Honesty

Our couples therapist commended my partner, Mike, and I recently on our steadfast commitment to living honestly. I was awestruck in the moment because I cherished the reflection that feels so true in my bones, and in many ways, long has. And yet, it can be incredibly frustrating and saddening at times, knowing that we sometimes let our old pains and stories lead us astray from the beauty of the honest path. Honest relationships call for honest emotions, honest reflections, honest desires, honest shortcomings and honest love-makings. They require a sort of nakedness where there is no where to hide, and overtime, even less of a desire to. They are the container for the ultimate exposure of self, not the ultimate exposure of the other. At it’s core, honesty asks us to own the truth within our own bones and finally cease lying to ourselves, before we can even think about demanding the truth from another.

This is where most of us get it wrong. We think we’re being honest to expose how we feel about the other when really it’s the shedding of our own layers of delusion that inspires the same in our partners. This kind of living and loving takes guts. It takes courage. It takes backbone. It takes inner knowing. It takes standing for something bigger than bullshit. It takes connecting to universal truth. It takes oneness. And most importantly, it takes an amount of willingness that digs deeper and wider than our shallow stories of truth ever could.

During the beginning of my relationship with Mike, he was often very forthcoming about his challenges with being in a serious relationship, in general, and what held him back from diving deeper into ours, specifically. He told me very early on about his disinterest in re-marriage and the ways in which his upbringing yielded a certain mistrust of intimate relationship. I admired his honesty and his ability to share what sometimes seemed like still-fresh wounds begging not to be salted by my response. As we climbed further into relationship and began what is now a handful of years of partnership that involves parenting his children together, my attachments and desires for a truly intimate partnership increased at a rate far faster than his. Every time he said “me” instead of “we,” when referring to the home we lived in together or talked about imaginary life plans after the kids leave for college, I felt deeply stung. It took my own work to share openly about the impact it had on me, which created an opening in our relationship for truly honest conversation, where no topic was off-limits, and still isn’t. 

On several occasions, particularly during the beginning of the relationship, I did ask Mike to keep certain feelings and stories he had about our relationship to himself. My request wasn’t to squash his ability to speak freely, as we had communicated mutually about them plenty of times before. It was my way of honoring my own nervous system from the havoc it often felt hearing repetitive knowings that were difficult to hear and even harder to swallow. Even many years later when we slip back into old patterns of too much truth with not enough sugar coating, I make fresh requests that he aims to honor with respectfulness and love. I don’t view this as a means to control him or to deny an aspect of him that I’d rather not be there. I know him and I aim to understand him and his truths wholeheartedly. I believe it’s an act of love and kindness that we offer one another when we keep the hard stuff to ourselves when asked. In the energetic sense, I also believe there’s a way we feed the stories we believe to be true when we let them have too much air time. Not-at-all ironically, the less we both air our grievances freely and instead focus on releasing old wounds directly, the flavor of our stories about one another are becoming more aligned with who we both really are, not just what we are locked into believing the other to be.

What I’ve come to learn most is that sometimes what we think is honesty, actually isn’t at all. There’s the truth and what we think is the truth, and it takes a depth of courage within ourselves to decipher the difference. The actual truth doesn’t voluntarily want to be revealed to us or anyone else. It’s hidden for a reason, because owning it and sharing it would mean we have to face aspects of our lives we don’t want to unearth. Instead, we manufacture a truth that we can live with on the surface and hold onto it for dear life. So often, this is what we project onto our partner so we don’t have to strip down naked to the truth of who we really are, to the one person who needs to see it the most — ourselves. 

When we’re not being truthful with ourselves first, honesty can feel downright cunning and hurtful to another, used purposefully to “speak our truths” disguised as spiritually evolved when it’s anything but. If we think any and all truths serve, we’re full of it, and are either willing or unknowingly using it to damage the person we say we love the most. In most instances, I ask myself, “How necessary is what I have to say in this moment?” I typically know the answer before I’ve even finished asking myself the question. When it’s not necessary, it’s accompanied by a subtle feeling of force that is pushing me to say something that I know will have unnecessary negative impact, and that force is generally out for some kind of blood, even if only a drop. Our partners don’t need to hear our petty criticisms and back-handed jabs pointed at the wrong person. They need to hear how we, ourselves, bleed and how they can help us heal with the very words they offer us during our greatest times of disconnection and need.

