Stop blocking out feelings and be honest

Hi, Carolyn: I’ve been with my fiancée for four years, and I learned pretty early on that the only kind of emotions she wants to see from me are either happiness or romantic love. Anything else she labels “whining” and tells me I should grow up (which I probably should … someday). That doesn’t really bother me because I’ve never really looked for emotional support.

Recently, though, she discovered that I’d opened up to my best friend about my frustrations with my career and asked his advice. This upset her because I’d never come to her with these things. She made me feel guilty about shutting her out.

I’m frustrated because experience has taught me to keep things like fear, anxiety, anger, frustration and sadness to myself. Does a healthy relationship require mutual emotional support? I’m totally willing to give her my support but feel no particular need for hers. – Feeling Twisted

Whine, whine, whine.

Given the range (and weirdness) of the ways people make themselves happy, I’m loath to say a healthy relationship requires anything, except perhaps mutual consent and mutual contentment.

You two, of course, have neither; she feels shut out against her will, and you don’t want to get caught feeling anything.

So while mutual support may not be something you offer, two unhappy parties at a two-person party definitely mean your relationship requires something.

To start with, your fiancée deserves an honest explanation. Stick to facts and avoid accusations by using “I feel …”: “I feel that when I share a problem with you, you dismiss it as whining.” If nothing else, it’s good practice. “I feel I feel I feel I feel.”

She can either defend her intolerance (see below) or deplore it, though the latter might take her some time; could be she’s as unnerved by frailty as you are. It would explain the attraction.

You, meanwhile, owe it to yourself to become reacquainted with your own nerve endings. You can’t block out all the bad stuff and expect the good to be unaffected. How can your fiancée read and respond to your moods, and thereby make you feel loved and accepted, when half those moods are an act?

Trusting someone to love you when you feel at your most vulnerable – to be your refuge – isn’t just girl stuff. It’s the fudge on the sundae, the prize in the Cracker Jack box, the whole point of mating for life.

So when you feel, share. (Judiciously. And follow up with a real effort to address the problem, in case there’s truth to the whining thing.) Seek her support. I disagree that you don’t want it; why the “grow up” if you weren’t reaching out? And why did it hurt?

If she continues to punish vulnerability, the answer is not to go back to feigning invulnerability or, egads, marrying your emotional hall monitor. It’s to request compassion. And, to break up if your bid is denied.

You may not need to lean on a mate all that much. But as a guy who has not only formed but also leans on a best-friendship - and now, on top of that, reached out to a long-winded, sincerity-mocking advice columnist – you apparently know full well how nice it is simply to know that you can.