Taking control: Have you learned to be vulnerable to your partner?

Just allow one person to have access to your being! Expose your fears and your most personal needs and let love abound!

As a social being, you are vulnerable to your environment, which instills both good and bad practices and beliefs throughout your life.  The same vulnerability is critical in a romantic relationship to enable your uniqueness to offer deep and unconditional affection for another person.

Vulnerability defined!

Vulnerability is being exposed to hurt physically, emotionally or manipulated by those who have power over material or non-material goods and services by denying permission to access them.  In relationships, vulnerability denotes allowing another person a full access to your being and private space; thus denying ego to protect you in moments of weakness or covering undesirable behavior or withholding information you regard as private or confidential.

Why you have to learn to be vulnerable to you partner!

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable denotes you are willing to unreservedly give yourself to your partner so that love could abound. According to John Browlby, the theme of the Theory of Attachment is availability and responsiveness to personal needs as between parent and child; and between romantic partners.  For you to know whether you have allowed yourself to be vulnerable to your partner, you have to recall whether your partner knows both your weaknesses and strengths. If you have withheld certain information because you felt it will disrobe you of the current image you have projected, it means you have allowed your ego to maintain your false image.  The following will assist you in evaluating your willingness to be vulnerable to your partner:

1.    You have subtle fear to disclose your fears and weakness: You may recall situations when you avoided an opportunity to talk about yourself especially with regard to issues where you made mistakes. I do not advocate for staying in your unpleasant past; but your past could shed some light on how you made poor choices. Remember that you cannot change what you have not acknowledged as needing change.

2.    Responsiveness of your partner to unpleasant you: Would it not be helpful to know the scope of your partner’s capacity to accept you for who you are? Life is composed of both good and bad experiences; and it would be helpful to know that your partner will carry your burden when you are physically and emotionally incapacitated. It is also important to note that secrets tend to create gaps which ultimately attract mistrust and withholding of affection.  Such holes  are not conducive to building lasting relationship because even though one does not have concrete prove of these internal cognitive processes, a person have a way of ‘knowing’ that the relationship is not based on trust.

3.    Overcoming fixation on emotional wounds: Conscious disclosure of weaknesses denotes that you have matured and believe in yourself. It is trusting on your strength which is accepting and living in the power of positive energy. Willful omission of weaknesses on the other hand is motivated by fear which is a negative energy. Such poor response to your weaknesses can only widen the gap more instead of bringing you closer to your partner. 

The benefit of being vulnerable to each other is building love on trust. Love thrives when you disclose emotional issues into the open so that they have no hold on you. If your partner is mature, she/he will also disrobe ego stuff so that both of you could be vulnerable to each other.  Both will respect and deeply honor each other and willingly be supportive to bring the best out of each other. That is what ideal relationship is about!