If you’ve ever felt like you’re holding back in love because of past fears, it’s probably affecting your current relationship.
If you’re worried you might be hurt, you may just prevent love from reaching its fullest potential.
A listener reached out to me about a new relationship that started with unusual calm, but has recently triggered familiar fears. She met someone casually, expecting nothing serious since she planned to move soon.
Their first date felt like a perfect 10 with no butterflies or anxiety, just calm. He felt like a best friend from the start, and she fell in love without even noticing. But once she realized she loved him, her old fear of rejection returned, breaking her heart prematurely because what she loved most was how calm she felt.
She grew up craving affection from emotionally unavailable parents, which shaped how she shows up in relationships. On their first date, she said things like not caring about commitment since she wasn’t staying anyway.
But the truth is, she loves love and craves it most, though she’s exhausted from searching for it. She fears settling but also fears ending up alone. She fears letting people in because vulnerability has been used against her in the past.
He said he loved her on the third date, but she laughed it off and said he couldn’t love her yet. Now she’s questioning everything the way she does when someone isn’t that into her. She told him she wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say because she is afraid of rejection.
She wishes they could just tell each other how they feel in a real conversation. That way, if her love is unrequited, she’ll deal with it, and she’d rather know sooner than later. And the fact that she’s questioning the longevity of the relationship is affecting how she shows up.
What strikes me about her message is how she’s answering her own question. She says she’d rather find out if this was a true relationship sooner rather than later because she can deal with that, yet she’s delaying saying anything at all! So the very thing she wants is the thing she herself is preventing from happening. He already told her he loves her, but she didn’t take it seriously. His feelings are already out there, already on the table, but she’s afraid it’s not true, so she won’t take the next step toward a deeper connection.
What happens when we hide our true thoughts and feelings? What happens when we pretend things don’t exist or try to keep our emotions buried?
In my experience, every time you hide something, it always shows up. It always reveals itself in some way, shape, or form. If you’re hiding anger, it may come out in passive-aggressive comments. If you’re hiding excitement, it shows up in your actions.
Whatever gets buried comes out later, and when it does, it’s usually unpredictable.
Transparency and honesty are usually better for finding things out sooner rather than later and discovering where a relationship is and where it’s going. When I was honest with my wife early on in our relationship, even when I feared she might not like what I was sharing (and could even lead to a breakup), that honesty changed everything for us.
In the past, I would show up as accommodating because I never wanted to make waves. I never wanted my partner to look at me and think I was a jerk. And every time I chose not to create conflict, it led down a worse road, a road of hiding my true thoughts and feelings and trying to pretend everything was okay.
When you bring up challenges in a relationship, and your relationship survives them, it strengthens the bond.
Two people who care about each other want the other person to be happy; to feel safe, to feel loved, to feel like they’re important.
The challenge for the person who wrote to me is deciding who she wants to be. Does she want to be her true self and have a relationship with someone who might be a potential partner for the rest of her life? Or does she want to hide behind her thoughts and feelings and hope everything works out?
Being yourself is how you find out if the relationship will survive the challenges. The real challenge in almost every relationship is whether the other person can accept who you really are. This test of the relationship determines if it will grow or fall apart.
Questions I address in this episode:
- What happens when you hide your true feelings in a new relationship?
- How do you balance falling in love with staying aware of warning signs?
- When should you have the difficult conversations about where a relationship is going?
- How do you know if someone truly cares about your happiness?
- What does it mean to let someone be themselves in a relationship?