Reflections on space and closeness

At the end of last month, I went on an ambitious canoe camping trip with my husband, kids, and five of our friends. I say ambitious because our kids are four and seven, and up until this trip, we had only been on one- or two-night car camping trips. Spending three nights out in the wilderness, carrying everything we needed into the woods and paddling ourselves from campsite to campsite, felt a little intimidating.

Long story short, the trip was incredible. I can look back now on all of those days of anticipatory anxiety and laugh a little, telling myself that next time I won’t be so worried…even though I know I will.

There was one moment on the trip that really got me thinking. I’ve tried to share this moment with a few people already, and it fell a little flat, so I am going to try again in this format, where maybe I can organize my thoughts a little better.

One afternoon, I was in a canoe with my four-year-old sitting in the middle and one of our friends at the stern. The sky was an enormous blue, scattered with white, fluffy clouds that offered us only a few seconds of shade at a time as we moved across the water.

I started asking my son whether he was excited to start school and see his friends. He is quite loquacious, so even this simple question initiated a more robust conversation about his friends and their various qualities. He started naming the kids in his class, telling me things about them, and then, at some point, the conversation trailed off.

I don’t remember why. Maybe we spotted an eagle. Maybe someone started singing. Maybe there was something interesting along the shoreline.

I don’t know how much time passed. Ten minutes. Twenty, maybe.

But I had looked behind me a few times and noticed that my son had his hand dipped into the water. He was watching the ripples his hand made as the canoe moved along. He was rotating his wrist, opening and closing his fingers, feeling the water move around his hand. He seemed completely absorbed in it.

And then, after that indeterminable amount of time, he said, “Oh, Mommy, I forgot another one of my friend’s names in my class. It’s Alex.”

It was such a small moment, but something about it stopped me. Just like the clear water beneath us, I felt like I could see into his mind for a second.

Of course, I don’t know what he was thinking about during those ten or twenty minutes. Maybe he had been thinking about his friends the entire time. Maybe he was thinking about the eagle, or school, or the feeling of the water against his hand. Maybe his mind moved through all of these things and a hundred others that I will never know about. But he had the space to let his mind roam, and eventually, something surfaced.

I don’t think we get a lot of that.

Certainly not as adults. There is always something to answer, something to remember, something to buy, someone to pick up, a text to respond to, a notification to clear, a podcast to listen to, a thought to finish. Even our downtime can be filled with stimulation, and increasingly, we seem to have very little tolerance for the empty spaces in between things. And I wonder if we get even less of it in our relationships.

We often talk about communication in relationships as though more communication is inherently better. Tell your partner what you need. Ask questions. Check in. Be curious. Clarify. Explain. Talk it out. And these things are important. I spend a lot of my time helping couples do exactly these things.

But one of the hardest things to do in a relationship is to mentalize another person, to remember that the person sitting across from you has a mind that is separate from yours, full of thoughts and feelings and memories and associations that you cannot see.

Mentalizing is, essentially, the ability to imagine and hold in mind that another person has an inner world that is separate from our own. They have thoughts, feelings, memories, fears, desires, associations and experiences that shape what they do, and those things are not always visible to us. Mentalizing means trying to understand the person underneath the behavior without assuming that we already know exactly what is happening inside of them.

This can be so difficult because we can become very good at predicting our partners, and after years together, we often know them remarkably well, but knowing someone well is not the same thing as knowing everything that is happening inside of them. There is always some part of another person that remains unknowable.

I think this becomes especially difficult when we are activated in our relationships. When we are hurt or anxious or angry, we tend to fill in the blanks quickly. You didn’t answer my text because you don’t care. You didn’t initiate sex because you’re not attracted to me. You didn’t ask how my day was because you’re selfish. You knew I was upset and didn’t do anything, so you must not love me.

We take something we cannot know and turn it into something we are certain of. And then we respond to our certainty rather than to the person in front of us.

Maybe mentalizing well requires not only becoming better at asking what is happening inside our partner, but becoming more comfortable with the fact that we cannot always know. There are things our partners are thinking about that have nothing to do with us. There are moods that belong to a particular day, memories that have been stirred up by something we didn’t witness, worries they haven’t figured out how to articulate yet, and ideas that are still forming somewhere inside them.

Sometimes our partner is quiet because they are upset with us. Sometimes they are quiet because they are thinking about work. Sometimes they are thinking about their mother, or their childhood, or what they want to do this weekend, or absolutely nothing at all. Sometimes they are just watching the water.

And I think there is something deeply intimate about allowing someone we love to have an interior life that does not require our participation.

This is particularly hard in long-term relationships because intimacy can start to feel like access. We know each other’s schedules, habits, bodies, families, histories, passwords, grocery lists, financial accounts and preferred ways of loading the dishwasher. We sleep next to each other and raise children together and make decisions about the same house, the same vacations, the same weekends. We can begin to believe that closeness means knowing everything. But maybe some part of closeness is also being willing to let there be things we don’t know.

There is a particular kind of pressure that can come from feeling like you have to account for every internal experience to your partner, as though every silence needs an explanation and every shift in mood needs to be immediately processed. I don’t mean that we should withhold from one another or avoid difficult conversations. I mean allowing another person to have a mind that is theirs before it is ours.

Maybe that is why there was something about watching my son in that canoe that felt so touching to me. I was watching someone I love very deeply exist inside of a world that I could not enter. I could see his hand in the water. I could see his face. I could hear his voice when he finally told me about Alex. But I could not see the path his mind had taken to get there. And I didn’t need to. I could simply wait for him to come back and tell me what he had found.

I wonder if our relationships could use a little more of that kind of patience. More willingness to sit beside each other while the conversation trails off, to resist the urge to immediately fill the silence, and to trust that our partner’s mind is doing something even when we cannot see what it is.

Because maybe giving someone space is not the opposite of intimacy. Perhaps, sometimes, it is how we make room for it.