Do you still love me?

There are sweet moments – early on in relationships – when one person can’t quite work up the courage to let another know just how much they like them. They’d love to touch the other’s hand and find a place in their life; but their fear of rejection is so intense, they hesitate and falter. Our culture has a lot of sympathy for this awkward and intensely vulnerable stage of love. We’re taught to be patient about the way people might become somewhat flustered or tongue-tied. Or they might act sarcastically or coldly, not from indifference, but as a way to disguise a disturbingly powerful enthusiasm. However, the assumption is that the terror of rejection will be limited in scope and focused on one particular stage of a relationship: its beginning. Once a partner is finally accepted and the union gets underway, the assumption is that the fear must come to an end. It would be peculiar for anxieties to continue even after two people had made some thoroughly explicit commitments to one another, maybe after they had secured a joint mortgage, bought a house together, made vows, had a few children and named each other in their wills.
But one of the odder features of relationships is that in truth, the need for, yet fear of, rejection never ends. It continues, even in quite sane people, on a daily basis, with frequently difficult consequences – chiefly because we refuse to pay it sufficient attention and aren’t trained to spot its counter-intuitive symptoms in others. We haven’t found a stigma-free, winning way to keep admitting just how much reassurance we need.
Acceptance is never a given, reciprocity is never assured; there can always be new threats, real or perceived, to love’s integrity. The trigger to insecurity can be apparently miniscule. Perhaps the other has been away at work for unusual amounts of time; or they were pretty animated talking to a stranger at a party; or it’s been awhile since sex took place. Perhaps they weren’t very warm to us when we walked into the kitchen. Or they’ve been rather silent for the last half an hour.
Even after years with someone, there can be a hurdle of fear about asking for proof that we are wanted. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t possibly exist. This makes it very difficult to recognise our feelings, let alone communicate them to others in ways that would stand a chance of securing us the understanding and sympathy we crave.
Rather than requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we may instead mask our needs beneath some brusque and hurtful behaviours guaranteed to frustrate our aims. Within established relationships, when the fear of rejection is denied, two major symptoms tend to show up.
Firstly, we may get distant - or what psychotherapists call ‘avoidant’. We want to get close to our partners but feel so anxious that we may be unwanted, we freeze them out instead. We say we’re busy, we pretend our thoughts are elsewhere, we imply that a need for reassurance would be the last thing on our minds. We might even have an affair, the ultimate face-saving attempt to be distant – and often a perverse attempt to assert that we don’t require the partner’s love (that we have been too reserved to ask for). Affairs can turn out to be the oddest of compliments; messages that we reserve for, and secretly address to, those we truly care about.
We become avoidant, when original attempts at closeness ended in degrees of rejection, humiliation, uncertainty or shame that we were ill-equipped to know how to deal with. We became, without consciously realising it, determined that such levels of exposure would never happen again. At the first sign of being disappointed, we therefore now understand to run far and fast. We won’t stay around and mention that we might be hurt. We chiefly don’t want to talk about it.
Or else we get controlling (what psychotherapy calls ‘anxious’). We are suspicious, frantic and easily made furious in the face of the ambiguous moments of love: catastrophe never feels too far away. A slightly distant mood must be a harbinger of rejection; a somewhat nonreassuring moment is an almost certain prelude to the end. Our concern may be touching, but our way of expressing it is less so. In the face of the other’s swiftly assumed nastiness and unreliability, we complain administratively. We demand that they be back exactly by a certain hour, we berate them for looking away from us for a moment, we force them to show us their commitment by putting them through an obstacle course of administrative chores. We get very angry rather than admit, with serenity, that we’re worried. We ward off our vulnerability by denigrating the person who eludes us. We pick up on their weaknesses and complain about shortcomings. Anything rather than ask the question which so much disturbs us: do you still care? And yet, if this harsh, graceless behaviour could be truly understood for what it is, it would be revealed not as rejection, but as a strangely distorted – yet very real – plea for tenderness.
A central solution is to normalise a new, and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how predictable it is to be in need of reassurance - and at the same time, how understandable it is to be reluctant to reveal one’s dependence. We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. ‘I really need you; do you still want me?’ should be the most normal of enquiries. We should uncouple the admission of need from any associations with the unfortunate and punitive term, ‘neediness’. We must get better at seeing the love and longing that lurk behind some of our and our partner’s most frosty, indifferent or managerial moments.