- Your messages don’t get across—despite your best efforts to
communicate your needs, he or she doesn’t seem to get the
message or else ignores it.
Note that it is not specific behaviors that threaten to become smoking guns
but rather an emotional stance—an ambiguity about the relationship that
goes hand in hand with a strong message that your emotional needs are not
so important to him or her. He or she may say the right things at times, but
his/her actions tell a different story.
As you’ll see in the next section, effective communication is an excellent
tool for disarming these smoking guns.
- A new way of dating: Be your authentic self and use effective
communication.
The next step is to start expressing your needs. Most anxious people
easily fall into the trap that relationship books—and society at large—set
for them. They feel that they are too demanding and needy and so they try
to accommodate their partner’s need for distance and boundaries (if they’re
involved with someone avoidant). It’s simply more socially acceptable to
maintain a cool, self-sufficient façade. So they hide their wishes and mask
their discontent. In actuality, you are missing out when you do so, because
by expressing those needs you achieve two goals. First, you are being your
authentic self, which has been found to contribute to our general feelings of
happiness and fulfillment, and being happy and fulfilled is probably one of
the most attractive traits you can offer a partner. Second and no less
important, once you are your authentic self, if your partner is incapable of
meeting your genuine needs, you can determine that early on. Not everyone
has relationship needs compatible with your own, and that’s fine. Let them
find someone else who wants to be kept at arm’s length, and you can go
about finding someone who will make you happy.
What do we mean by “being your authentic self ” and “expressing your
needs”? Amir’s patient Janet can illustrate this point well. At 28, she had
been going out with Brian for more than a year when he decided to end the
relationship. He wasn’t ready to get serious and needed his space. She was