How do you bring up your need for desire without making your partner feel guilty or how can I bring that up without seeming like I’m ignoring their needs or that they are busy?
People ask me a lot of times like how can I do X without making my partner feel Y?
And the answer is you can't because we can't control how someone is going to react to us.
We can do things that are more or less likely to bring up with those feelings in them but for some people, any feedback that's not like completely totally positive is going to make them feel guilty because for them, they have a lot of stories around guilt.
For some people, no matter what we do, it's going to be hard for them to hear.
And then the second piece of seeming like you're ignoring their needs or that they're busy, sometimes a reality of a relationship is that like what we need and what our partner needs are at odds to each other, at least to some extent.
In disability communities, oftentimes they'll call this like access friction where like what one person needs for access is different than another person in a way that can conflict.
If your partner is in a space where they are super busy and they are overwhelmed all the time, they may not have it in them to present with a lot of desire because they are just wiped and could they make slightly different decisions about that busyness.
Like do they have any amount of control over what is keeping them busy that is preventing that desire? Because that's stuff that they might be able to change.
In terms of feeling like you're ignoring their needs, I guess I don't understand that piece.
I think I would want to understand like what that need is and it may be a situation where right now your needs are incompatible, which may mean figuring out like do we need to restructure.
Do we need to pull some stuff off the table for a while?
Is this going to be something where like one of us is going to not get our needs met and we're just going to have to figure out like what that means or how to go about it?
I also think like sitting down and both of you getting really clear about like what your needs are, what kind of stuff you can shift and like helping each other brainstorm around it, figuring out like how to sit with each other as a team, addressing this problem rather than like two people in a tug of war.
Like how can you rejoin with each other in solving this together?
A really great resource for this is the book “Cultivating Connection” by Sander Jones. Sander is amazing and that book is such a beautiful, beautiful resource that looks at a lot of these kinds of conflicts and how to handle them in a way that is healthy.
So strongly recommend checking out “Cultivating Connection”.
It's a great book and it might have some tips that are helpful for you in figuring out how to restructure these discussions so that it feels less like me versus you and more like the two of us together are figuring out a way forward.
All right.
Oh, I’m glad it was helpful.
Okay, yeah, and this is – desire gaps are really, really common.
It's going to be pretty rare that two people in a relationship have exactly the same amount of desire all the time.
That's just not going to be a real thing most of the time because I’m having a busy week at work, you're feeling sick right.
There are going to be ebbs and flows in both directions but I think it's about like over a long-term focus how is it going or has it been like a long period of time where this gap has been widening or has kind of entrenched and then can we figure out a way to like close the gap some that feels good for both of us, because I think it's easy to get into spaces of like trying to extract our need from someone else, convince someone else to give us the thing we need.
That's not healthy for either of us because they're going to feel a lot of resentment and pressure and we're going to feel like it's unsatisfying because it's something we're having to continue to pull from them.
Most of us don't want to feel like we're continually having to convince our partner to want us or convince our partner to want to spend time with us or convince our partner to want to talk with us if we're feeling in this space of like I have to keep convincing you to show up in the ways that you know are essential to me.
What are we doing in this relationship?
What's happening here?
Maybe the way that we do things is just not super compatible and the way that you show love isn't the way that I want to receive love or vice versa and that may be changeable, but sometimes it's just not a great fit.
Everybody has different amounts of need that they have for different things.
Some people are perfectly happy in a relationship with a person who texts them once a week and that's all the communication they need for like a very close partnership.
It would never be me.
So, for me, if someone isn't texting me, if we're not talking, if there's not interaction between the time that we're seeing each other, it feels like the connection goes dead.
There's nothing wrong with being a person who does a lot less connecting between dates but it might be the wrong fit for me and I think that there's this way often that we're trying to figure out like how do I convince this person to be the person that I want and need rather than figuring out what is the relationship that I can have with this person.
I can invite them into doing things in this way that I would love for them to do but I shouldn't be trying to reshape them into something that I want and need.
I should be figuring out with who they are, what relationship feels good for both of us.
