Most of what passes for healthy communication with a partner is either a lecture or a flood, and neither one is intimacy.
Jenna Ward, while interviewing me for her podcast, summed it up in one line before I found my own words for it. “Talk like a lover.” (You can find the episode that formed this essay here.)
I’ve been turning that over since, because I spent many years in my relationships with men lecturing and flooding, and neither one ever once worked.
Even though in my defense I was coached relentlessly to do so. Female friends, books, podcasts, online groups, reels, therapists, all showing me how to set boundaries, get my needs met and process.
But guess what? It didn’t work.
At the end of my self-work journey, I was, by my own honest accounting, building a case. I had read the books. I had the language for what was wrong with them, and I would sit him down and explain it carefully, generously, I told myself, the way you’d walk someone through evidence they hadn’t seen. I thought if I explained it well enough, one more time, in the right order, he would finally see it my way and change.
Writing that now makes me cringe.
That was not communication.
I don’t know a single woman who would respond well to that either.
I have seen myself in many clients over the years too.
An amazing woman will open a session by filing her last four relationships by diagnosis. This one was avoidant. This one had abandonment stuff. This one was a love bomber, but also a narcissist. Ways she would never talk about anyone - now normalized and finalized.
She has the vocabulary because she has done the work, and she is finally ready, she tells me, for someone with healthy attachment.
There is no side-eye here. I have been this woman. I can still be, in a stress state, this woman.
So i’ll usually say back to her, it sounds like every partner you’ve ever had ended up scared around you, or shut down around you.
