Mirror — Mirror

When You’re in a Relationship… It’s like a double-edged sword.

Essay 2 of 18

It’s exactly what you said, and I think the part that was sitting with me and I was grappling with was that we cannot always access or see the work we need to do to be healthier in a relationship. It doesn’t become disclosed to us until we are in a relationship.

It’s like a double-edged sword because there’s nothing as beautiful and nothing as amazing as the way you can feel when you’re in a relationship. But, on the other side, nothing is the biggest mirror than when you’re in one, reflecting who you really are.

So, if you haven’t approached some of the work you need to do to be healthier in a relationship, your challenges can be operating in your blind spot. You won’t or can’t see them until you are actually in a relationship. This might have been what came up for Tema.

Something around what you said about Tema ending the relationship and how she did just made this observation about the double-edged sword of being in a relationship come alive for me. She may have come to realize that she wasn’t as ready to be in the kind of relationship she espoused until she was actually in it with you.

For me, the question is not necessarily the range of a person’s experiences; it’s maybe more the range of their developmental capacity (stage, not age). While you cannot have all the experiences of another person, you can have the empathic imagination and capacity to hold what’s coming up or you can’t. It sounds like she may not have had the necessary empathic imagination to be in the relationship.

Essay 3 of 18: Mismatch (coming — 03.05.22)