A relationship is a fluid, moving thing—open, closed, in, out. Never still, never the same. It’s easy to be lost in the swirling complexity of feelings, thoughts, desires, preferences, and differences.
How do you find your way?
Our willingness to receive each other is constantly changing and allows or limits caring and connection. Learning to sense openness in each moment is the key to navigating the complexities of a relationship. I often refer to openness in relationships as aperture and to the ability to be aware of and guided by awareness of openness in each moment as the aperture effect.
In each moment means you’re not looking for an overall sum or average of your experience so far with this person. You’re not evaluating an abstract idea of general openness. You’re sensing, in exactly this moment: how open are you, how open are they, now? Because, despite our preoccupation with the past and future, the present moment is the only moment in which you can act to influence your relationship.
The Now Part Is the Hard Part
So, how do you do now? Start by noticing that mostly you don’t. Observing our experiences as they are occurring is not what we generally do. Much of the time, our attention is elsewhere. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert,1 research psychologists, studied our ability to attend to the present moment using a phone app to check in randomly on 2,250 volunteers to ask what they were doing and what they were thinking. They found that 47 percent of the time, participants were thinking about something other than what they were doing.
We have two neurological biases that make experiencing “now” difficult. First, we are neurologically wired to predict the future from the past. This is extremely useful in finding tasty berries or avoiding lions. We’re also neurologically biased to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. When physical survival is the issue, making sure that you know where the berries are and that you don’t fail to notice the lion are the important things. Furthermore, lions come before berries.
But when we take these same survival skills into our emotional relationships, they present serious disadvantages. We are overly influenced by the past and overly attentive to the negative.
On the way to knowing what is going on in each moment, we take a lot of shortcuts and make a lot of guesses based on previous experience, especially negative experience. Very useful, except when it’s not. When we are overburdened with the past and with the fear of being hurt, our ability to perceive what is happening right now is compromised. This is the recipe for the downward spiral that many couples find themselves in.
The Downward Spiral
In a downward spiral, your relationship is at the mercy of the self-fulfilling prophecy. This means that when you allow your neurological biases for past experience and negative experience to dominate, you tend to predict that the interaction that is unfolding in this moment is going to be like the painful conversation you had last time. You thus make it more likely that this moment will be like the previous unhappy one. When you and your partner go too far in this direction, you are in the downward spiral of negative expectations and behaviors that can make you both miserable.
In each moment of a relationship, if you think you’ve been here before, then you’ve reduced the actual moment to one or two of its features, filled in the rest with past experience, and assumed you have the whole picture. The look on her face seems like the look she had the other day, just before she closed her heart to you. But it’s not that look; it’s this look, and you don’t yet know, really, what will happen next.
If you can free yourself from the past and its defeating negative assumptions, many things are possible. Fortunately, we can learn to manage our neurological biases and go beyond them.
Mindfulness Practice Helps Us Do This
Mindfulness means paying attention to what’s happening in the present moment with curiosity, openness, and acceptance. Mindfulness often evokes ideas of sitting on cushions with your legs bent into uncomfortable shapes. Though this is one way to learn mindfulness, many people prefer yoga classes, walks in the woods, or playing the piano. It turns out that all of these things help us arrive in the present moment. This freedom to perceive freshly in each moment does not mean you deny the past, but simply that you know how to perceive the present moment freshly, not overly influenced by these biases.
If Now Is the Hard Part, What’s the Easy Part?
Perhaps surprisingly, sensing openness—aka aperture awareness—is the easy part once we get the hang of it. Fortunately, we are well equipped to sense openness. As our brains evolved, we went beyond lions and berries to strengthening our connections to others, which also had survival value. We became adept at sensing these connections. Our brains are already well equipped for this.
Relationships Essential Reads
Once we’ve developed awareness in the moment, we can learn to tune into the ability to sense openness. And, as with many things in life, knowing what to do with certain perceptions helps you to strengthen them. As you learn how to use aperture awareness to improve each moment, you naturally get better at it.
In the midst of anxious uncertainty, ask yourself: Am I open or closed? If closed, gently, with compassion, encourage yourself to open. Then tune into the other person. Are they open? Not why are they open? Or, in general, are they open? But right now, is this person feeling open or closed?
The other person may also be feeling anxious and uncertain. Helping yourself to open is how you help them to open. This is the basic paradox of safety in a relationship: Your safety and being loved depend on the other person feeling safe and loved. Move toward that as well as you can and open to the mystery of what happens next.
Will they open? No guarantees. If you need guarantees, you might as well pack up now and go elsewhere. Bake a cake. Mow the lawn. Wash your hair or your clothes. Almost anything will have a more certain outcome than a moment in a relationship.
For relationships to thrive, we must let go of certainties and demands. And, especially, let go of safety based on predictions and past injuries.
Now is how. You are here with each other listening to the words, their voice, your voice. Listening to the silence. Sensing connections and disconnections. The feeling of closed, and the possibility of open.
