“We were close. I hadn’t talked to them for a couple of months, but everything was normal and everything was good.” (Gene Hackman’s daughter’s words after her father was found dead a couple of days ago)
Have a look at the quote above! Do you see a problem with it? Do you agree with the daughter, namely that she was emotionally close to her father? Do you agree that “everything was normal”, as she stated? Do you agree that “everything was good”, as she also stated? How does “normal” and “good” look like for you, personally? Take a moment or two to ponder on this before going further with the article…
What is all about and why some of you might feel that this situation is far from “normal” or “good”? Because, in some of you, I might have triggered a conflict between two concepts: Contact and Love. And in order to understand the situation, we need to didactically separate these concepts.
Contact is the ability to maintain a relationship through various means: contact in person (seeing each other), talking at the phone, using social media, writing letters/SMS/texts, etc. Contact is quite obvious, it is something we do, it belongs to our behavior, it involves the ability to create, maintain and enjoy connections. And, it has a social quality, it involves social behavior. On the other hand, Love is the ability to feel affinity with a person, the ability to emotionally connect. It belongs to the affective realm, not to the behavioral realm. This connection can happen either inside us (we think about the other person with love) or outside us (we do something for the person we love, and maintaining contact is the most basic form of loving behavior). From this results that, typically, Love and Contact are linked, maintaining the Contact being a consequence of feeling Love.
Well… not always…
Sometimes people love others but do not maintain connections; Love is disconnected from Contact. It is a rather tragic situation, as the “receiver” of love cannot know and cannot feel the love coming from the other one, as we do not “feel loved” if the other does not show us anything that could be interpreted as loving, and we do not have direct access to the other’s soul so as to acknowledge the existence of love (or not). For this reason, the “receiver” of love is forced to “guess” or to approximate the existence of love coming from the other side. And, consequently, a high degree of Doubt about the authenticity of Love can arise in situations in which Contact is not actively maintained and cherished.
You can do an exercise and stop calling the others, cut any contact you might have, and see after how much time the others call you back or write to you. You will be surprised that people call back after different amounts of time… and you might see that people develop “withdrawal symptoms” after one day or after weeks or months or even years… I let you make the experiment and see how much disconnection your closed ones can tolerate, but I must warn you that you risk an undesired awareness of the fact that you initiate and maintain the contact more than the others…
You might be tempted to judge the daughter from the quote above: How can she say that she was close to her father if she didn’t see him in months? How dares she say that!?! This would be your reaction based on your own principle that says the following: Love and Contact “always” go together. But in order to be completely balanced, you need to accept that some people (and some families) function in this way, different from your own functioning. It may be the family pattern (model), it may be a deep social anxiety, it may be a cold schizoid process (withdrawal)… or it may simply be a lack of love that is conveniently covered with rationalizations such as “all is normal & all is good”.
How about you? Do you have Love and Contact fused together? What do you do so as to maintain connections? Do you care to maintain connections? Do you have expectations that the other one should make the connection first? Do you believe that loving and connecting is a sign of weakness from the one who does it first, and therefore you always wait for the other one to initiate?