Stop Thinking That The Other People In Your Relationships Have The Upper Hand

She was three steps behind me. She was up against my headphones and yet the story of her and the girl she was dating won out. It was a little past 7pm and there weren’t many souls walking on 10th avenue.

Her phone conversation made up for it.

“I was drunk and said things I shouldn’t have said, but regardless of that she doesn’t get to redefine how I experienced her words and silence.”

All the parts of me that were proud when someone held on to their narrative were actively cheering. She was right, there’s nothing she could have done that would have removed her right to feel however she felt.

But holding onto her feelings doesn’t rid her of the responsibility she had over the words she also said. Owning your narrative means holding others and yourself accountable to its reality.

One too many shots of tequila were the culprits for this girl’s words. Every sentence that punctuated the phone conversation she was having had the same undertone — she couldn’t remember what she’d said, but really, she said, how could she possibly have managed to hurt her partner that much?

How could her words have had that much power?

And yet there was no inkling of surprise on how much of an impact her partner’s words had had on her. She told her friend she hadn’t slept well in two nights, that she kept checking her phone for a white flag that never made it through.

The truth is that power is subjective and while it may be words for one party, for the other it may be a triggering action.

So often relationships, of every kind, operate on the notion that one party has more leverage than the other. It’s a war of wills and we’re all the losers in our own eyes.

Her partner’s motives were lost on me. All I knew was what she said — a dynamic similar to that of which we experience with our own friends. We mumble “yes” every time a friend talks their partner down — can you believe they did that? They knew it would hurt me and did so anyway.

The conversation she had along 10th avenue pulled me into a story that I shouldn’t have belonged in. As I walked to meet my boyfriend I wondered if he ever felt the same way. We weren’t immune to the lows that reminded us what it felt to be high. Our dips were deeply felt and nagged at invisible scars we both have tattooed on our skin.

The girl who’d had one too many tequila shots wasn’t that different from the rest of us. She was more comfortable speaking when she had a barrier between her and her partner. I’ve seen the walls come up just as quickly in my own relationships. Projecting, holding everything in until the alcohol made it okay to say, telling someone else everything you can’t tell the person who would actually need to hear it.

Relationships are multilayered. The freedom to be vulnerable isn’t a given, it’s a safe space that’s built with actions and words. You walk into the safe space with someone who you trust won’t leave a human sized hole in their rush to split. You trust them to listen, to walk through the door if they need time to process, to respect that it’s taken you a while to build this safe place up.

This is why I nodded as the girl started to turn left and kept going straight on 10th. The last I heard of her conversation was,

“She doesn’t understand that the only thing we have in this relationship is communication. She can’t say she wants to marry me and then shut me out.”

She was right. Hiding is a defense mechanism that cements us in place. The longer we stand there the higher the wall between us and moving forward becomes.

I hope she takes her advice. I hope we all do.

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I’m the founder of toodamnyoung.com. You can find me talking about mental health, grief and work-life on Living Vulnerably: https://medium.com/living-vulnerably

I also host Creating Espacios, podcast for the next generation of Latina trailblazers.

Follow along as I condense essays into 140 characters: https://twitter.com/vivnunez