Emotional unkindness is a failure to provide for emotional needs such as encouragement, understanding, respect and compassion. It includes ignoring you when you start a conversation, showing you none or very little attention and no empathy. It entails rejection, silent treatment and withdrawing.
Emotional unkindness entails an absence of concern or care at times when you would most expect it – such as when you’re sick, in hospital, recovering from giving birth to a baby, or when you’re worn out and need a break.
Emotional unkindness also includes refusing to share responsibility for your children’s care and development, threatening to abandon you if he doesn’t get his way, making it emotionally difficult if you want to leave the house or leave the relationship, complaining whenever you ask for any kind of support, or making promises but not keeping them, saying ‘yes’ to doing something then ‘forgetting’, or it entails helping but with conditions attached.
Anyone can be emotionally unkind on occasion whether it’s done ignorantly or purposefully. There isn’t really a problem to write about if the unkind person takes responsibility for their behaviours and makes valid attempts to change. But the problem I’m addressing here is quite different –
Red flags that there’s a major problem:
all your attempts at getting your partner to take responsibility for his unkind neglectful behaviors fall on deaf ears
he denies that he’s done anything harmful
he minimizes your experience
he turns the situation about face and blames you
If this is the case, you need to listen to your gut instinct, admit to yourself that what you are experiencing is what you are experiencing! Otherwise you’re in danger of making one excuse after another for your partner’s emotional unkindness and violation of trust. You’re in danger of staying in a relationship in which his behaviors get worse and worse over time, and the long-term effects on you will get worse and worse.
It is often shocking for women when their partner repeatedly neglects them emotionally. But gender socialization is full of messages about how to be a man and how to be a woman.
Unfortunately, men experience social pressure to suppress expressions of love, care and empathy – in fact many men are bullied for doing so.
On the other hand women experience the opposite pressure – that it is the woman’s role to do the emotional work in relationship – and for this women are applauded. This rigid socialization not only harms women, it harms men.
At the social level, everything we do influences our social and cultural norms.
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