Are You Aware of Your Partner’s Vulnerabilities and Sensitivities?

“People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them.” Harriet Lerner

We are pretty much fully cooked by the time we decide to make a lifelong commitment to someone. We have our strengths and most importantly for this discussion, our weaknesses. We come into relationships with baggage. No matter how strong one tries to appear, they have shortcomings. We are the total of our genetics, how we were raised, and everything that happened to us. No one is perfect, so it is best to have an idea of the flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of the person you have chosen to bond with. It is often unresolved issues from the family of origin that determine the issues we carry into our relationship. It is these same issues that might even explain why we marry who we do. We are sometimes looking to fill a void or complete some developmental task through the relationship we pick.

Fear of vulnerability is perhaps one of the most common and deeply rooted fears. Early humans needed to be on constant alert for danger, so vulnerabilities needed to be constantly on their mind. Nowadays, the attacks we are subjected to are often less physical and more emotional or spiritual. The idea of vulnerability today brings to mind weakness. Brene Brown, however, believes this to be far from the truth: “...vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our most accurate measure of courage.”

Are you aware of what baggage your partner carries? It is these vulnerabilities that will likely be the reason behind the persistent fights you will have as a couple, Harriet Lerner Ph.D. asserts. When we are new to a relationship, we often keep our shadow side under wraps until we are sure we are loved and valued. As a relationship progresses, we begin to unpack our baggage. We begin to feel safe and secure in the connection we have. Whether we do this knowingly or not, we begin to expose the ways in which we are flawed, our sensitivities, our scars, our tender spots.

It is a matter of deep trust that someone reveals vulnerability to us. We certainly wouldn’t want to reveal them to someone that is strictly a business acquaintance. We believe that our partner would never do anything to hurt us, so we feel safe sharing our broken places. In revealing our vulnerabilities, we are giving our partner the power to wound us deeply, but trusting that they won’t. There are few things more painful within a relationship then to reveal to your beloved a vulnerability and have them use it against you.

Are you aware what topics are triggers? Are you aware of lines you shouldn’t cross? Are you willing to accept them as they are with no expectation they will change in this regard? If you have no idea what your partner’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities are and you have been together a considerable amount of time, that brings up another issue: why not? Is there true intimacy or is this just a superficial pairing? Do you not really care about your partner? Don’t you truly trust this person?

To bump up against someone’s emotional wound that you are aware of is no different then to poke them on a still fresh surgical scar. But we try to get our partners to overcome these deficiencies out of love and wanting better for them. I can understand wanting a partner to ‘get over’ this tender spot, but true healing never occurs until they are ready to work on them for themselves, not to please you. We can’t want it for them. We would never tell someone we love that is suffering from cancer to just get over it, yet this is often what we do when it comes to the scars we have on the inside. We shouldn’t expect that picking at these wounds will entice our partner to just get over these long held scars.

Those that will have the most problems with revealing their vulnerabilities in a relationship are those who have been betrayed and had them used against them. They will have learned to build walls and keep people at a distance to avoid getting hurt again.

Sharing our vulnerabilities can foster trust and create a deep connection and intimacy in our relationship. Misusing this trust can spell the end of it. There is nothing like a close relationship to foster knowing what buttons to push. We know how to hurt each other and it is not unusual to do so once in a while. When it is done intentionally and repeatedly this is akin to abuse.