🍀 Keep a Check on Your "EMOTIONAL FROST" - ISSUE 170

Hi, I am JOE and I write on "Mindful Productivity & Cerebral Happiness". My endeavour is to share life lessons, some thoughts, quotes & links to articles/podcasts/books, I discover during the week.

Hey Friends, if you have missed the last edition of this newsletter 🗞️📰📮 than you can read it here.

And, if you have not subscribed to the weekly dose of ‘ Mindful Productivity & Cerebral Happiness’ and want to become a patron of this newsletter than you can do it right away before diving into this week’s ‘SUNDAY REATZO’. This way you can support my work and will get a ‘Productivity Planner’ worth $25 ( ₹2,000 ) absolutely free

During the week , I was mulling with a thought 💭 of as to - ‘Why We Go Cold on Our Partners.

The story of the path to coldness in love is well known. We start off full of affection for one another and then with time feelings fade. We start prioritising work. We check our phones while speaking with eachother. We don’t especially want to hear as to how eachother day went. These are the few examples many many variations in each of them and their own rapped reasons for it.

I did ask around and the most common answer I got was - 👇

There’s a popular surface explanation for this emotional frost: that people naturally get bored of one another, in the same way as they get bored with everything else like gadget that once seemed so amazing, the film they used to love…going cold is simply the unavoidable consequence of familiarity.

But there’s another explanation, darker at first – but in the end, more hopeful. The loss of interest isn’t either natural or inevitable. The boredom is something which is becoming more complicated and more active. It exists because we feel hurt by, angry with, or scared of our partner and because we haven’t found a cathartic way to tell ourselves or them about it. Tuning out isn’t inevitable, it’s a symptom of disavowed emotional distress. It’s a way of coping or to say defence mechanism. We get internally numbed and just a touch bored.

I recollect something beautiful which ‘Osho’ Once said -

Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.

Among these realism and philosophical outlook, things are bound to sound bipolar and strange. After all, we might have no active sense that our partner has been silently hurting, angering or frightening us. This very idea appears laughable or extreme but in reality it make our partners sound like monsters or ourselves like weaklings and interestingly neither of which is true.

But the-self-that-loves within a relationship is not the normal adult we know from other zones of our lives. We may mostly be hugely resourceful and resilient, but the person who loves is an infinitely more vulnerable being.

We should imagine it like a smaller, younger, more defenseless version of ourselves that lives in our heads and is no tougher (and not much wiser) than we were as babies – which is when so many of our needs for, and ideas about, love were formed. It is this vulnerable self that continues to direct our hearts – even when we are six foot two with a pointy beard.

Ideally ofcourse, the small self of ours would at once point out what’s happened. It would carefully explain that it had been frustrated. Its voice would be measured, undefensive and charming.

But it just stays silent. That’s understandable. It doesn’t properly understand what’s wrong. It just knows it’s in pain and is driven by an instinct to withdraw and protect itself. This is what translates into behaviour that looks cold.

There can be something especially humiliating in having to say: ‘I don’t feel you took enough interest in the details of my lunch break’ or ‘I’m 45 but not capable of sharing a TV remote’. These truly are small issues for an adult to dwell on – but the parts of us that make themselves vulnerable in love don’t obey the ordinary adult rules.

The consequence is that the loving self dries up. It doesn’t want to get into love making with the partner and vehemently resist with pretending ego. Result of which it gets sarcastic and irritable but conveniently not accepting the very reason of it. Even the bigger problem is that it doesn’t even know why it’s like this. It isn’t putting on an act, it’s confused.

To learn and to cope with an emotion frost, we need a prominent mutual awareness and forgiveness of this dynamic waves of sensitivity and distress with a commitment to decode it when disengagement and indifference start surfacing more often.

We have to create a forum ( anything of your comfort) in which so-called minor love-sapping hurts can safely be aired, without the other dismissing it irrespective of the issues at stake as childish or imagined.

I would say - the touchiness of the loving self is ridiculous especially if judged by the more robust standards of the rest of life. But remember, this is not the rest of life.

My Final Thoughts 💭 -

When we have gone cold, we may not truly have lost interest in our partners. It would be momentary shift in our priority shaped by the prevailing circumstances.

We might just need an opportunity to imagine that we are quietly really rather hurt and furious with eachother and need to have an access to a safe forum in which our tender but critical feelings can be aired, purged and understood without risk of humiliation, embarrassment or being judged too soon.

Let's turn the lens you - ⁉️

• Do you see an emotional frost when you look around ??.

• And, how best you can address it ?.

Take good care & enjoy reading this week's dose of ‘Mindful Productivity & Cerebral Happiness’.

Joe