“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” ~ Brené Brown

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One of the biggest reasons we get into relationships is companionship.

We want connection, comfort, emotional holding. We want someone to share our life with. Someone who sees and understands us, who can stand beside us when life becomes heavy and celebrate with us when life feels light.

We want to know that we matter to someone on the good days and even more on the not-so-good ones. We don’t want to go through life alone and lonely, and we’re not meant to.

At the heart of it, most of us are not looking for perfection. We are looking for presence. Someone with whom we can share our silliness, laughter, sorrows, deep dark secrets, and sometimes just silence. Someone who always has our back and who can hold space when things fall apart. We want emotional presence and availability, not just physical presence.

And sadly, the very thing that a relationship needs is the one that most human relationships lack. There is physical presence but hardly anything emotional about it. People share the events of the day, plans for tomorrow, sleep in the same bed, travel the world together, yet they cannot open their hearts to each other.

At times, the only thing they can share with each other is silence that no one understands, and that is where a kind of abandonment begins that almost no one talks about. This is not about someone being left alone because the other wasn’t physically present. It’s when you’re left alone, unseen, unheard, and unmet in a space that was supposed to be a fertile ground for your dreams, desires, and hopes to grow and come alive. It’s when you’re emotionally abandoned, being left out in the cold with no one to witness and offer some warmth.

And the thing with this abandonment is that you don’t want anyone to offer warmth and comfort; you only want that one person whom you considered as yours. And when they leave you out in the cold, it hits differently. Unlike physical abandonment, this one is subtle, quiet, and much harder to name and even understand. The other is still there. It’s not like they’ve walked out of the relationship. But even then, they’re not there.

They aren’t available for your needs and wants. They don’t understand or are not a part of your emotional world. There is no sharing of emotional warmth, no offering of comfort and reassurance when things get rough. Conversations become transactional, presence becomes mechanical, and slowly, the relationship begins to feel strangely empty. And you continue to carry the weight of your own unmet needs and of the relationship all by yourself.

And this is what most people don’t understand. Abandonment is not always about someone leaving. It’s when your needs go unmet, emotions are dismissed, you are nowhere on the priority list, met with excuses or defensiveness. Everything about you and your emotional world seems more like a task or even inconvenience.

And this kind of abandonment is hard to recognise because at times it’s not loud or in your face. It happens slowly and gradually. When conversations become shorter, more guarded, when fear sits in the driver’s seat, curiosity dies, and there is nothing but distance between two people even if they’re physically together.

This kind of an abandonment can be difficult to identify because the relationship may look perfectly functional on the surface. But inside, it’s hollow.

It often shows up when:

>> Your partner avoids deeper conversations about feelings. There is no time, bandwidth, or simply no desire to engage.

>> When you express distress, the response is indifference, irritation, or silence, or, at times, being made to feel that you’re too much.

>> Difficult conversations are brushed aside or postponed indefinitely. The time to get into them simply doesn’t arrive.

>> You feel like you are the only one trying to maintain emotional connection. You’re the one reaching out, asking, trying to make amends, resolve but you get nothing from the other side apart from defensiveness or stonewalling.

>> There is little curiosity about your inner world anymore. They don’t ask what’s going with you internally, and even if they do, that ask is hollow.

>> Comfort and reassurance are rarely offered when you need them.

>> You hesitate to share your feelings because it feels pointless. Somewhere you already know how the scene will play out, so you start keeping everything inside.

>> Conversations revolve mostly around logistics rather than emotional connection.

>> Your partner seems emotionally unavailable during difficult moments.

>> You start feeling lonely despite being in the relationship.

>> You slowly begin to question whether your needs are “too much” or if something is wrong with you because they seem to be cool and absolutely normal like nothing happened.

And slowly, something inside you begins to shrink. You begin to shrink and start losing parts of yourself. You start telling yourself stories that maybe you are expecting too much or that such things happen in relationships; it’s a phase. Maybe this is just how things become with time. You over-adjust, over-explain, or sometimes just stay quiet, hoping and wishing that one day things will become better if you tried hard enough, did more, showed up differently, and you keep doing this until you simply can’t. Until you get exhausted and crushed by the weight of your own unmet needs and cries to be seen, heard, and held. When the silence in your inner world begins to scream. And that’s the time to pause and see what’s really going on. See whether you can go on like this because what is a relationship between two people without emotional connection and presence? Then, what difference does it make whether you’re physically together or not when there is nothing shared about the space between two people?

Whether emotional abandonment happens due to inherent incompatibility, repeated conflict, avoidance, lack of maturity, or capacity, understanding the reason doesn’t fix anything.

Which is why sometimes, instead of continuously trying to adjust or explain yourself, it may be time to pause and ask an honest question. It’s time to question what’s really going on here because a relationship where someone is physically present but emotionally absent can leave you feeling just as abandoned as if they had walked away. It’ emotional neglect that cuts deep. Something that impacts every cell of your body, something that your body remembers for a long time.

But here’s a harder truth. Many times, we let this happen not just because someone else has checked out, they lack capacity, or can’t show up, but because somewhere along the way we have also abandoned ourselves.

When we stop listening to that quiet voice inside that tells us something isn’t right, minimise our own needs, convince ourselves that maybe we are asking for too much, feeling too deeply, expecting too much closeness, too much emotional presence, we set the stage for someone else to abandon us as well.