It was a Sunday. The children were at her mother's.
You'd made no plan for it, which is maybe why it happened at all. She put her head on your chest during a film neither of you were really watching and left it there.
Later, in bed, she let you all the way in. The real one, where she looked at you and stayed, rather than the version where she's somewhere else and you both quietly agree not to mention it.
You fell asleep with your hand on her hip thinking, "there she is. I remember her."
Tuesday she answers you in one word.
Wednesday she flinches when you put your hand on the small of her back at the sink. By Thursday you've gone back through Sunday frame by frame, twice, three times, looking for the thing you did wrong, the word, the moment, the wrong hand on the wrong day, because something must have gone wrong.
Was it the reaching? A woman doesn't open like that and then close like this unless the man did something in between.
You didn't. Nothing went wrong on Tuesday. What you are watching is the cost of what happened on Sunday.
Part One: Her body is paying for Sunday
A nervous system can only hold so much openness at once. Dan Siegel calls the range a person can stay present inside their window of tolerance (the phrase is his, the week you're having is hers).
Open past the edge of it, even into something good, especially into something good, and the body does what it's always done when it's taken in more than it can metabolise.
It closes to catch up.
For a woman whose body learned early that opening wasn't safe, Sunday was expensive. She spent something to be that undefended with you. The cold you're meeting on Tuesday is her body paying the bill for the beautiful experience you both had on Sunday……
Stephen Porges has a name for the check the body runs beneath thought, faster than you can think it. Neuroception.
Her system was scanning for safety on Sunday too, yet it let her through, it let that experience through…
Then, in the days after, it does what any system does once it's taken a risk that paid off: It goes back and checks the locks, harder than usual. Almost like a cooling off, turning off the faucet of feelings.
That's the flinch at the sink. Her hands still in the water, the tap running behind it. Your hand, trying to touch her there arrived in the middle of an audit she doesn't even know she's running.
Hello subconsious!
Now this is the thing most overlook: She is often as surprised by the cold as you are. She is not doing this on purpose, intentionally.
She couldn't have told you on Sunday night that Tuesday was coming. The retreat is weather moving through a body that opened wider than it usually lets itself, and is now bracing for the fall it's always been taught comes next.
Part Two: Two and a half of your three moves make it worse
The first is to chase. To reach for her more, to try to recreate Sunday, to get the closeness back so you can stop feeling the cold, so you can stop hurting..
Her body reads the reaching as pressure at the exact moment it has the least to give. It closes further.
You feel that. You reach harder. The loop is running fully now, and neither of you started it on purpose.
The second is to take the cold personally and to respond in kind: go cold back. To decide she is punishing you, or that Sunday meant less to her than it did to you, and to withdraw to protect yourself.
She feels the withdrawal as proof that the door only stays open if she performs. So next time she won't open. Why would she? Look what it cost.
The third is to demand she explain. To ask what is wrong, and then, when "I'm fine" arrives, to ask again, because you can see "fine" isn't the whole story, or even part of it….
Ofcourse, you are right that it isn't…… and you are also wrong that Tuesday is when she can tell you.
She CAN NOT….
The words haven't loaded yet and asking her, in some way pressuring her to find them, to produce them, before her body has fully caught up yet- only adds the pressure of a test to a system already over its limit.
Looping continues….
Part Three: What I know from the other side of it
I know this from the inside, because I lived it.
I would open, occasionally, all the way, have the most beautiful connective time, and then I'd go quiet for days. There is no way I could have told you why. I would be tearful after sex and call it hormones, being tired, or "just the way I am".
I would let him get close again, yearning for that connection and low and behold, I could not stand his touch- or the closeness… Ofcourse beating myself up over it, reading the whole thing as evidence that something in me was wrong, I was broken. Or worse, we were incompatible.
I just didn't have the language then that I have now.
Sensation as language.
The understanding that the body is reporting when it retreats. When I first came across this, I didn't understand the real impact of learning to describe the FELT sense… to be able to share a moment, in time and space, that I was having, a felt sensation in my body- and the other person could feel what that feels like in their body too.
For example: There was a moment when you approached me and my back tightened, my jaw stiffened, and my heart rate sped up.
So all of a sudden there is not only a cognitive knowing, but a visceral knowing of what it feels like in the body.
That creates connection.
There's a study men find hard to believe until they've stayed with it a while. Dr Gary Salyer put the same question to a room of seventy women and six men.
"Have you felt afraid for your physical safety in the past week?" Every woman's hand went up.
Not one of the men had felt it in the past year. You are not living in the same weather that she is.
Her body carries a baseline yours has never had to carry. That's why opening costs her what it doesn't cost you, and why the days after are real rather than a mood, or "her time of the month."
Part Four: What keeps the door from locking
Stay close enough that she can feel you haven't gone anywhere, far enough that she isn't being pressed. Presence without a hand out, without wanting to "fix her"
You in the kitchen, steady, unbothered, is doing more than you think. Her body isn't reading your words that week. It is reading your nervous system. If yours stays calm and regulated while hers recovers, you become the thing it can come back to.
Let the retreat be allowed. Don't make her pay for being cold with your face. No rolling eyes, no grimances, no little tell tale signs.
Because, let me tell you, she is watching!
A man who can meet that without collapsing and without attacking teaches her body something it may never have been taught. That she can open, and close, and open again, and the door will still be there. A door that does not lock is worth more than any one perfect Sunday.
Try this tonight. The Small Bid.
Give her one signal that costs her nothing to receive, and then leave her be.
Bring her a cup of tea, put it down beside her with no question attached, no pulling for approval.
Put a hand on the top of her back for two seconds, and be gone before she has to respond to it.
Let your fingers brush hers as you hand something over. A sliver of connection. Your palm flat between her shoulder blades as you pass behind her.
Reach with nowhere to go, and then actually go nowhere. Do not linger to see what happened. Do not look at her to check whether it landed. The going away is the message.
It is creating Trust. You are telling her body that you are there and that the offer of touch is still on the table for whenever she is ready.
When your own patience runs out: Notice out loud, then stop. No question mark on the end.
I am finding this week hard. Then stop talking. That is The Full Stop™, and it lets you be honest without turning your honesty into another thing she has to manage.
Watch it happen once. Her softening back toward you without being chased.
Choosing you from the inside rather than being coaxed. The trust her body is slowly rebuilding, the connection, a completely different feeling to be met than to be managed.
Now I am speaking from experience. I know that from both sides. I have watched it in the couples I work with, and I lived it myself, going quiet for days and unable to say why.
I also know where it goes when a man learns to hold it, and where it goes when he doesn't.
So, she didn't vanish, and you weren't wrong.
She went to the place her body goes to recover from having trusted you. The only real question is whether the door is still open when she comes back for it.
That part is yours.
Her body braced. Patterns can be changed.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette