The most capable woman in the room is often the loneliest, whether she's single or in a relationship | Ep 159
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I'm recording this one from inside a blizzard, which honestly feels appropriate — because this episode is about what happens when you white-knuckle your way through life alone instead of letting people in.
We're talking about hyper-independence: where it comes from, why so many high-achieving women wear it like a badge of honor, and why it might be the exact thing standing between you and the connection you're craving — whether that's in dating, in a long-term relationship, or just in your friendships.
I get into the through line between the easy-going, accommodating version of yourself you learned to perform and the loneliness or resentment you might be feeling now. And I share a very unglamorous story from my own marriage that made me laugh at myself a little — because this stuff is ongoing, even when you know better.
If you've ever caught yourself saying "whatever works for you" when you actually had a preference, this one's for you.
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Transcript:
Welcome back to another episode of I Think I Like You, the podcast. I'm Clara Archwalagur, and this is a podcast for high-achieving, highly independent, high-functioning women looking to find depth and connection in relationships. You can find more information about me and the work that I do at ithinkilikyou.co. I run this podcast every week. I also run a Substack every week, everything from videos on how to attract a more emotionally available partner to the current thing that's helping me fight in a better way with my husband. And all of that is free. I don't charge for my Substack. All of that will be linked as well in the show notes. And as a reminder, if you like the show, if you're enjoying it, I would be so grateful if you would leave a rating, leave a review, either on Spotify or iTunes or both. And please, please, please share with a friend. I just, um... a dear friend of mine launched a podcast a couple of weeks ago. It's called The 40 Portal, and I'll share it here, and I will include the, a link to that in the show notes. And I have been sending episodes to friends as I listen to them, genuinely from a place of like, "Oh, this person would really like this podcast," but I also know it makes a big difference in terms of getting the word out about the show, so it does the same thing for me. Hmm. Okay. Okay. Before we dive in, I mean, I'm quite literally in the midst of a blizzard. I'm recording today in the room in our house that has two walls that are mostly windows, and then the two other walls are French doors into our TV room, and then our library, our music room that it's becoming, and that also looks into more windows that are looking out just at the snow. So, um, yeah, in the blizzard, in the blizzard again. Um, I've had to get very active, I'll say, when it comes to fighting this winter inertia, which is a new feeling for me. I usually trend towards, let's hibernate, let's be cozy. But if I think about it, this time last year, my son was, gosh, three months, three months old, and I was still in the midst of like, you know, waking up several times in the middle of the night, breastfeeding. I was also riding high on the hormones, post, post-motherhood, and he was sleeping all the time. So it was just a different window into life. And then the year prior, well, I didn't have a kid, and I would have basked in the coziness and the ability to, you know, work all day, write all day, watch movies with my husband all day. We're in the midst of watching the series, um, Department Q, and I'm like, "Man, if, if we didn't, if we didn't have this 16-month-old rolling around, we could just, we could just binge-watch this whole thing." Um, but there are lots of, lots of merits to life at this point. But I will say that, yeah, I was really intentional this weekend. Knowing this storm was coming, I got out on Saturday morning. We have, um, a really cool sauna near our house. There's a farm that has a variety of different like outlets and outcropping, so there's like a tavern there. Of course, all of the fields where you can pick things when we're not living in the frozen tundra. Um, there is a market store, so many other things that I could, that I could name. If you actually are visiting from the city, it's called Gregg Farm, and it's, uh, lovely. But they now have a sauna. So a dear friend of mine, sometime last week, was like, "We're gonna sauna on Saturday morning. Do you wanna go?" And initially in my head, I was like, "Nah." And then I was like, "Oh, I'd better book this. I better book something to get me out of the house." And I was so glad that I did when I got to that point, because Saturday morning also found me getting an oil change at 7:30 in the morning. Um, so yeah, it was great to have that respite. And as I was walking up to the sauna... This is, this is an outdoor sauna, okay? So you're out in a field by a pond. The cold plunge. I've been to places where they have, you know, the sauna, the hot tub, and then the cold plunge, and the cold plunge is very, like one you could buy on Instagram, right, and have installed in your home kinda thing or adjacent to your home. This cold plunge is basically like a trough. It's very clean. It's very clean, but it is literally a big bin filled with cold water. Uh, but I love it. I love how off-the-cuff it all is, how casual it all is. The sauna itself is beautiful, and there are six people that can book the sauna. So myself and two friends went, and there were three other people, and they were all just lovely. Like, we had really nice conversation, which I'm, I'm feeling very present to. So that was really nice. Um, and then I've been getting more into my Pilates reformer classes, which is kind of surprising me. I was a diehard mat girl and am really taking to the reformer. But I honestly think it has more to do with the fact that I am going to a place, and there are other people, and I'm in this beautiful studio. Um, and yeah, it doesn't hurt that my back is feeling a hell of a lot better. After lugging around my son, um, for the last almost year and a half. So there's that, and then I'm sitting n- oh, no, wait. Where is it? I'm sitting next to... I mean, this is, like, my forever therapy, but I have a really good book that I'm reading right now. I've never read any Adriana Trigiani. I don't know if I'm saying her name correctly, but I saw one of her fiction books, this looks like a new book, on the shelf of the library. It's called The View from Lake Como. Not Cuomo, it's the lake in New Jersey, not Italy. Though I think she's gonna go to Italy in the book. It's fun. Like, I'm really... It's a really nice read. Like, I got into bed last night and I was reading it, and it just, it felt good. It felt really, really good. And, um, I, this would be... I'm shooting to finish this by the end of February, so that would be four books that I've read since the beginning of the year. Two of them are memoirs. Um, What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo? I think that's who it's by. Don't quote me on that. Very good. And then I inhaled, as everyone is inhaling, the book Strangers, um, by, gosh, the names are... I think her name is Bell Bond, and the name is... You know what, y'all? I'm gonna Google that right now, 'cause I just wanna know. Bell Burden. I knew it was a double B. That was very good. And then I finally got to reading, which I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, Kathryn Newman's Wreck. If you are new to Kathryn Newman's wor- work, I'm just, I'm just adding in a casual, like, book chat here, if you will, so you can skip ahead to the rest of the episode if you want. But if you're new to Kathryn Newman's, uh, fiction work, then I would start with We All Want Impossible Things. Her more recent novels, Wreck and Sandwich, were excellent, but I personally think that, like, We All Want Impossible Things and then Sandwich are her best. But I did read that. I love Kathryn Newman. I also love her Substack. And then, yeah, now I'm reading this other fiction novel, and, um, I do have a memoir on my bedside that I also snagged from the library that I'm hoping to start in early March. Maybe sooner, if I get to finishing this one. But- But again, that, that kid, he's always in the picture. He's always taking up time. Fortunately, he's very cute. Um, so yeah, I th- I just thought I would, I would drop in with that because it has really been an active effort to manage my mood, my mental health, and just kinda make it through a lot of time that we're spending, all three of us- Mm-hmm ... in, in the house. And this kind of dovetails, you know, just the management, as you will, of a relationship dovetails with our topic of conversation today. So let's get into it. I have spoken about the tendency to, quote, "do it all ourselves" on numerous episodes before. I don't think as directly as this one, and it always feels worth revisiting. So the tendency to do it all ourselves is definitely a quality I wore as a badge of honors for many years. I still do wear in some ways as a badge of honor, if I'm being totally honest. But I've also come to realize the really not so helpful effects that it can have on not just my life and others' lives. It comes big into play with my clients. For my clients who either aren't meeting anyone, struggling to meet someone, are still single and they don't want to be, or those in relationships and they feel a lot of resentment towards their partners. And I specifically love breaking down topics of this kind because to me, and I really apply this to myself as well, I am so in this. It provides us with such agency. Like when I start to feel resentment towards my husband or in my marriage, frames of this kind have me going, "Okay, what can I do within my own life to shift my own reality, shift my experience, understand my role in this?" And whether we're single, coupled, or somewhere in between, this always applies. And I find that the more loneliness, lack of connection, and resentment that we feel, or any of those things, like if you're like, "Oh, I'm just feeling really lonely right now, but I'm not feeling resentment," I still think this applies. Take those emotions, put them in a bubble, and then draw a dotted line to our tendency to just handle things on our own, to just navigate life on our own. There's a direct correlation between those two things. And I find in my own life, especially in the season I'm talking about, this really hard winter, I made a point yesterday to get out with friends even though it was just, like, going down the road to a kind of empty restaurant that still happened to be open given the storm that was coming in, that had an area for our kids to play. I mean, I, I don't even know what Jude ate off the floor. Like, he came home so dirty. It was kinda boring. The food was not that good, but the company made all the difference. And I made a point during that gathering to just share how I was struggling, because I could feel some of those feelings of lack of connection or loneliness start to rise in me. And so anyway, coming back to that tendency, right, to just kinda carry it all, do it all on our own, that high-functioning, hyper-independent. What also tends to fall within that, meaning if we are that person, then we likely also struggle to ask for help. We tend to be the one who's always managing and planning, like leading the group organizing or p- making the reservation or planning the excursion. We like