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When Your Partner Can't Get It Right
Is your partner missing you — or are your expectations too high?
If you’d like the full explanation, you can watch the YouTube video above. If reading is easier, I’ve included a shortened illustrated guide below.
On season four of The Ultimatum, Haley wants more emotional support from Blake. She wants him to notice when she is upset, reassure her, and respond in ways that feel thoughtful. Blake seems to be trying. He asks what she needs. He cooks breakfast. He starts conversations. And somehow, he still seems to get it wrong.
That raises a useful question for any relationship: How do you know when your partner isn’t giving you enough, or when your expectations have become too hard to meet?
Your Mental Map
We all carry mental maps of people and the world. Those maps help us predict what might happen. Usually, updating the map is easy. If someone moves the toaster in your kitchen, you notice, and update your mental map: “Now the toaster lives here.”
The Should Shield
When the new information hurts, sometimes the Should Shield goes up.
“He should have known.”
“He should validate me.”
“This should come naturally for him.”
The shield protects us from disappointment, but information bounces off of it. Instead of updating our mental map, we start fighting with reality.
Lowering the Should Shield does not require you to like what happened, but it does give you room to ask better questions: What is this telling me about my partner? Is this something they can learn? Is my expectation realistic?
And if this really is what my partner is like, is that enough for me?
Refine Before Asking for Validation
There is another problem in Haley and Blake’s first argument. Haley wants Blake to validate her, but some of what she gives him is very hard to validate. She says things like, “You don’t care,” and tells him that if he is not jealous, he does not love her.
There is real emotional information underneath that: fear, a desire for reassurance, hurt feelings. But that information is mixed together with judgments and assumptions about Blake.
I think of our first emotional reaction as crude oil. There is useful material inside, but it usually needs some refining before we pour it into the relationship engine. For Haley, the crude oil version is: “You don’t care about me.” The refined version might be: “I got scared watching everyone else reconnect. I really wanted you to come over and hug me.”
That is something Blake can understand and validate. He does not have to agree that he does not care about her or that he would feel exactly the same way, but he can say, “I get why you felt that way based on what was happening for you.”
Refining means separating your feelings, desires, and past experiences from your assumptions and criticism. Pouring crude oil directly into your relationship engine will cause damage and require later repair.
“Good Enough” Attunement
Even when we communicate clearly, our partners are still going to miss us sometimes. The idea of “good enough” parenting helps make this clear. Healthy parents and babies are not perfectly in sync. In fact, studies of parent-infant interactions have found that they are in sync only about a third of the time. The rest includes lots of ordinary mismatches and attempts to reconnect and repair.
In adult relationships, we can notice what we are feeling, put it into words, ask for what we want, and regulate ourselves when our partner does not immediately understand. It is a healthy expectation that your partner will miss you sometimes.
Then you might tell them and watch what happens next. Do they care? Can they understand? Do they learn something about you? Can the two of you repair?
Let Reality Teach You Something
Blake later asks Haley where she learned about love. She talks about watching her friends’ families and wishing her own parents had cared for her that way. That helps explain why being noticed and cared for without having to ask may feel especially important to her. She deserved more of that care as a child.
And at the same time, adult relationships have to include two separate people who will sometimes miss each other.
Lowering the Should Shield gives you a clearer view of the relationship you actually have. You may realize that your partner is trying and needs more help understanding you. You may realize that they keep missing something important even after you have explained it clearly. Or you may realize that the two of you simply want different things from a relationship.
The goal is to take in enough reality that you can make a decision based on the person in front of you, rather than on who you wish they were.
For more illustrated explanations of relationship patterns like this one, visit my YouTube channel: The Illustrating Therapist
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