problem, a person is trying to “divide” time between immediate and original family relationships for unconscious defensive reasons. Staying divided up like this will sustain a limited involvment in a current immediate love relationship, usually with the justification that family relationships are important.
Emotional distancing usually poses an undeniable problem when the defensively distancing individual gets into a love relationship with someone expecting a deeper involvement. In fact, this emotional scenerio is often a prelude to chronic marital difficulties and divorce, if neither partner is willing to compromise. Albeit, compromise in this instance may not be the healthiest solution. Distancing partners are usually unwilling to deepen their involvement, and risk being vulnerable to additional hurt and disappointment. Usually some kind of emotional epiphany is required or an effective course of psychotherapy.
Intimacy seeking partners who unfortunately get together with distancing partners will usually have to either live with the limited intimacy, move on to find someone who can provide a more emotionally intimate love relationship, or stay in perpetual conflict, the subject of the upcoming third post in this series of posts dealing with psychological love life defenses.
Comments welcome…
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychological disability consultant, speaker, and author of the award-winning book, Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Presentations and telehealth Love Life Consultations available upon request. Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries. Visit my speaker page at lovelifelearningcenter.com/speaker