to be in control. This is a big piece of it for me. And then somewhere in there often is a fear of being a burden to other people And I remember years ago, a coach of mine saying to me, "Hyper-independence is a trauma response, too." I was just like, "Damn it. Damn it." So big picture, this behavior is a response to something. It's not just a personality trait. All that said, we don't wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater, which if you're a client of mine, I know my clients listen. I tend to hit on these jags where I use certain phrases. So with all my clients right now, I'm, like, taking that phrase, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater," and applying it to their own lives. So if you're listening, I, I see you right now. But in this case, like, the version of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here is, like, I attribute a lot of, excuse me, my ability to handle a lot, navigate life, like really get shit done, with a lot of my own accomplishments, and that feels really good. And myself along with the people that I work with, like, we don't need another reason to beat ourselves up or to find something we need to fix about ourselves. I love my ability to do a lot. It's like a well-oiled machine if I'm well-slept. Like, I like the hum of that. But it's also something I have to watch so I don't burn myself out, I don't resent the hell out of my husband, or I'm not connecting with those around me, like really staying in touch with the challenges of my life. And I can apply that very simply to the excursion yesterday, where I was like, there is a version of this day where I could have my son crawl around on the floor, and I could hand him different toys or let him open this cabinet and he could entertain himself. And I don't know, I could rearrange the drawers, or I could bake something that I maybe think would be more valuable to the family And there was a time in my life where it wouldn't even register for me to not do that thing. Like, I would just do that thing. I would try to do things around the home or create something, accomplish something, that's really the word, accomplish something, in order to gain a certain emotion. And what I would end up feeling was more depleted and more alone. And what I really needed was to bundle up my child, like get us into snow gear, explore whether he would go sledding at this farm, and then meet up with friends at the, the, the tavern, the tap room. And so I'm, I'm breaking all that down because I think there's a lot of nuance and subtlety here. There is the first step of this, of getting better at asking for help, and I'm gonna get to some of the like what do we dos and solutions later on, but I think that that subtlety is important because there's, there's a source for this way of being, meaning there's a place where this response to operate in this way Came from for all of us. My own ability to, quote, "do it all on my own" stems from the nature of my parents' divorce. My mom was a single mom. She took on the brunt of the childcare. She was also working part-time. So there's a certain weight to the day-to-day, her stress, her emotional load that I was carrying there. My dad was much older when he had me. If you listened to the podcast before, you might recall that my parents had quite a bit age difference. My dad was 62 when I was born. His age, combined with the nature of his work, combined with who he was as a person, like, he just was not that emotionally present. He was really present as a provider, but not as a parental resource. He really couldn't handle a lot of complex emotion from me. And one of the things I find sometimes when I work with people, and I certainly went through seasons of this with myself, was that we can work really hard to try and pinpoint, like, what happened at those moments in time with our parents that made us a certain way. But if I'm being really honest, I didn't come to this knowledge about myself, this awareness of myself by way of having this awakening around the nature of my parents and who they were and my upbringing. It came from just burning myself the fuck out in my 20s and 30s multiple times over and trying to understand, like, okay, what's, what's led me to be so hard on myself? What's led me to not reach out to other people or push myself to the point of misery and exhaustion? So that is the way that I have come at a lot of this, and I just mention that in the context of this episode because if you're listening and you're like, "Oh, I relate to that behavior," but you're trying to go back first, I would start with the more recent timeline. I would start with the number of times you have been the one always planning things for friends or finding yourself in the job where you are just running on empty or never delegating to anyone. The through line on all of this isn't discipline or ambition. I'm very disciplined. I'm rather ambitious, and l- I'm less ambitious than I used to be, and I... There could be a whole conversation on that, but I actually think it relates back to a lot of this. But I'm still highly, highly disciplined. This isn't about those things. It's about not being too much, not needing too much, just kinda keeping things steady There was likely a moment, or many moments quite frankly, where our needs, your needs weren't met. If you relate to this way of behaving, that your needs weren't met at a younger age. And those are almost always emotional, not physical. For the client, this could look like, oh, you know, dad couldn't handle if your younger sister was having a tantrum, and you witnessed that. So you learn to then not exhibit those emotions because you saw that it made dad angry, or it made him set- upset, or it made him then lash out at mom, or something to that effect, right? So certain