Q: My girlfriend has these phases when she is very romantic and others when she is totally into other things like her job, friends, etc. Sometimes she is very talkative and at others very silent. These silent phases worry me a lot. They make me wonder what she has been thinking of. How do I decipher these phases?
You have a person at your hand, who through no fault of her own, is complicated. At the cost of sounding sarcastic (in my head I am only being funny) guess what! We are all complicated. None of us come with a user manual attached to us. A lot of us are trying to search and write that manual most of our adult lives. In the absence of such, very desired but woefully absent manuals, one has to rely on two major skills that most people have or can develop — acceptance and communication.
Related reading: A symphony in love
Accept that there are all kinds of people on this planet and my lover doesn’t have to have everything that I want in an ideal lover. Having said that, I understand the hurt and confusion one may feel in the face of one’s lover going hot and cold, however unintentionally. Her behaviour could be because of several reasons, which I don’t want to speculate on, without having met her and complicate matters for you by priming you to believe things that might be the furthest from the truth. My efforts here are more focused on assisting you to develop skills to deal with confusing and sometimes contradictory behaviour.
Sometimes people are not aware of the effect their behaviour is having on them or they have become very hardened and defensive because they have been attacked a lot for who they are and how they behave. Very few people have shown patience and kindness to help them understand the complicated and sometimes socially dysfunctional side of their personalities. Love has to be complemented with a lot of patience and kindness, maybe you can show that in your communication style, without the patronizing attitude that they might have run away from in the past. Keep the grammar of ‘I’ and describe ‘how you feel, given your lack of skills to deal with their human complexity’ and not ‘how they make you feel.’
All the best!
Deepak Kashyap
