Dear Jasmine #14: From Today’s Tilling Come Tomorrow’s Flowers
"...when you trim the garden of your life, new saplings will sprout and with them, new experiences and happiness will come along."
Question 14
Dear Jasmine,
I’m in my 20s and I’m in a relationship with a person who is emotionally unavailable to me, at least I think that. His experiences with his past relationships have not been good, he thinks everyone who came in his life used him, he thinks he wasted his time giving love and compassion to people who did not reciprocate it. Talking about myself, I find myself the more giving one in this relationship, he admits that too. It’s not that he does nothing, he calms me down when I feel low, he listens to me but whenever I ask him why he can’t love me the way I do.
Don’t get me wrong but I know different people have different way of showing their love and I totally understand that, but as a human, I also want to feel loved. I also want that someone actually waits the whole day to talk to me genuinely, like they are as excited as I am and it may not feel like they are talking because they "have" to but because they "want" to. I hope my statements are making sense. I have tried a lot to make him feel comfortable with my love, my attention, my care but he just doesn’t seem to reciprocate it. He does but that is very minute.
I sometimes think he came into a relationship with me to get over his ex. He doesn’t talks about his ex to me or bring her up in our conversations but I think he hasn’t been healed up completely. He says he has a fear that everyone who is going to come up in his life will at some point leave him and he’ll be broken again. Whenever I ask him to be a little emotionally available, he says he has become this person now and this will take time to change which is okay, I get it. I don’t know what to do, I feel like I'm draining my energy and myself. Should I be in this relationship and just be patient for a little more time or should I just end this relationship?
- Stuck In My Own Thoughts
Answer 14: From Today’s Tilling Come Tomorrow’s Flowers
Dear Stuck in My Own Thoughts,
I always wonder why people stay in unfulfilling relationships. I look back to my own serious relationship which rendered me heartbroken many years ago and made me question my own sanity. Yet, I stayed. I stayed until I was abandoned because I didn’t have the courage to leave. More often than not, people stay in unfulfilling relationships because of many reasons, but I suppose that the bulk of these reasons have everything to do with hope. We hope that things will get better. We hope that they will change their behaviour, that the tides will turn and the days will become easier, that we will find more courage at the brink of a new dawn, that a baby will heal what’s broken, that our financial situations will provide us sanctuary, so on and so forth. We, as humans, are doomed to hope for things to become better with time.
Does time make things better? I don’t think it does, Stuck in My Own Thoughts, but I firmly and unequivocally believe that we make things better. To underscore this sentiment a little strongly, we as a community can make things better for all of us. No human is an island. Time just watches us do our thing and somehow, we attribute to time what we must credit to humanity and our undefeated courage even when our courage is silent. Do I discard the concepts of kismet, destiny, karma, and the heaven? I don’t. I simply haven’t seen any of these intangible concepts. However, I have seen the every day bravery of humans turning over large mountains with their bare hands. I just find it easier to believe in what I see. For now. That might change. I might believe in the celestial churning of time, but today is not that day. Today, I believe in us as people.
I’m so sorry that you’re feeling unfulfilled in your relationship. Your need to be wanted and loved is valid and you’re absolutely worthy of it. Is your current partner able to meet these needs? Clearly not. Is it your duty to wait around and see if your partner becomes the kind of person you want him to? It depends. That’s what we are here to talk about, Stuck in My Own Thoughts. Are we incumbent on waiting for the people in our lives to become who we want them to be? It is a very large question. Doesn’t having faith in something immeasurably often turn stone into idol and spring water in a desert? It does, and we have all heard those stories. I wish upon all of us that kind of faith. I wish that someone believes in us unequivocally even through our roughest moments. For now, I am the person who believes in you beyond measure, Stuck in My Own Thoughts. I believe that you are capable of putting your own needs first and discerning that though you might love someone to the moon and back, it is not up to you to will them into being someone they are not.
