This one is for you, guys.

Sometimes your partner is the closest thing you have to a village.

That is an absurd job description for one person.

You’re supposed to work, provide, parent, remember things, notice things, communicate, be emotionally available, and somehow arrive home with enough of yourself left to be somebody’s safe place. Your partner may be trying to do the same thing. Meanwhile, the actual village appears to have fucked off somewhere.

So two exhausted people end up looking at each other and thinking: Why aren’t you giving me what I need?

A fair question. Sometimes someone really does need to step up. But sometimes we judge a person’s character when what we’re actually seeing is their capacity in that particular moment. Sometimes the person you’re asking is running on 3% battery.

My partner and I know what happens when we’re both overwhelmed. One person usually goes quiet. The other feels it and starts scanning: Is he/she angry? Is it me? What didn’t get done? Suddenly we’re reacting to each other’s stress on top of whatever made us stressed in the first place.

So when the shit hits the fan, we try to stop and name the common enemy. Name the cycle. Name what is happening.

It’s a (simple, but not always easy) practice of stopping mid-chaos and naming what’s actually happening. Having a tiny well-earned pity-party, not to each other, but with each other.

“We’re exhausted.”
“We have no backup.”
“And now we’re being weird with each other.”

Sometimes we vent for a minute. Sometimes one of us finds something funny about it. Usually one of us does.

This might seem like positive thinking, but it’s not. Quite the opposite. Positive thinking says, Everything is fine. This says, Nothing is fine AND my partner isn’t the cause of all of it. Those are completely different moves. One denies reality, the other LOCATES it correctly.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for our own shit. It means we can look at the actual problem before making each other responsible for all of it.

Recently, we have started working on what I call our Minimum Viable Communication Protocol. (My partner is an ACTUAL systems architect and when I started talking about feelings, he looked understandably suspicious. When I came up with the protocol name, his eyebrows went instantly up. Finally, we have an interface.)

The name makes it sound much more sophisticated than it is. It mostly means saying WHERE YOU ARE.

“I’m exhausted.”
“I’m frustrated.”
“I’m overwhelmed and I don’t even know why yet.”
“I’m sad today. Lonely.”

You don’t have to deliver a full report on everything wrong with your life and relationship. You also don’t have to wait until your partner asks EXACTLY the right question.

Presence includes saying something aloud before the other person has to figure out which question will finally open the door.

And if you’re the one hearing it? Please, for the love of all things holy, you don’t have to solve it in the next thirty seconds. Stay there for a minute. Listen.

This whole process is not always instinctive. It takes practice, and it still doesn’t always work.

This morning, I felt sad and lonely. I cried a little on my own. When my partner asked, I could have opened the entire archive of old hurts and unfinished conversations.

Instead, I said, “I’m a bit sad today. Lonely.”

The best part? He didn’t try to talk me out of it. About five minutes later, he came back and gave me a huge long hug and kisses.

Did the hug repair our entire relationship and summon a village? No.

Did it help with the fucking loneliness? Absolutely.

Connection doesn’t have to be productive. Noticing is not a task. And having a little capacity left doesn’t mean you owe someone a solution to everything that hurts.

Sometimes the best thing you can do with that capacity is tell your person where you are. Or stay long enough to hear them tell you.

I told him where I was, and he came to find me.

That counts.

A side note: I’ll be writing more about the whole “partner as a village” myth. The pressure we put on partners, the science of how we affect each other, and the support neither of us can conjure out of thin air. Our partners deserve the spotlight in this conversation, too.