Of all the scenarios that can develop out of dating, the most uncommon is meeting someone compatible and proceeding to a meaningful long-term relationship. It’s happened enough for me that I know it can but I also understand it is the vanishingly rare exception.
Far more often there is a failure of compatibility, of attraction, of mutuality. An inability to connect or communicate with parity of depth. Asynchronous emotional development. Goals that are not in alignment. This is by far the most likely outcome of any possible pairing, the source of connection notwithstanding.
Far less common, though not exceptionally rare, is what I like to call the False Alarm. Where all initial indicators are positive, no apparent red flags are present, and yet for whatever reason, the connection misses. While it could be said that any missed connection might prompt some level of disappointment, these particular encounters are difficult and painful in their own special way, and I am still learning how to reckon with them.
An essential ingredient to these scenarios is a particular kind of intimacy; one that seems to develop almost instantly. I am a person that places a high value on candor, and certainly practice it myself. I have noticed this can have the effect of bringing others to reveal things to me they might not otherwise tell someone they met only recently. The number of times I have heard “I’ve never told anyone that before” or some variation thereof is incalculably high.
I accept these admissions of vulnerability with deep reverence. I am by nature a person that withholds judgement and can see past surface assumptions. As an ex of mine once said, I try to be “a benefit-of-the-doubt giving motherfucker.”
I think this tendency is something people are drawn to, but might not always be prepared for. Depending on their degree of emotional honesty – with themselves or others – this can alternately feel freeing, or threatening.
I have come to understand lately that a powerful sense of intimacy does not always result in a true experience of emotional safety. While one can develop from another, one is not ultimately indicative of the other.
For my part, this realization comes late because emotional safety has been all but non-existent in my life until I learned how to create it myself. For someone who didn’t experience it as a child or in any of my romantic relationships, it has been something I only began to understand initially as a concept rather than an experience.
Lacking a reliable template, I misidentified a kind of hasty and heedless intimacy as where a secure and healthy attachment would begin. I did not understand that the powerful feelings of connection I experienced were often the result of stress responses to novelty and physical attraction. Very often, months deep into a relationship, I would look around at the situation I was in utterly bewildered. How did I feel so close to this person at first only to experience increasing alienation as time went on.
It took time and self-reflection, along with a more thorough understanding of my CPTSD, to recognize the way I had conflated knowing things about someone with knowing them on a deeper level.
I also know it has worked in reverse as well; that people who knew things they considered incredibly private and revealing about me would mistake that for a meaningful understanding of who I am. People who would declare a deep attachment to me after only a brief acquaintance and then go on to describe a person that does not exist based on their assumptions about who I must be, to have shared the things I did.
It can be a fine balance to strike. There is a harmony to be found where people can reveal themselves to each other with candor and authenticity while respecting the pace at which meaningful and enduring intimacy can be developed. Acknowledging that actions must align with words and consistency of character across a variety of scenarios is essential.
All this to say that sometimes, should enthusiasm overwhelm this measured approach, sometimes two ships passing in the night is still better than having them collide.
In the wake of such moments, I now try to be present with emotions that can feel out of scope with the length or depth of the connection. A reliably obstreperous voice in me will clamor that I will never find true and enduring love. That this is simply one more example of the irrefutable truth I am unlovable.
I am learning to recognize this as grief, not just for the particular disappointment, but for the long years of my life where no such love was available to me from any source. The pain of that far outweighing the brief moment I believed something special had been kindled.
I am also learning to accept that it is part of the cost to engage in the defiant act of proving that voice wrong.
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