Giving up on important aspects in your relationship is deflating.
Giving into your partner feels as if you are denying important parts of yourself in favor of your romantic relationship.
Giving up on something you want, or giving up on getting through to your partner is a sense of defeat and or disempowerment.
Giving in to your partner and agreeing to do things their way can feel like you’ve lost the battle.
Such experiences of loss, self-denial and defeat threaten your self-identity. You may try to cling onto your personal identity in other ways, putting a strain on other parts of the relationship. So it’s important to actually deal with the existential issues of giving up parts of yourself, and of giving in to another, rather than displacing it onto those other weak spots.
What happens if you don’t deal with the conflicts around giving in and giving up?
Giving in to your partner or giving up parts of yourself to be in the relationship often leads to infidelity where you can bring the shrunken parts of you to life. In addition you can find yourself looking for other venues to express your true self, getting deeper into work and promotion and or joining clubs and becoming an important player in the group, moving further and further away from your partner.
Giving up
Giving up may mean that you throw in the towel as your efforts have failed. You don’t see the point of banging your head against a brick wall. Defeat and failure overwhelm you in ways that make you numb out and retreat. Depression may come to the rescue, keeping you small and numb so you don’t feel the searing pain and fear of being forced to live a less than full life.
Giving up a part of yourself means shrinking to accommodate your partner, molding yourself to your partner’s tastes. Perhaps it’s a familiar coping mechanism that you first adopted in dealing with the overbearing personality of a parent. Giving up a part of yourself works to lower the threat of loss of the connection between you and your loved one. Your need to depend on their closeness, care and protection involves you staying under cover – strangling yourself while pumping your loved one up.
The outcome of giving up a vital part of yourself causes anger, resentment, hate and a constant internal war between your conflicting needs to depend and not depend on your loved one.
Giving in
Giving in has a whole other connotation – that you cede you power to your partner, when you no longer assert your own right to act according to your values or – all in the cause of ensuring the consistency of the romantic partnership. It can be deflating and demeaning. But it can also set up expectations that if you ‘give in’ on one issue, your partner will do so on another issue. This is rarely the case, and you end up bitter and revengeful. Wrestling with ‘giving in’ propels you into a perpetual swing from feeling powerful and strong – pushing your partner away, to feeling disempowered and needy, helpless and ashamed wanting your partner to fill you up with a sense of love and value.
Giving in and giving up – It’s about our beliefs about changing ourselves or others
“We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” Adam Phillips ‘Giving Up’ published by Hamish Hamilton, 2024
Sangita, a 30-year-old Artificial Intelligence engineer was keen to hold on to her personal autonomy. She feared that moving in with her boyfriend Paul, a 34-year-old landscape designer, would be giving up her independence. She imagined that she would have to abide by Paul’s ways. That meant she would have to give up being herself.
For Sangita, it was an existential question. Does she set up home with Paul and make her boundaries more malleable to please him or does she stay firm and risk friction? If she allows her boundary edges to soften and mix with Paul’s will she even be herself anymore? Would she be giving in to her desire for a safe and stable relationship and giving up a part of her self-identity in the process?
Would her friends and indeed Paul perceive her being unable to commit without understanding her deep conflict?
Giving up and giving in- both threaten loss
The conflict flared up when Paul talked to her about keeping things tidy and how to behave around his friends. At these moments Sangita was thrown back in time reliving the conflict she faced trying to be the perfect dutiful daughter that her parents demanded – taking care of her parents. The sacrifice involved giving up her chance to have a social life with peers. She couldn’t bear the thought of her parents thinking of her as disloyal, selfish or irresponsible, so she gave in to their orders to be their caretaker – an act of gratitude for her life. She also had to give up the part of her that wanted to be a separate person, moving on her life’s arc while showing care and love to her parents. But that path wasn’t available. She felt the pervading threat of loss of love if she deviated from her parents’ norms. She experienced the dread of loss arising from stifling her own need to be herself and explore the world. And one more loss that hung around her neck like the proverbial albatross – If she did her own thing she would be disowned because she had brought shame of her family.
Her parents didn’t facilitate the transition from dependent to independence, making Sangita’s path more treacherous, and lined with guilt. If she gave up her dependence on her parents she would lose their approval, and her sense of belonging. If she gave in to their wishes she would be giving up her move towards adulthood.
Now the same conflict flared up with Paul. Will she have to give up Paul in order to feel secure in her autonomy and independence or will she and Paul find ways of enabling her to experience her transition from child to adult while maintaining the bonds of connection?
Giving up and giving in – firming up personal boundaries
There are many ways in which Sangita can strengthen her sense of self and reduce the threats of loss involved in giving up and giving in. First she has to become conscious of her attempts to finish her developmental path in the romantic relationship. Individual therapy helped her to find her sore spots and identify them using a vocabulary that allowed her to communicate with Paul rather than just act out.
1. Focusing on the fact that Paul has chosen her as his partner because he wants to be with her authentic self.
2. Turning down the volume on that voice that says unless she is a good dutiful obeying partner she will be disappoint him and he will disown her.
3. Turning up the volume of his curiosity about her inner experience and opening up to create a more fruitful dialogue where exchange is tolerated and valued.
4. Choosing to do what she wants without having to hide as if she is a naughty girl, or that her behavior will make him mad – leading to reprobation and discord.
Giving up and giving in to the positive self-empowerment inner voices
While Sangita can experiment and take risks in order to break out of the shrinking mold of childhood, there are healthy core voices inside her that she should give into and give herself up to:
1. Giving into the voice that says she is entitled to have a life of her own and discover her own potential, passions and talents – while still loving her partner and wanting to share life with him, in a self-empowered manner.
2. Giving in to the voice that says her opinions matter and that her value doesn’t rest only on Paul’s approval or comfort.
3. Giving up the voice that says she has to earn love by being a good girl and pleasing Paul. Even if he isn’t pleased it won’t end the connection.
4. Giving up the voice that says she has to choose between being her authentic self and having a partner.
The Reality of Giving in and Giving up can be wholesome
Reality can be disappointing when faced with having to reconcile with the fact that choosing one thing means letting something else go. It often involves mourning the loss of something precious to you. But it is part of the process of growing up and creating priorities that evolve with new circumstances that are often out of your control.
Reality can be more fulfilling by presenting opportunities for mixing and matching that can be invigorating. The all-or-nothing abyss changes to a set of available alternatives that involve some losses and some gains, so you can lean on your partner and allow you to be true to yourself.
Copyright, Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D. 2024
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