how to navigate feeling attracted to someone else (pt. 2)
You feel a slight tug of attraction to someone other than your partner.
You share a lightness, a depth that is less accessible in your own relationship. There’s ease, common ground, resonance.
Finally, a part of you can finally breathe, expand, and take up space.
It feels electrifying.
Until it starts to feel unsettling. Until you realize the potential it has to compromise the security of your home base.
Even though you want to feel more of this sense of ease with your partner, you worry that bringing it up would erode trust and safety.
Where do you go from here?
After revisiting difficult situations that involved attraction to someone else, I found something unexpected.
Attraction is an ember. An ember with the undeniable potential to light your home on fire, to burn it down until you’re left with nothing to return to.
But at the very same time, it holds the uncanny potential to light the way and illuminate the truth. The truth you need to keep the spark alive.
How do you navigate your attraction in a way that both preserves your relationship while getting you more of what you want?
In part 1, I simplified attraction to three broad zones. In this newsletter, I’ll share about my own experience navigating the red zone with a partner who felt a strong pull to someone else.
My ex-boyfriend John and I are winding down and reading in bed with our legs intertwined.
He’s reading The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton, a novel that walks you through what it takes for a couple to sustain love over a lifetime.
As I turn off the lights, I ask him, “Did the book provide any interesting insights on our relationship?”
There’s hesitation in his response.
“It actually reminded me of Ella.”
Ouch.
“Oh. What did it remind you of?” I ask, shrinking my pain to make room for his exploration.
In the dark, he searches my voice and continues to tell me about a passage in the book that articulated a gift Ella gave him that I couldn’t — the ability to sulk without questioning.
“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about... Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened.”
-Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
Ella was a close friend since college that he was in frequent contact with. For the rest of our relationship, he’d often compare us, much to his own anxiety.
She became the standard that I could never measure up to.
Lesson #1:
The reason John blurted out his thoughts about Ella was because he didn't want them to fester and spiral into anxiety.
It was a sign that he didn’t allow himself to sit with the attraction long enough to tune into what it was trying to tell him.
According to Bessel vander Kolk's The Body Keeps Score, the brain is divided into two parts: the emotional brain and the rational brain.
Think of the amygdala inside the emotional center of the brain, as the smoke detector that warns us of potential dangers before we are even aware of them.
Then as long as we're not too overwhelmed, the prefrontal cortex, the watchtower of the rational brain, hears the alarm and helps us distinguish between real threats and false alarms so we can react appropriately.
This means that we can sense and feel a potential threat long before our rational minds can put words to it.
Instead of accessing our rational brains, John and I became stuck in a state of hyperarousal, overreacting and unable to respond in a way that moved us forward.
The attraction itself wasn’t the real threat. But it set off the smoke alarm to alert us to pay attention to our relationship. If we took a step back and tuned in, we would have discovered that what we failed to repair over time manifested as an attraction towards what wasn’t easily accessible between us.
Even though we ultimately wanted to work things out and stay together, we didn’t ever get to the bottom of what felt missing because we each fell into a trap we couldn’t get out of.
We centered our worries around the attraction, when it was about us and what we needed to work on.
If you leave an ember alone, it will eventually go out, but we kept fanning the flame.
Lesson #2:
Was there a better way to handle the situation without setting the house on fire?
On my end, I also made mistakes that didn’t help. I created wishy washy boundaries, like requesting for him to text her less in front of me because I felt conflicted — how do I weigh my need for emotional safety with his need for more sources of emotional support outside of the relationship?
In hindsight, we both failed to advocate for the stronger boundaries we needed to regain our sense of security.
If we made safety and security was our highest priority, we wouldn’t have stayed in fight-and-flight mode. We could have accessed the right headspace to prioritize other important needs, like freedom. But safety comes first.
Another mistake was expressing complaints in a way that damaged safety.
His complaints focused on Ella and how I fell short, but what if it was more about us, or about how he felt or what he needed?
If your ultimate goal was to stay together, deliver feedback that is balanced in prioritizing security, minimizing threat, and taking steps towards feeling more connected and getting more of what you want.
For example:
“I read this passage in the book that expresses something I’ve been feeling in our relationship that I want us to work on. There’s ways I don’t feel fully understood and I want to explore what’s blocking us. I want you to know I’m committed to us and working through this will make us grow stronger as a team.”
Feedback delivered in this way would have placed our relationship at the front and center. Not the attraction to someone else.
Lesson #3:
While John compared me to Ella, I did the exact same thing. I nitpicked at him whenever he didn’t live up to my idea of the perfect partner, so he felt a sense of adequacy with Ella that was hard to access with me.
We both fell into yet another trap: to expect ease and comfort all the time and to compare each other to an idealized version of our partner.
As a result, we got impatient and unforgiving of each other. Because we didn’t know who we were, what we wanted, or what we needed, we made each other feel inadequate throughout our relationship.
No one is born “the one.”
But when we finally find a place to call home inside of ourselves, we develop into "the one."
Lesson #4:
When I revisited these memories, I found one last pattern.
Disconnection can be a sign that you’ve been withholding a part of yourself that you value.
Sometimes we operate on the secret wish that our partner will light up about all the things we care about. We cast pieces of bait to see if they’ll bite. And if they don’t, we either cater to shared interests or shrink that part of ourselves around them.
Withholding a facet of who we are is a strategy we use to protect ourselves from rejection. But over time, it’s a dangerous habit that breeds disconnection.
One thing I’m still trying to internalize is that if it’s interesting or important to me, then it’s worthy to talk about — it’s okay to take up space.
For example, even though my current boyfriend doesn’t enjoy writing as much as me, I’ll remind myself to bring him into my world. I’ll let him see how much writing means to me by sharing my favorite sentence or allowing myself to ramble on about a new concept I learned.
Even though I do feel sad that he can’t nerd out about something that is so central to my identity, I know it’s not realistic for us to connect on everything.
However, I can plant a seed of connection today that we can harvest tomorrow.
Just like how he’s been patient with me when it comes to real estate and scaling companies. At first, I couldn’t engage, but now I'm starting to put the puzzle pieces together and understand more everyday.
It’s less about resonating on everything and more about being in a relationship where you feel seen and valued for what makes you, you.
So dare to expand their world and dare to let them expand yours.
Tune in to what the attraction is telling you.
Your feelings and your body knows long before your rational mind can figure it out.
Use what you learn to plant a seed of connection to harvest for later.
Invest in your relationship.
And be patient. With yourself and the person in front of you.
You're both on a journey to find a place to call home in yourself and in each other. 🙏
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