• Do you feel a lack of empathy or reciprocity when you are busy doing things for the person you love?
• When you show you really care, do you feel drained, used, or depleted instead of invigorated?
• Does your relationship often feel like more work than play and more unspoken discomfort than joy?
• Do you feel your relationship is ultimately not enriching your life?
If you answer yes to any of the above questions, it suggests that you may build relationships for all the wrong reasons. But stay with us: you are building awareness, which is an important first step. Also, don’t blame yourself for this kind of behavior; this is a pattern you’ve come by honestly. The fact is, our culture supports one-directional caregiving. It is considered virtuous and makes us so-called good family members, good neighbors, and good citizens. But chronic, one-directional caretaking is actually a dysfunctional pattern learned as infants or small children in the earliest months and years of our relationship with our primary caregiver, usually a parent.1 In this pattern, we sought to elicit behaviors we needed in order for us to feel safe. These formative transactions were the beginning of a life-long pattern of interactions whose purpose was, and continues into adulthood to be, to manage relationships so that they sustain feelings of safety above all else. Irrelationship is a straitjacket built for two that does not allow a flow of spontaneous loving, but it does protect, at least superficially, against feelings of anxiety. Irrelationship is the ultimate defense. And the attempt to feel safe and anxiety free can trump any kind of authentic loving. However, no matter how much we want to love, over time, the underlying hidden anxiety pushes us to repeat the pattern chronically, so that we never learn how to form real relationships of genuine intimacy and reciprocity. Instead, we live in isolation, even though our lives appear to be actively engaged with others whom we regard as our closest associates, friends, partners, or spouses.
Yet, isolation has a pay-off; it allows us to maintain a safe, non-vulnerable artificiality at the level of emotional investment, free of the risks that come with intimacy. However, the space in which we do interact with others must be filled with something, and that something is called a song-and-dance routine. Briefly, the routine is a set of behaviors, which can be active, passive, or interactive, featuring two people who secretly agree to displace the possibility of authentic interaction between each other. This dynamic of routines—usually designed to resemble caregiving—is, in fact, the opposite of being loving, caring, or giving. By refusing to accept what others around us have to offer, we tend to devalue them. This is an essential marker of irrelationship.
Who Is Who?—The Performer and the Audience
The components of a song-and-dance routine are choreographed to sustain irrelationship. The Performer overtly delivers care to the Audience, while the Audience covertly administers care to the Performer by pretending the Performer’s part in the routine is desirable and helpful. Thus the Performer sees him- or herself as the giver who administers care to the Audience, while the Audience, appearing to accept what the Performer offers, appears to be the receiver of the Performer’s ministrations. The behavior of both, however, is deliberately constructed to block the possibility of a genuine, reciprocal connection. The missing connection prevents the development of shared experience enjoyed in authentic relationships. Each participant’s role devalues the other by refusing to validate anything genuine he or she has to offer. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the irrelationship is that each party experiences isolation and a vague dissatisfaction with the other. Both know on some level that something essential is missing.
Irrelationship as a Survival Tool
Irrelationship is not the result of a failure on the part of either party. In fact, irrelationship is better described as a survival technique that gradually developed in a child who continues to use it in later years. As small children, we experienced the world as unstable, frightening, and sometimes hostile. This experience of instability, however, was actually generated by our caregiver’s emotional state—depression, anxiety, unhappiness, or other negative emotion—and made him or her unable to provide conditions that made us feel secure. To manage our anxiety, we used the skills at our disposal to create a song-and-dance routine that we hoped would make our caregiver feel better so that we could feel safe. Flipping roles, we became our parent’s caregiver: Julie brought ice packs to her mother in bed or massaged her feet; Liam tried to be funny and make his mom laugh; and Stanley listened quietly while his father complained about his boss. We did whatever our parents’ cues told us to do, hoping it would change their mood. When it worked—when their emotional state improved—we felt safe again and could relax.
As can be seen from these examples, the child’s routine may be that of either Performer or Audience, but sometimes it may include elements of both. In any case, the child is providing care that enables the ineffective caregiver to believe he or she is a good parent.
Having learned as children that our song-and-dance routines worked, we took them forward through our lives and used them whenever necessary to make those around us feel better and ourselves safer. Relating to others in this way is a project doomed from the start; it sets up situations that allow only emotionally guarded interactions that are neither open nor spontaneous and leave no space for sharing, closeness, or intimacy. In fact, the routines stifle awareness of actual human needs and prevent our learning how to meet those needs. Ironically, these routines establish and sustain a defensive dynamic—irrelationship—between parties that does not address the deep, perceived lack of safety, even in close relationships. Whether we’re acting as Performer or as Audience, neither touches the other meaningfully to relieve that unease.
Part of the deception of irrelationship is that it feels right, which is a clue that something is badly wrong. It’s comfortable because it’s numbing, although it looks real from the outside. The participants have unconsciously, but deliberately, chosen to protect themselves from participating meaningfully in the lives of one another. Therefore, use of irrelationship results in a “no winner, no loser” situation.
In abusive relationships, one participant exercises more power than the other, resulting in a winner and a loser. In couples affected by irrelationship, neither participant wins; both participants’ anxiety keeps them emotionally locked down. The joint investment in this mechanism is called brainlock. Brainlock is an emotional logjam in which nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Both participants selectively ignore the same things together. Most significantly, they ignore the fact that they are using a false connection with one another to defend against intimacy. It can be compared to two people who bury a treasure and then forget where they’ve buried it.
This doesn’t mean that when Performer and Audience interact nothing is going on between them. Their defensive constructs are interlocked so firmly that when they go into recovery, their most challenging task is to step back far enough from their anxiety to allow them to see that the song-and-dance routine they’ve created has been a stand-in for genuine caring behavior.
Sam and Claire’s Irrelationship Storyline
Two wannabe stars, Sam and Claire, met one another under the bright lights of New York’s Broadway theater world. Each of them sought to escape the unhappiness of failed former relationships. They were immediately attracted to one another, sharing a sense of familiarity and instant comfort. They joined their lives to love and support each other as they made their way toward stardom—at least that is what they thought. And it partly worked.
Sam succeeded in making it on Broadway. Claire’s less dramatic success in Off-Off-Broadway productions meant keeping her day job while continuing to struggle on the periphery of show business. After a short time, they began to question their love. They became uneasy with one another and began to act out an obvious song-and-dance routine. The question was, who would be the Performer, the overt caretaker, and who would be the receptive Audience? Before long, the exciting promise of healthy connection slid into the abyss of irrelationship. And because they
