Taking space while being present in a relationship

I’m a caregiver at heart. When I like someone, I want to take care of them. I want them to feel safe and secure. I want them to know that I am there for them. I want to give them the support that they need—I want them to express when they need support, and not be afraid of asking for it. I dislike it in a relationship when someone is afraid of coming off as “needy”, afraid of expressing their needs to me.

I sometimes feel anxious that I don’t show up in the ways that the person needs me to show up. I sometimes feel an internalized pressure to show up more, show up better. But I never feel that the person is “too needy”. I see the issue as stemming from me—it’s something that I need to learn to manage.

I feel that I need to have a better sense of my own boundaries, and learn to draw them accordingly. I need to learn how to express my boundaries while simultaneously assuring the other person that my need to draw my boundaries isn’t a rejection of them. Maybe I don’t need to constantly reassure them, but I do feel that I need to as part of my role as a caregiver—that even if I need to take space, I am still there, and they can feel safe and secure with me.

Perhaps I project my rejection sensitive dysphoria. Perhaps I give constant reassurance of my continuing presence because I need constant reassurance. But knowing this doesn’t make the feeling dissipate. This makes me struggle to take space for myself in a relationship when I need it. I worry that the other person would feel rejected. I worry that they wouldn’t feel safe and secure with me.

I often let the other person take the lead in asking for alone time if they need it. If they do this, it assures me that they don’t experience taking space for oneself as a form of rejection, and thus this allows me to take space for myself, knowing that they’re okay with it.

Interestingly, even though I struggle with rejection sensitive dysphoria, I don’t experience someone taking space for themselves as a form of rejection. I’m comfortable with it. Rather, I fear that that’s how the other person might experience it. Why do I feel this way? Because growing up, that’s how I experienced it. In my family of origin, taking space for myself felt that it was taken personally, taken as a rejection—and generally, I wasn’t allowed to have my own space. So I grew up socialized into the belief that taking space for myself is viewed negatively and interpreted as a rejection, and it was my responsibility to make the other person feel not rejected.

I wish that I can just proclaim that I have the right to take space for myself, and enforce this boundary accordingly. But it’s not that easy. It goes against decades of socialization. This is why I give reassurances. In a way, it’s to reassure me that the other person is okay with me taking space for myself: I gauge their reaction to make sure that they don’t take it personally.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think it is, in and of itself. It feels like a small accommodation I have to make for myself to give myself permission to take space. But I have to recognize that it’s my own need, not the other person’s. And the other person has to recognize this as well: that this is something I do for my own feeling of security in the relationship. I don’t want the other person to feel rejected because I want the dynamic to remain stable. I don’t want my taking space to indicate a shift in the dynamic. I want to be able to take space then return “home”. When the other person feels rejected, it creates a conflict, a detachment. If this happened every time I took space, the relationship feels rocky, like we’re in a constant storm, and I constantly need to expend emotional energy to reconnect.

Is there a way I can overcome this constant need to give reassurance when I need to take space for myself? Perhaps if the person told me that they don’t need it. But I don’t know if I can trust that they’re being truthful, with me and with themselves, that they really don’t need it. Maybe they’re trying to play it cool and underplaying their own needs.

This for me is a carryover from a past relationship: I have been in a relationship where my partner didn’t express their needs to me, despite telling me that they would. I felt responsible for it. I felt that I could’ve created space to allow them to express their needs. So maybe this is precisely what I need to do: Create regular check-ins where we can both express how we feel, so we become proactive in expressing our needs and have equal space in doing so. This is all I can do. I can’t make someone figure out their needs if they’re not ready for it, nor can I make them express them if they’re not ready for it. I cannot hold myself responsible for how far along someone is in their own emotional journey, or how much they can express themselves—beyond creating and nurturing a space for it in our relationship.

Would this be enough to assuage my anxiety? Honesty, I don’t know. But I do know that I have to accept that I cannot control whether or how much someone shares their needs. I have to accept that this is a compatibility issue. If someone doesn’t know their needs, or isn’t able to open up about them, they do not give me what I look for in a relationship. And I have to learn to trust my intuition when I feel that something is amiss. Because in my previous relationship, I did feel that something was amiss; I just ignored it. I told myself that maybe my partner didn’t have many needs, and maybe I’m just self-conscious of appearing “needy”. But the truth was that our dynamic was very imbalanced, because I was expressing my needs and my partner wasn’t. My needs came to dominate the dynamic. This made me feel “needy”, but it also ironically made me feel that my needs weren’t being met, because one of my needs is for my partner to open up to me and express their needs to me. As I was unaware of what was happening, this created a negative feedback loop: the more detached I felt from my partner, the more I asked for, and the more my needs dominated the relationship, which in turn made my partner feel that it was more difficult to express their own needs.

There’s no blame here. I don’t blame myself for having needs, nor do I blame my partner for not knowing or being able to express their needs. We were in different stages in our emotional development. Having regular check-ins could have proactively created space for them, but it would have still been on them to be able to know their needs and express them.