The Unconscious Commitment

By the time couples realize they’ve drifted, the dance is already well-rehearsed.

Not necessarily in words or fights or silence, though those may be part of it, but in the state they live in together. It’s a state of low-level resignation. A practiced emotional distance. A quiet, steady avoidance of the thing that could actually change everything.

Sophisticated, well-therapized adults in the 21st Century aren't avoiding their pain or trauma. They're spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars getting intimate with and aware of their family history and their psycholgical and emotional wounds . . . They are developing self-respect and self-confidence, self-compassion and acceptance. In the domain of individual psycho-spiritual healing, couples in their 30's and 40's are on the fast track . . . to wound awareness and addressing the wound.

The challenge now is to risk being themselves, with all their updated awareness and self-knowledge . . . in relationship with their intimate partners . . . Can they now allow their essence to express and be seen again in intimate relationships after devoting a lifetime to supressing or hiding their true self in service to securing love and attention?

Old Habits Die Hard

When we talk about relational habits, we often mean things like roles or behaviors . . . who gets angry, who retreats, who fixes, who pleases.

But beneath all of that is something far more enduring and unconscious: A shared commitment, an unspoken vow to staying out of contact with what hurts the most.

This is the real habit of relationship. Not yelling or withdrawing or over-functioning . . . but protecting each other from what was once intolerable . . . rejection of the true self . . . abandonment or annihilation of the child's open heart.

This agreement isn’t verbalized. It’s felt. And it is rooted in each person's body, in their nervous system, in the earliest imprints of what intimacy cost. It's also rooted in the foundation of the partnership, in the field that is shared between beloveds.

When the betrayal of intimacy happens early, when reaching out means being shamed, ignored, punished, or left, we adapt. We learn to connect without revealing ourselves. We learn to bond through roles in order to survive each other’s company.

This is what generally passes for love and commitment.

But it isn’t intimacy we’re practicing; it’s really mutual management.

Unconscious Collusion

Here’s the painful paradox: what most couples call “conflict” or “disconnection” is actually a shared effort to avoid the unbearable repercussions of differentiation, individuation and freedom of expression.

It’s a co-created defense.

It keeps the deeper risks off the table:

• The risk of truly being seen.

• The risk of needing and not being met.

• The risk of wanting too much.

• The risk of letting go of your protective identity and not knowing who you’ll be without it.

• The risk of letting go of your protective identity and not knowing who will be with you, if anyone!

  
  

I mean, let's be honest . . . Who will love you be if you aren't the caretaker? Your therapist will! But who else? Who will you be if you aren't the withdrawn one? Who will you be if you aren't the one holding it all together, or the one falling apart?

Most couples don’t want to face those questions. So instead, they settle into a rhythm of pseudo-intimacy. They intellectualize their pain. They process without revealing. They function without feeling.

And the relationship flatlines . . . not from a lack of love, but from a lack of life.

Being intimate and connected with another while being true to myself hasn't been a survivable state!!

Paradoxically, survival means being a little bit dead.

Underneath this mutual avoidance lives a deep, ancient longing . . . to be met, felt, held, cherished for who and what we are, not for who or what others need or expect us to be. But that longing is tangled up in terror. To long in this way is to risk disappointment. To be different, to individuate is to risk ridicule or abandonment. To want to be free is to risk being too much.

So we deny our longing . . . we manage it:

• Make requests with a built-in apology.

• Criticize the other instead of connecting with ourselves.

• Withdraw instead of admitting we want more.

  
  

It’s all strategy. All protection. All part of the pact, the agreement . . . "Together we will maintain a survivable state that serves us both; one in which neither of us actually fully steps into existence, into aliveness. I won't differentiate if you don't. You'll stay with me and love the "almost me" that I am . . . and I will do the same for you."

The Pact that Protects, but Also Prevents

This is the unconscious commitment that sustains so many modern relationships; not because it’s fulfilling, but because it’s familiar.

It keeps both people in a state that echoes the original wound:

• The despair of not mattering.

• The ache of being too much.

• The chronic need to earn love by being useful, quiet, agreeable, strong.

  
  

It feels survivable. It IS survivable . . . But it is not alive.

It’s a life that mirrors childhood; emotionally suspended, semi-present, always slightly out of reach of something essential.

But to move beyond it would require something unthinkable: To finally stop protecting yourself from being you. To stop hiding or withholding the one thing your partner has never truly met (or may have caught a glimpse of in the earliest days); your unguarded, wild heart . . . a part or parts of you that may not include your beloved at all . . . or the parts that may have such immense need that your partner would surely run away screaming, forever.

This is what the previous post was pointing to: The Drift isn’t laziness. It’s a loyalty to an experience of relational safety that hasn't allowed individual freedom.

And this prepares us for the next post: understanding that the restoration of intimacy is not about a superficial return to old habits of apology and forgiveness, but about the ways we’ve denied our own being, and how that denial has impacted our partnership.

Until we can say: “My absence has cost you something. My hiding has shaped our love. My avoidance has protected me . . . and hurt you.” … we’re still operating from the pact. We’re still trying to heal while staying hidden.

In the next post, we’ll explore what real repair asks of us. Not just apology or behavior change, but self-revelation in relationship. That begins with stepping into your existence.

There is no sustainable intimacy without that level of contact with the self. And there is no future for the love we long for with partners unless we’re willing to bring our whole selves to the table . . . unbearably vulnerable, and alive.