What do you do if your partner's interactions with others make you nervous and insecure? Illustration / Marta Monteiro, The New York Times
What do you do if your partner's interactions with others make you nervous and insecure? Illustration / Marta Monteiro, The New York Times
What do you do if your partner’s interactions with other women make you spiral? A therapist gives advice to a reader’s dilemma.
Q. At age 66, I’m finally in a wonderful relationship with an attentive, loving and kind man, but I’m frustrated by how anxious and target="_blank">insecure I am in our relationship.
For example, he has formed a bond with a woman we regularly play pickleball with – they’re both dealing with alcoholics in their lives. They look for each other when we arrive to play, manoeuvre it so they play games together and have intense, private conversations between games, usually about alcoholism and recovery. Meanwhile, I’m on the periphery, watching every move with a sick feeling in my stomach. I dread seeing her and worry when I do.
I also struggle when he comments about other women. “The eyes of my physical therapist – they’re so gorgeous they’re distracting,” he says. “I noticed she’s not wearing a wedding ring.” Great, thanks for telling me! I think about how handsome he is, start to wonder why he even loves me, and it all goes downhill from there.
I do not mention any of my insecurities to him. I know it’s not his issue, and it would only make him feel weird and resentful towards me. I’m pretty much a 10 out of 10 on the insecure attachment scale.
How can I learn to live more securely and truly trust him?
A. What strikes me about your letter is the way in which you frame this situation as your issue alone, without considering your partner’s role in it. You seem to be aware of your pattern of struggling with a fear of abandonment and sense of inadequacy, but when you label yourself a “10 out of 10″ with these traits, you pathologise yourself and tune out what your anxiety is telling you.
Anxiety can be helpful when it alerts us to danger, allowing us to take action to protect ourselves. Other times, anxiety can be harmful, like when experiences from the past create a state of hypervigilance, even when no danger is present. What I invite you to do going forward is to try to distinguish between the two.
How? You asked how you can trust your partner, but what you need to do is practice trusting yourself – and that starts with trusting that your discomfort matters. On the one hand, you say that your partner is attentive and loving towards you. On the other, he seems to be operating in a way that doesn’t account for your feelings. Comments about the physical therapist’s “gorgeous” and “distracting” eyes and lack of a wedding ring don’t exactly breed a sense of security in a relationship.
Your partner might dismiss observations like these as harmless small talk, and, yes, attraction to others is normal – we’re human. But the choice to vocalise those attractions, whether your partner is aware of it or not, reveals more about his needs (perhaps for attention, validation or control) than about any genuine appreciation of beauty. If he encountered an attractive man during the day, would he tell you about his appealing features or whether he was wearing a wedding ring?
Similarly, he and the woman at pickleball might bond over the fact that they’re both navigating relationships with people struggling with addictions, but he seems to disregard how the intensity of their interactions might affect you – or what need he’s filling for himself that goes beyond this commonality. (If this pickleball pal were a man, would he behave in the same way?)
All this is to say, your feelings matter – and it doesn’t help you, your partner or your relationship to keep them to yourself to avoid causing him discomfort. If you want to “live more securely,” you’ll need to show up authentically and ask the same of him. The goal of the conversation isn’t to tell him what he can and can’t do; it’s to let him know how his actions impact you and for you to understand where they’re coming from.
Open and honest communication has been linked to stronger, longer-lasting relationships. Photo / 123RF
You might say something like:
“I’m really enjoying our relationship, and I want to tell you more about me and learn more about you as we continue to get closer. When we play pickleball together, I feel excluded because of how you approach the woman we play with. I understand you have something important in common, but the intensity of the way you’re drawn to her leaves me feeling ignored and unimportant, like a third wheel. Something similar happens when you talk about your attraction to other women, and I wonder why you choose to share that with me. In the past, I’ve had a tendency to feel insecure; I also know that sometimes when I feel this way, it’s not about my past but about something that needs attention in the present. I hope that by talking about this, you might become more sensitive to my feelings.”
It would be great if we could all enter relationships by handing our “operating instructions” to the other person. Instead, we learn how the other person operates – what buttons not to push, what makes things run smoothly – through direct and honest communication. The more we do this, the more we become attuned to each other’s emotional landscape, which allows each partner to develop an awareness of the other’s tender spots and treat them with care.
But if this doesn’t happen with your partner – if he continues to discuss his attraction to other women or doesn’t try to make space for you at pickleball (and maybe go to Al-Anon for the bonding and conversations about recovery that he’s seeking) – you’re still doing the work of learning to trust yourself. Because you’ll realise that what you experienced wasn’t the same old jealousy – it was wisdom. Trust it, and find someone willing to be gentle with your heart.
