Why Relationships Matter

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If you're living as if your life is bursting at the seams, slow down, whether making love or making dinner.

Living at a too-fast pace is bad for your health and bad for your relationships.

Instead of expanding your to-do list, expand the quality of each experience.

What's the most important thing you can do for your relationship? Slow down! Slow down when you're talking, slow down when you're making love or making dinner, slow down your life in general.

We have increased, and continue to increase, the pressure on ourselves to do more faster. We multitask, which we know from the research is simply a way of tricking ourselves into thinking we can be more productive by doing more than one thing at a time. Research shows that not only does it not work, but that the more you multitask, the less efficient and productive you become.

And multitasking is part of the larger phenomenon of keeping ourselves in a state of pressure. There is irony in the feeling that somehow we don't have time for our lives, as if our lives have somehow leapt the natural bounds of time and energy.

When we live at this too-fast pace, we induce physiologic changes–extra cortisol and adrenaline. In the short run, this may feel good. We feel successful at moving faster, getting more done. It also creates a state that helps us ignore feelings of fatigue or loneliness created by this exaggerated pace. Then, as with other chemical addictions, there is let down and craving that eventually drives us to get more, just to relieve withdrawal. In the meantime, our health suffers. This is the effect on us individually.

In relationships, our too-fast life deprives us of the time we need with our loved ones. And in the time we do have with each other, we are often tired, irritable, and distracted. Interacting in these states can actually damage relationships, making things worse than not being together at all.

The loneliness epidemic is not just about needing more people in our lives; it's also about not really connecting with people when we are with them.

We want and need so much from other people–to know them and be known by them, to care and receive caring, and to have shared experiences that knit us into couples, families, and communities. For these things to happen, we need more than just being in the same room, more than just exchanging words. We need to be able to attend to our bodies, feelings, and emotions, and beyond this, to notice the other's experiences. We need to be open enough to know differences as interesting instead of annoying. We need enough ease to welcome the other's requests rather than resenting one more demand that life is making. These experiences happen only if we slow down enough to live our lives rather than being imprisoned in them.

Slowing Down Conversations

Since much of a relationship happens in conversation, I ask the couples I work with to slow down when they're talking to each other. The pace of most conversations barely allows us to exchange information, much less sort through all the complex reactions and interactions. In any conversation, so much is happening all at once. We’re talking, listening, getting distracted, having memories, and feeling emotions. Things move fast, often without pauses or silences. Additionally, when emotions heighten, we tend to speed up—the opposite of what is needed.

Slowing things down gives us time to become aware of words, thoughts, feelings, nuance, ambiguity, and meanings. In an interesting experiment, neuroscientist Vinod Menon tracked the thought patterns of people as they listened to music and found, surprisingly, that subjects’ brains were actually more active during the pauses in the sound. Vinod says, “A pause is not a time where nothing happens.” [1]We must slow down to—as William Isaacs, expert in organizational psychology, said—"listen as the words cascade into silence"[2].

So if slowing down is so useful, why do we go so fast, even speeding up as conversations get difficult?

Don't Move the Way Fear Makes You Move

Here's what's happening. Inside your brain, the amygdala—the "safety first" center—is always on duty, alert to any sign of difficulty. It could be a tiger, but for most of us, it's a moment when our partner scowls, gets an unpleasant tone, or even says the dreaded, “We have to talk.” What happens next? Our amygdala goes into its "danger-danger" response: the fight, flight, freeze response. We then become verbally aggressive (fight), talk too fast (flight), or shut down (freeze). This self-protective response is instantaneous and not under our conscious control. It turns out that we cannot not get defensive; we can’t negotiate with or control the immediate reaction.

Why Relationships Matter

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What we can learn to do is to pause to allow the rest of our brain to catch up and to consider what is going on, including all the possibilities for interpretation and all of the options for response. Rumi said, "Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move."

For example: Your partner says, “It bums me out when you’re too tired to speak to me when I get home.” Your immediate response might be “Great! You try being with the kids all day and greeting me with a smile and dinner!” But if you wait and observe closely, you will feel the initial defensive response soften and pass. After a pause, you might say, “Of course, it does. Let’s talk later about what we can do differently.” This ability to observe your own feelings long enough for consideration of the situation and your options turns a moment that might damage your relationship into one that benefits it.

Can Our Life Be Too Big for Our Life?

Life, overfull, has us straining to keep up. And we always have reasons to hurry, reasons to overfill our days, reasons to leave no blank space for just being: A parent's voice in the recesses, needing, wanting, demanding our success. Our need for love and for feeling worthy and useful. And, of course, even deeper in our unconscious, the awareness of the limits imposed by mortality. Death is always there, no matter how concealed. We know we will eventually run out of time. All these are real forces. Can we relate to them without fear?

Can we stop responding by cramming more into each moment, hour, lifetime? Instead of expanding the number of experiences, can we expand the quality of each experience by being fully present? Can we stop screen-checking and fully listen when our son wants to report his latest ballfield victory or our partner needs comforting after an upsetting phone call? Can we take care of all we must do and also attend to our need to—and our loved ones' need for us to—simply be?

When the morning light streams through your window as you get coffee, can you take a full breath and a full moment just to enjoy?

The white space is what makes poetry—on the page, and in our lives.

[1] Lisa Krieger, “When the Music Stops, the Brain Gets Going,” Mercury News, August 2, 2007; Sridharan et al., “Neural Dynamics of Event Segmentation in Music: Converging Evidence for Dissociable Ventral and Dorsal Networks,” Neuron 55, no. 3 (2007): 521–32, https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(07)00500-4; Maggie Jackson, Uncertain (Prometheus Books, 2023).

[2] William Isaacs, Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together (Crown Currency, 1999).

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