If your romantic partner is ranting about a problem they have, you’d logically feel compelled to help. Why wouldn’t you? You don’t want someone you love to be upset, so you try to resolve the issue, to remove the source of the upset by offering advice and suggestions for how to fix it.
However, if you do try to do this your partner may well be annoyed, frustrated – angry, even. It’s not exactly a logical reaction.
If you have experienced this, you’re not alone. The key term used so far is ‘logical’. But real human relationships have never been purely logical. They’re shaped by emotions, and emotional connection. Emotional processing is sort of a mental equivalent to digestion.
Much like how food enters our body and is gradually broken down into useful components by the digestive system when an emotional experience occurs within our brain, various neuropsychological systems gradually convert it into something that can be safely added to and integrated into our existing memories, psyche and understanding.
And like how disrupting proper food digestion causes unpleasant physical consequences, prevention of emotional processing is very bad for well-being, both mental and physical.
However, we humans are incredibly social creatures, and much of how we develop and learn is based on our interactions with other people and the social feedback they provide.
This has many consequences, one of which is that processing an emotion often means it needs to be communicated, shared and acknowledged and validated by others.
But while emotional validation can theoretically come from anyone, we prefer it from those we’re closest to. Evidence shows that a long-term romantic partner often ends up becoming very important to our emotional processing.
They become an emotional ‘modulator’; someone we depend on to accept and validate us, but also help define and refine our emotions through their responses and interactions with us. We usually don’t know we’re doing this with our partners, though.
Like most of our emotional development and processing, it happens subconsciously. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. What it does mean is that we regularly depend on our romantic partners to validate our emotions.
Particularly those we’ve had to suppress, even temporarily, due to experiencing them in situations or groups where expressing them would have negative consequences – the anger at being unfairly blamed for something in a workplace meeting with higher-ups present, for example.
This means we’re even keener to have our legitimate feelings validated, so we express them, enthusiastically, to our romantic partner. And then they ignore our emotions. And instead focus on their objective source. And proceed to make suggestions, and offer advice, about a situation that they weren’t involved with, and have no experience of.
What’s this, if not a rejection of emotional expression and communication, a denial of much-needed validation? On top of that, it can also be perceived as a loss of status. Because your partner’s effectively saying: “I will offer solutions that I don’t believe you will have thought of – ergo, I’m smarter than you”.
Loss of status, and rejection of emotional connection? Both guaranteed ways to cause stress and upset in the human brain, both experienced when your romantic partner ignores your emotions and tries to fix your problems.
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Let’s be clear: no one who genuinely wants to fix their partner’s problems is a bad person. It’s an understandable and reasonable behaviour. But it’s one that causes negative outcomes, due to unawareness of the emotional factors at work. And that’s not necessarily a failing. Nobody understands exactly what another person is feeling, and what they want, 100 per cent of the time. Not even long-term partners.
Heck, much of the time, we don’t really understand what we’re feeling ourselves, and what we want, until long after the event. But it’s important to put the effort into improving your understanding of these tricky emotional factors, for your partner’s well-being, and the well-being of your relationship
Ultimately, if you ignore or dismiss your partner’s negative emotions for long enough, unintentionally or otherwise, they’ll eventually be left with nothing but negative emotions. And then you’ll have an emotionally stressful problem to deal with all over again. So, keep your mouth closed and listen.
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