Hideyness
introvert intimacy instructions
Correspondent: Eliezer. This relationship tech might look strange and cold to a lot of you who are not us.
Date: Two and a half years ago, not long after we both moved so we could live closer to each other.
I’m like this.
If my person gets too far away from me, I feel lonely and sad, but if they get too close to me, I feel suffocated. There’s this very narrow band in the middle that feels good, and it’s kind of hard to hit it just right, because it’s a moving target.
I think, my love, you are exactly the same way.
(Not everyone is. Or rather, they are, but their purple band is much bigger, and either the red or the blue is small-to-nonexistent.)
My model of your hideyness1 is that you’ve wandered into the red zone and need to go cool off to feel okay again. That’s about what it feels like to me.
Now that we’re trying to be a couple, and we’ve intertwined our lives and even some of our work, we have a new problem. It’s hard enough for each of us as individuals, trying to stay in the purple zone, but now we’re trying to match up our purple zones.
Lots of times it works! Your purple zone and mine have overlapped much more than is typical from my own experience, and I think it’s been surprisingly overlappy for you also (question mark?).
But also we get this pattern pretty often:
I’m not even sure I labeled it right, I don’t know if you’re hiding enough, maybe you’re skimping on the hiding and the point we pick is still inside the red zone for you. But I do know it’s in the blue zone for me some of the time.
I have a set of beliefs and values about this.
I’m for autonomy and individual choice and consent, and I’m against entitlement. I only want to be together if we both want to be there. So for that reason, some “solutions” really don’t work for me, even if on paper they look like they should work for me if not for you.
I think that’s right. I don’t want to change that. I think Figure 3 above is actually the correct answer. Figure 4 is wrong.
But I think I’ve been making a systematic mistake.
Because I believe so strongly that Figure 3 is the correct answer and that Figure 4 is wrong, I’ve been trying to avoid doing anything that might cash out into Figure 4. Notably, I’ve been keeping my own state hidden from you. I’ve been trying, with varying levels of success, to make my purple and my blue indistinguishable to you.
And that’s nice of me, sort of. I think that if you know I’m sad, and specifically if you know I’m sad in a way you could theoretically fix, that makes your life harder. So in a sense I’m doing you a favor by keeping my sadness a secret and managing it all by myself.
But now I think it’s wrong to hide my state, for two reasons.
First, keeping my sadness a secret from you makes me more sad. A LOT more sad. I’m feeling isolated and alone already because you’re hidey, and having secret feelings I mustn’t let you see just amplifies that.
Second, I’m stealing your power. You should have the full picture. I don’t want to fool you into thinking we have overlapping purple zones a lot more than we really do. If I’m wandering around languishing from neglect, that’s a hard thing for you to know, but I think it’s right for you to know. I shouldn’t minimize it, I should be honest about it.
So: new tack.
When you are hidey, if that leaves me in the blue zone, I’m going to be a lot more explicit about that.
But I still pick Figure 3.
It is really really important that you know that.
I might ask for things that would help ease the blue-ness and shift me towards purple. You might not actually have those things to give. You might say no. It might be hard for you to say no. I’m sorry about that. But I need to stop playing both our hands and leaving you out of the game. I have to just play my own hand and let you play yours. I’m sorry I haven’t trusted you enough to do that until now, that was a mistake on my part.
Let’s figure this out. I think it’s a really key piece of tech we need working in this relationship.
xoxoxo
A surprising thing happened as we got to know each other better: our purple zones grew with respect to each other. We still feel hidey sometimes, but I don’t hang out in the blue zone much any more, and haven’t in a long time.
Eliezer sometimes says “I feel hidey” when he wants to recharge on his own, and I picked it up from him.
I love this :). Thank you for sharing it!