Often, I look at the people in my life and I see that they become more and more of themselves with every passing year. Do I love them with their idiosyncrasies? Sure, I do. Do I wait for them to become someone else? I don’t because I know they won’t. This is who your partner is now — he is fearful of intimacy and he is emotionally unavailable. Can you fix that by loving his fears away? You could have, but you have tried and it hasn’t changed a thing. So now, it is not up to you to wait around hoping that he might become someone else when he has clearly told you who he is. If your partner actively chooses to work towards his healing while being in this relationship with you, then I would urge you to stay and love the bejesus out of him. However, by your own admission, he is hurt to a point where he is unable to fulfil your needs. I suspect that’s because he is unable to fulfil his own needs.
When in love, we all have a dual responsibility — a responsibility to feed our own soul and a responsibility to love someone such that they grow and are not diminished by us. Your partner must fulfil the first responsibility where he takes care of his own soul by healing from past trauma, by rebuilding trust in himself and his immediate relationships, and by learning that all relationships come with disappointment but that disappointment cannot be the foundation of all relationships. This is the work he must do alone. Your love and care is supplementary but it is not primary to his process of emotional recovery. Please take that pressure off of yourself, Stuck in My Own Thoughts. You’re not responsible for him to have a healthy relationship with himself. It’s just not up to you, no matter what love stories, movies, and your own hopes have you thinking.
Then, ask yourself this: do you feel that the love and attention he provides to you, over a consistent period, makes you grow as a person or does it diminish your being? In the answer to this question lies what you must do. Our immediate relationships must build us up, add value to our thoughts and interactions, and supplement our self-worth. This applies to all relationships — from parents to siblings to relatives, and even friendships. We are in active engagement with other humans around us and given how hard life can get, it is imperative we help each other up and create spaces for growth and healing from what life throws at us. What is the point of being associated with people who are not aligned towards your growth and safekeeping? Isn’t the “world at large” out to get us all any way?
I’m not asking you to build an echo chamber, Stuck in My Own Thoughts. I’m just asking you to prune your garden of life to keep your symbiotic relationships and remove the ones that inhibit your proliferation. This doesn’t mean that certain people are ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it just means that you work in harmony with some while you don’t synchronise with others. Think of your life like a garden which will only grow well if you’re able to match with the right plants and share sunlight and water in as-needed proportions. If some plants have different needs, they belong in a different garden, just not yours.
If this relationship is draining you, like you said in your letter, you’re going to have to prune it out because it doesn’t work for you. Be honest with your own needs and if they’re not being fulfilled on an ongoing basis, have the courage to make that call. It is very heartbreaking for me to see many of us trapped in spaces that don’t aid towards our joy and flourish just because we hope against hope that things might get better. Yes, they might, and for the love of all that is good and peaceful, I hope they do. But you deserve your spot in the sunshine; you deserve to be in a partnership where you’re not giving more than you get. If you’re the only one putting in all the work, this will only leave you high and dry. Is that what love is about?
Have an honest conversation with your partner about why this relationship doesn’t work for you. You’re not “using” him as he might tend towards believing. Clearly articulate how his healing should come either before or in tandem with an ongoing romantic relationship. His past is not a blueprint for the future. The past is a story we tell ourselves. The present is a story we’re not paying attention to. The future is a story we hope turns out the way in movies. We’re going to have to tell better stories. We have to repair old wounds and forgive our future when it arrives. But while we do that, we must pay attention to our present with tenderness and do the hard work of actively cultivating what beliefs we entertain, where we look for hope, and with who we spend our days. From today’s tilling come tomorrow’s flowers.
Put yourself in the sun, Stuck in My Own Thoughts, and this time, get to work for your own growth. You’ll find that when you trim the garden of your life, new saplings will sprout and with them, new experiences and happiness will come along.
All the love you’ve been giving others, give it to yourself and see what a world of difference it makes.
Love,
Jasmine
Dear Jasmine is a fortnightly column by an anonymous writer. If any of you want to send in questions, please send them to Jasmine here.
wonderful !, i was the 'stuck in own thoughts " here.