Much of what Mike shared early on was incredibly painful to hear but it also invited me into a level of adulthood in which I ceased taking his words for face value and instead filtered our conversations through my own ever-strengthening internal knowing. Some could say, and have, that I’m a glutton for punishment, a masochist, delusional or in denial, but aside from a few moments here and there when I let my own wounding get in the way of boundary setting, I’ve never felt any of those labels to be the truth. I knew from early on that Mike’s honesty in those moments was the “truth” of his experience masking blocks to deeper intimacy. It’s not that I didn’t listen for the content but I listened more for what was underneath it — an unintegrated part of Mike that was unconsciously testing my loyalty accompanied with a divine aspect of him that palpably desired to be met in the depth of his raw, imperfect, overly-honest-at-times human being.

What I know about honesty is that it is beautifully bittersweet. If I demand truth from Mike, which I do more and more, I need to be able to receive it even when it’s not what I want to hear. Being able to both give and take the heat (albeit Mike and I have very different temperature thresholds of our honesty taste buds) has created a bond of trust within our relationship in which we’ve made room for so much more of who we are to come to the surface.  With the doses of heat has also come sweet and vulnerable love, bittersweet tears from old hurts, and the delicious beauty of togetherness.

Now, years later when old stories still plague us, we continue to demand a deeper truth from one another. If either of us makes big claims about our truths, whether it could harm the other or not,  we expect that the other will voluntarily look at what is underneath it. I’m not willing to hear what my faults are, specifically, or within our relationship without also calling Mike to more as a man and as a partner. This is the unspoken and spoken agreement we make about honesty — where I look, so will you and vice versa. No stone left unturned, for the sake of our individual growth, and of the integrity of our relationship. 

I’ve also learned that I can take a lot more that I can dish, so my growth lies in sharing openly and timely. Given that I air on the side of overly tight-lipped, when I actually get up the nerve to share something true to me, it’s because inside my being, it feels like life or death; truth or bust. I’ve already filtered the circumstance through my well-oiled machine of discernment, feeling and knowing. Generally, I let things go and integrate what I can into life’s bigger picture, but some experiences stand out like jagged square pegs trying to make their way into round recesses of my being. In these times, there’s no amount of rationalization or self-healing that balms the wound, and no amount of self-love that squelches the desire to be truly understood by the man I yearn to be felt by the most. 

Sometimes, when I share from this raw, vulnerable place, I bomb. I entirely miss what I was attempting to communicate, somehow sharing the content of my experience without any of the accompanying emotion that would connect my heart to Mike’s. I perform a set of robotic communication void of substance, all so I don’t have to face the possibility of rejection in the face of a heated topic that matters beyond words. Just a few weeks ago, as I attempted to share with Mike about a new writing project that came to me in the silent hours of the night, my enthusiasm mixed with fear of dismissal that caused my share to fall flat on its face. I felt disappointed in myself, for not yet feeling comfortable expressing myself with confidence that can’t be shook by my own insecurities nor the quality of the response of my partner. On much more delicate topics, it has taken me years together to share honestly about the pain I sometimes experience as a step-mother and how hurtful it can feel as woman to sometimes not feeling fully chosen by my partner in the relationship that I cherish most. 

And yet still, there are divine times when I’m centered in myself just enough that I naturally step into the simplicity of an honest moment ahead. I trust my need for an initial embrace from Mike or a moment of eye contract before I share with him as vulnerably as possible. The gentle recognition of an ouch met with apology, the loving inquiry after a day’s disconnection, or the deeper dive into a layer of withheld emotion that deserves fresh discovery. 

While it is getting easier as an individual and as a couple, there’s always new layers to unfold in the name of honesty. Even as of late, we’ve spent the last couple of weeks in avoidant crunchiness rather than the smoothness more consistent honesty offers. Old patterns die hard. But with every new chapter of relationship also comes new layers of communications. It takes asking more difficult questions and being willing to hear more difficult answers to get the bottom of much of what doesn’t want to be revealed without some force. Will we ever desire the same things to see them materialize within our relationship? Will we stay committed for long enough to find out?  Sometimes the answers come from scared places wanting reassurance that they’ll be honored as a deeper dive reveals the next layers of our truths. In the end, it’s our commitment to staying on the path of honesty that matters more than getting to the potentially rocky beaches of a particular destination ever could.