Protecting Your Partner From Feeling Invisible is Critical to Maintaining a Healthy Relationship

Mostly we're not trying to make people feel this way. Often, we don't even realize it. But that doesn't lessen the importance of ensuring that our loved ones never feel invisible to us.

Image/Counseling Long Beach

For some people, feeling invisible has been a lifelong condition because their parents or guardians didn’t provide them the love and care that most of us have the good fortune to experience as babies and young children.

Maybe their parents died tragically when they were really young. Maybe their parents were highly successful in their careers and were rarely home. Maybe their parents were themselves raised by parents who didn’t model relationally effective love and care—the art of being present and involved in the lives of our children—so they truly never learned how.

Others feel invisible in school. Rejected by certain cliques. Unattractive or unpopular to the “cool kids.” Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their skin color or cultural background was much different than the majority of their peers. Maybe they felt attracted to people their parents or friends or churches said they weren’t supposed to feel that way about, so they always kept it a secret and always felt alone and different from others.

We sometimes hear metaphors about people “coming out of their shell” or being “late bloomers” or “growing their wings” in some sort of caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis analogy.

Young, awkward, gangly or chubby pre-teens grow and mature into attractive young adults. Years of practicing a sport or an instrument or an area of study earns them recognition and admiration from others.

A commitment to some specific craft results in career success and/or economic wealth, and suddenly, if they hadn’t “belonged” before, they do now.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs taught many of us that a sense of belonging is something we all require in order to achieve the mental, physical, and emotional wellness necessary to reach the highest levels (a state of being that feels good instead of shitty) of the human experience.

The Ghosts that Haunt Relationships are Often Invisible to One or Both of Us

While the details often vary from household to household and couple to couple, the themes tend to always be the same. And in my relationship coaching work, one of the most frequently cited negative conditions in a marriage or long-term partnership is that one partner often feels invisible to the other. Maybe not always. But often enough to hurt. A lot.

This can happen when we run away from uncomfortable conversations or disagreements with our partners, which I wrote about in my last post.

It can happen when we’re home together, sitting in the same room and not knowing what to say to one another. Or lying in the same bed, both partners afraid or uncomfortable attempting to initiate intimacy with one another. It can happen when we struggle to have connecting conversations at the dinner table. It can happen when one of us is always running off to pursue individual hobbies and interests at the expense of shared activities with one another.

It can happen when we fail to notice or acknowledge their new haircut, the home-improvement project they completed, the hours of mental, physical, and emotional sacrifice to care for children and pets.

It can happen when one of us is traveling for work or a friends’ trip, and not checking in often. That can happen every day when we’re busy with work or literally anything—the lives of other people totally invisible to us because we’re dealing with whatever is immediately in front of us, resulting in us failing to account for or notice things happening outside our field of view.

It’s not the coolest human trait, but it mostly won’t ruin your life when you do this with coworkers, or ancillary friends, or distant cousins.

But it can very much contribute to ruining your life if it’s happening with the person with whom you share homes, children, money, beds, etc.

When we—literally—share a life with someone, everything we do has some measurable effect on them. And whether we are consciously aware of it or not, they’re experiencing ups and downs in their life day in and day out, in much the same way we are in ours. And when we fail to account for it—when we fail to notice or invest any interest or energy in understanding what they are going through—our partner commonly (and in my estimation, understandably) ends up feeling invisible.

Whether we are disconnected and disinterested because we don’t give a shit, or whether we are disconnected and behaving in a disinterested way because it never occurred to us that our partner feels invisible and ignored, the pain tends to be the same for the other person.

Whether they’re hurting me on purpose, or hurting me by accident, it would seem I’m destined to continue feeling this small, this invisible, this ignored, this unimportant to the person who promised to love me all the days of my life.

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One of the most important pieces of relationship advice I’d like to offer here is simply: Protect your spouse or relationship partner from the pain of feeling so unimportant and inconsequential to you that you don’t care about what’s happening in their lives, and that when you are apart, you are rarely thinking about them.

How you’ll accomplish that will vary from relationship to relationship, but I think the biggest culprit at the heart of this common relationship condition is a simple lack of awareness that the other person is feeling this way.

• When they want to tell you about their day or ask you about yours, please recognize it as an important bid for connection. They just want you to be connected to them, and for them to be close to you.

• When you are traveling or busy at work or even just out golfing or shopping on the weekend, consider making time to check in with your partner about their day, and wishing good things for them. That’s your partner. Invest in the success of their day as much as your own.

• When small matters of disagreement or tiny complaints arise, instead of choosing defensiveness or investing your energy in trying to get them to change their mind or feelings about it, invest in UNDERSTANDING why this other human being experiences this kind of thing differently than you do. People with potentially fatal peanut allergies experience ingesting peanuts at a baseball game much differently than I do, and that’s not so hard for me to understand. If I apply that same concept to emotional diversity, I behave in much more emotionally intelligent ways than I did back when I was unwittingly destroying my marriage.

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People need to belong. And that starts with being seen. With being heard. With being understood.

I see you. I hear you. I understand how you would feel that way, or at least, you can trust me to work hard to get it, because it’s never okay for you to hurt because of something I didn’t notice or am not paying attention to.

With being known.

Because I love them and want to demonstrate care for them, I choose to notice what they’re doing, to listen to what they’re saying, to seek to understand why they feel differently than me, all so that they are reminded over and over and over again that they can trust me to love and support them all the days of our lives.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.