Dear Reader,

When I was 22, I started going out with a boy. It was the second semester at uni, we lived in the same halls of residence, and although we didn’t study the same subjects, our friend groups naturally overlapped. In one of those early friendly get-togethers, he talked about someone he had dated, and of how little significance that relationship had been.

I distinctly remember thinking, "if I ever go out with this boy, he will not be talking about me in that way."

We did go out, and I know that relationship was significant for both of us. But looking back, I want to acknowledge that a big part of it starting and ending rested on my need to feel significant - to him. Needless to say, 1998-me also firmly fell into the romantic trap of expecting him to read my mind, fix all my problems, and be my one source of love and happiness.

Following the Cosmo advice du jour, I pretended to be easy-going while really, he became the center of my focus. Over time, it became difficult to keep the plates spinning. Uncertainty crept in about whether I was still doing it right.

Not realizing that by pretending to be less intense, less soft, less insecure, I was draining my soul of the spark he had been attracted to in the first place.

Not realizing that by anticipating his responses and moderating my behavior accordingly, I was actually in relationship with my fantasy, expectation, and projection of him, not the real him.

Not realizing that I was following socially prescribed relationship customs, making attachment the goal, instead of co-creating a partnership between two authentic equals.

Until he told me how annoying and exhausting my constant need for reassurance was, I don’t think I had a concept of it. There I was feeling smug for having a boyfriend, thinking I was who he wanted me to be, that he would magically intuit who I was and what I need, and everything would be fine forever. Everybody felt a little unsure with their partners, right? That's why there were so many quizzes and how-to-keep-them-happy articles in the magazines, right?

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Before I deleted my Instagram account last week, I came across a clip from Mel Robbins and Gabor Maté. She’s a big self-help podcaster (who allegedly nicked the central idea for her last book from another creator https://sagejustice.substack.com/p/mel-robbins-and-plagiarism) and he’s a famous trauma specialist.

They basically talked about an exercise you can do to gauge whether you’re choosing authenticity or attachment in your relationships by answering a series of questions. I have listed them for you below, with some suggestions how to get the most traction out of them.

Before we get to those, however, a couple of caveats to keep in mind: as ever, your personality preferences, unique personal history, and cultural programming play a big role in how you experience and interpret the concepts of attachment and authenticity.

For example, in a way, I actually showed up pretty authentically to my ENFJ core back then. Broadly speaking, extraverted Feeling (Fe; dominant cognitive function for ENFJ and ESFJ) is about

• deciding courses of action based on personal and universal values,
• connecting with others,
• maintaining harmony,
• taking other people’s feelings into account,
• making things easy for them,
• considering the broader frame of what’s best for everyone involved,
• what’s right and appropriate for the situation,
• with a focus to safeguard the connection.

Doing the right thing for the others, keeping the peace, and managing successful relationships is how dominant Fe Types gain their sense of self-esteem. From that perspective, I applied my Fe, maintaining harmony and the relationship, until we passed beyond the “honeymoon” phase and relying on my favorite function alone wasn’t beneficial anymore. I felt the relationship slipping, and my self-esteem soon followed. Cue spiraling deeper into people-pleasing mode, that he experienced as clingy and needy.

(Stay tuned next week for a look at choosing authenticity over attachment, where I’ll pick up this thread again.)

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Here are the exercise questions, and before you let your eyes gaze over all of them, I do recommend slowing yourself down and taking them one by one.

Find your breath, center, maybe close your eyes for a minute, let your body know it’s safe to dip into this work. Maybe even grab a pen and paper to write out whatever comes up; sometimes our hands can move in ways our conscious brains haven’t anticipated.

For my tarot friends, why not use these questions as positions for a spread? Play with it and let me know how it works for you.

Where are you afraid to say “no”?

What is the impact on you when you don’t say “no”?

What’s the belief that keeps you from saying “no”?

How did you develop that story, “if I say no, …”?

Who would you be without that belief?

Where are you not saying “yes”?

--

I’m so grateful for my relationship with that boy. Although a lot of it was challenging for both of us, I know we never hurt one another out of malice. I have so much compassion for those young people; we were doing the best we could with the minds we had at the time.

In case you’re remembering bygone relationships now and wishing you could have done things differently, take comfort: you couldn’t have. Our teens and 20s are for being a little one-sided and going as far as we can with the one cognitive process we like the best. It’s the beauty of Type development to learn that one-sidedness only gets us so far, and to realize that we have access to a host of other tools to start living a more conscious and fulfilling life.

And of course nobody really talked about co-creating conscious relationships in the 90s, so we had no models of what psychologically healthy relationships might look like. More on that next week.

Cheers,

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