Nothing hurts quite as much as being ignored by a partner. It’s easy to understand why a loved one may not want to talk about personal things on a given day. After all, any of us can have a bad day or occasionally feel unwilling to share something intimate about ourselves until later.

However, when every day is a bad time to discuss close feelings with a mate, we may feel a profound anguish in our love relationship—one that may be hard to put into words.

When mates abandon us, we typically feel disregarded, rejected, helpless, and somewhat unreal. Our partner may at times act as though he or she cares, but somehow we can’t feel or trust the caring. We may even begin to lose trust in ourselves, or blame ourselves for the loneliness and despair we feel.

The need to share our personal experiences of life with a loved one is a sacred and universal human need—one that we all ought to have satisfied. None of us deserves to be ignored in a caring relationship.

When a partner continually withdraws from us emotionally, most of us react badly. We may become irritable in ways we normally aren’t; communicate empty threats to our lovers; develop health conditions to unconsciously get attention; or get depressed and withdraw ourselves, wondering whether we were mistaken in the first place to ever expect happiness out of life. The misery of being ignored eats away at who we are.

Eventually, as these patterns persist, we may turn our frustrations into self-righteousness, in which we momentarily ease our suffering by seeing ourselves as superior and our partners as inept at expressing love. Such reactive patterns may only amplify our pain and keep us in a suffering role—one that overlooks a very important fact about our identities: that we ourselves are solely responsible for our own happiness. When we blame our partners for our own unhappiness, we keep ourselves in the suffering role and we fail to attend to our own fulfillment.

Being shut out by a lover may hurt terribly, but not nearly as much as pretending we have no other options or making a virtue out of suffering. Happiness is for us to give ourselves.

Developing options

Let’s look at other ways of seeing our predicament. Many of us who are in the emotionally responsible roles in relationships may be rather dumbfounded to learn that our lovers secretly share our relationship passions, but don’t feel free to express how they really feel. Partners may not talk to us because they may feel that we aren’t ready to listen to them.

Sometimes they are right—we may say we want to talk, but we may act as if we are not ready to listen. For example, Marge constantly complained to me that her husband Steve, who originally showed great interest in her, was just a typical man and only interested in one thing—sports.

In their joint counseling sessions with me, a clear pattern arose—Steve couldn’t stop talking about his hidden misgivings about their relationship, and Marge kept correcting his views of things and even went into some silent rages. Eventually, Steve admitted to avoiding Marge outside of our meetings, and Marge realized she was challenged by Steve’s forthrightness and could not see it as a form of love. She saw how her criticalness of Steve hid how scared she was to receive caring unless it was on her terms.

Not all attempts at welcoming our partners to be open are as successful as we would like. Some of us need to learn how not to take our partner’s reticence quite so personally, and to rely on the love of supportive friends to pursue our own happiness and life meaning.

To illustrate, Rita came to me because her live-in lover of 20 years, George, who had always been somewhat withdrawn and irritable, had failed to come to her mother’s funeral.

This was the last straw for Rita—she felt incredibly abandoned. Despite a plethora of support from friends and family, Rita felt that George had purposely abandoned her in her hour of need to pay her back for her incessant emotionality. Actually, George had sent a beautiful arrangement of flowers to the funeral and used his computer skills to make a poignant photographic collage of Rita’s mother for all to see.

I asked if George had ever been assessed for depression, and a shift occurred in Rita as she began to blame herself less for his withdrawal. Nearly a year later, George told Rita that he had been depressed most of his life over the loss of his own mother, and that he could understand how she had felt abandoned by him. However, he didn’t want to work on lessening his depression, and he eventually left Rita. In this case, Rita realized it was George’s unresolved pain, not her unlovability, that was at fault, and she pursued her own happiness.

Clearly, too many of us blame ourselves unnecessarily for another’s behavior, and we imprison our own happiness. No matter how much we think otherwise, there are always options for growing beyond a silent partner.

Understanding a withdrawn partner

It’s wise to see the forest for the trees when it comes to having a silent partner. When we understand the bigger picture, we are more free to accept ourselves and make wise choices.

There are a variety of reasons why lovers withdraw from us. Some of our partners simply need time and space to figure out what is going on inside themselves. Other mates may be responding in a reactive way to how we have unwittingly made it difficult for them to express themselves. Sometimes partners are simply taking us for granted and like being in the power position of withholding from us, or are expressing anger toward us through the silent treatment.

Other lovers know we are so dependent on them for our happiness that they can remain unknowable to us, secure that we would not pursue our own happiness outside the relationship with them. There are some partners who simply and chronically have never had much capacity for a deep emotional relationship, and play at best a utilitarian role for us as we merely settle for less.

Unfortunately, some of us get so focused on getting our lovers to open up that we don’t see how we’re trying to get water from a rock and neglecting our own happiness.

Making choices

It’s generally best to express your pain openly to a partner, perhaps in a letter, regarding how his or her silence is affecting you. Your lover cannot read your mind and may not even fathom how you’ve been affected by such reticence. You may need to get your feelings off your chest to move on to bigger and better ways to care for yourself.

You may want to read Making Our Lives Our Own by Marilyn J. Mason, Ph.D. (HarperCollins, 1991) or Man Enough by Frank Pittman, M.D. (G.P. Putnam, 1993). Certainly, if your loved one is willing to seek professional help with you, it’s a wise move to make. Whether you stay or leave, it’s always best to be your own person and be responsible for your own well-being.

This article first appeared in the May 2002 issue of The Phoenix Spirit. We may earn a commission via the links on this page, at no cost to you. Thank you for helping to support the website.