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Key points
- Living together involves sharing personal space.
- It can bring up anxieties and fears for couples that love and care about each other.
- Issues with physical intimacy are often related to past experience.
- Recognizing the basis of uncomfortable feelings can help people move forward in a relationship.
Bobby’s girlfriend, Lara, suggested that they live together before deciding whether to get married. The thought had occurred to Bobby, but he’d never brought it up. When Lara did, however, he shocked himself —and her—by dismissing the idea.
The two had been seeing each other for almost two years, and they seemed to have bonded. So, the fact that he was unable even to try living together led me to think that he was uncomfortable with the idea of sharing his personal space. That is, the question seemed more about him—his needs, his fears—than about how much the two of them cared about each other.
If we could figure out why Bobby was resistant, we could try to help him consider what was holding him back. In Bobby’s case, the goal was not so much to enable him to live with Lara, though that might be an outcome, as it was to help him understand why he resented anyone coming physically near him.
It is sometimes the case that sharing physical space can seem threatening. In such cases, we often equate sharing our personal space with personal loss, as if these other people are taking something (our health, our repose) that belongs to us. The issue of physical intimacy, however, arises when we don’t discriminate between the presence of total strangers and that of people with whom we have a degree of relationship—our colleagues, family members, and friends. As to each of these, there has to be some allowance for “intrusions” or encroachment if we are to get along.
Bobby, I thought, was struggling with this dilemma. It was preventing him from trying to settle down with Lara and forcing him into a willed isolation that he didn’t understand. “I really don’t want to be alone,” he said, “but I can’t imagine finding someone there every day.” The fact that Lara was “someone,” rather than the woman whom he might marry, was a chilling reminder of Bobby’s failure to discriminate between strangers and intimates insofar as they might occupy his space.
As Bobby and I talked, it became clear what bothered him about sharing a space. When Bobby was growing up, his older brother, Eric, declared that Bobby’s bedroom now also served as a gym. He installed a weight machine as well as free weights. “I mean, he just took over,” Bobby said. “I wasn’t big enough to use those weights even if I’d wanted to.” Bobby’s brother used the room when Bobby was outside but, as Bobby said, “I had no room to turn around when I was there.”
Bobby complained to his parents, but they said to just work it out. “I wanted to work it out by breaking Eric’s head with a barbell, which of course I couldn’t even lift.” He resented Eric’s assuming that he could just take over. What got to Bobby was that once another person moved in, no attempt at negotiation seemed possible.
Bobby endured Eric’s body-building for three years, after which Eric decamped to college. The family finally sold Eric’s equipment but, every day, Bobby half expected barbells to come marching through the door, demanding their rights to sit on the floor, cluttering his space. “It stayed with me,” he said.
But there was more. Once Bobby thought that he’d finally reclaimed his room, his parents became the source of new intrusions. His father, who had become increasingly deaf, turned up the TV so loud that Bobby could hear it down the hall. He’d ask his father to turn it down, but his father said that the house was his and he had the right to listen how he wanted to. Again, Bobby felt powerless, ignored.
The ultimate intrusion came when his 81-year-old grandmother moved into Eric’s room. Grandma Lucille was nice enough, but she thought nothing of turning up in Bobby’s room. “She needed company, and I was available, so she thought. I had to be nice to her, but I resented it.” The problem, from Bobby’s perspective, was that his grandma had no reciprocal need to respect other people’s needs.
Bobby is older now, but he hasn’t outgrown his experience with Eric, his parents, and his grandmother. It’s become fundamental, part of how he presents to the world. Even at the office now, he sits at his desk with headphones to block out the chatter, and he keeps a sign on his cubicle wall that says “Don’t just assume that you’re welcome.” He knows that the sign is more than a little edgy. It’s part of a much larger pattern.
What could he do to break the pattern, which was so deeply ingrained, when it came to living with Lara? How could he feel safe around someone who was always there?
I started by discussing with Bobby how sharing space with someone you care about was not necessarily a loss of personal integrity. Presumably, this person reciprocates your feelings and, hence, cares about your integrity. Their interest is in sharing, not taking. But I also said that in Bobby’s specific case, it would be useful to talk with Lara about his fears. The idea was not to make her self-conscious so that she tip-toed around but only to sensitize her to why, perhaps unintentionally, he might suddenly bridle at some noise or even an uncapped tube of toothpaste.
I also felt that gradational exposure therapy would be useful. That’s when people who are frightened of an experience, like flying or speaking in public, are exposed to it long enough to see that’s it’s not so bad after all. If Lara moved in for a week or two, on the understanding that it was a tryout, Bobby could get more accustomed to having her around. They could develop routines, shared ways of allocating their time and the space that they lived in. After a while, it might seem natural.
A big part of wellness is getting past patterns of behavior that constrain us. They are often based on assumptions that are so ingrained that we don’t even notice them. Bobby had to learn that sharing space would not necessarily undermine his well-being. He had to confront an ingrained pattern of behavior in learning to live with someone he loved.