ways of being, certain emotions get suppressed, get capped, get pulled off the table. Or maybe if you got really upset if you lost your volleyball game, or your friend was mean to you at school, or you spilled a glass of milk when you were two or something like that, and you saw that mom couldn't handle it. She left the room. She got really, really, really, really angry That gets tracked in a certain way. Those actually get tracked as abandonment and rejection. That's what makes us then adapt to being easy, go with the flow, really accommodating, but that then translates to being neutral, small, and not really having any, like, texture or identity to us because easy felt far safer than being abandoned or rejected. As you're listening, there might be certain, you know, as, as I'm sharing certain examples or memories of our- my own, there might be certain things that are popping up, but there are many ways that we can draw a dotted line between, let's say, like, the rule-following 8-year-old to the straight A student 15-year-old to the 38-year-old who won't text first because she doesn't wanna scare the person off kind of thing, or the 38-year-old that won't ask her husband to watch the kid for three hours this afternoon because she's afraid that it'll be a burden to him, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many ways that we can slice and dice this. The most important thing to understand is that, like, the very thing that I developed, we developed to make ourselves more lovable, but it's really, like, w- less likely to be abandoned, is the very thing that's pushing away support, connection, and love. I'm, I'm gonna say that again because, like, that's the thing to really get. The very thing we developed to make ourselves more lovable, but really was a means to avoid being rejection- rejected, excuse me, or abandoned, is the very thing that's pushing away support, connection, and love. It's always the client of mine who's like, "I want someone, you know, to make dinner for me or plan something for me," that's on the hamster wheel of doing. But she's also the same person who is just, "I'll just be chill" in the early stages of dating because she's afraid to appear too needy and push someone away. Here's the thing about being needless, not relying on others or being fearful of being a burden. Your needs won't be met because technically what you're putting out there, what you're evoking is you don't have any, so how can they give you a minute? And you will make friends, colleagues, boyfriends, partners, all sorts of relationships who do not meet your needs, maybe because you're entirely focused on taking care of their needs, but because you're very rarely exhibiting any. Let's come back to that like... I like this idea, right? I often... This is something I've been playing with lately. Like, I think of myself, my 40-year-old self, okay, and then I'm drawing this dotted line back to five-year-old me, and 10-year-old me, and 15-year-old me, and 20, and 25. I don't know why. I just went in fives, et cetera, et cetera. Right? But okay, so let's think about, you know, that person who's not expressing their needs now, the person who's running the show, managing everything, is also the needless eight-year-old that didn't wanna bother their dad or their mom or their older brother with their homework, or the needless 22-year-old that didn't want mom to know that you were struggling in your job because, I don't know, she loved bragging to her friends about your position, and it made her feel so proud and good. Um, or the needless 38-year-old that is just always the one at work that's like, "Oh, I'll get it done. I can handle it. I can handle the extra project." You know, you're the person that your manager or your boss or your superior comes to that's like, "I know you can handle it." And, and here's the thing. This isn't all bad. It's not all bad. This is why I keep coming back to the merits and the value of handling a lot. I would say one of the reasons that I'm able to work for myself comes from this place. Also comes from control, okay? So there's, there's that worth noticing but for each of us, and if you relate to this, I highly encourage you in conjunction with looking back, looking to the ways in which this isn't serving you or this is limiting connection, be it the depth of connection in your marriage or meeting someone that you actually like by way of dating, to also look to the merits. But it's important to note this absolutely plays a role in, you know, meeting flaky, inconsistent, "Oh, I'm not ready for a commitment. I, you know, I just moved through something really hard and I'm not ready to meet people, but, like, let's hang out." That's at play there. Or ending up in a scenario with your husband where you're doing 99% of the child and household management. That is my flavor of choice right now. Like, that is the thing I have to work on. So I had a different iteration of this in dating, but it still existed, and now I'm confronting the version that ultimately connects to if I want it, if I choose it, if I change my own behavior, more joy, more fulfillment, more connection in, in my marriage I think of being agreeable, which goes with kind of being smooth and easy and taking it all on, not having needs, like being like Teflon. So when you have no visible needs, you become neutral, but there's no grit or texture. Nothing really sticks, like Teflon. That's, that's the point. Teflon's easy to clean. I don't know. It's easy to fl- flip an egg or flip a pancake But easy in the context of social interactions, relationships, friendships, romantic relationships, professional relationships, is not the same as attractive. I think in certain ways people are drawn to me as a coach for the people who end up working with me because there's grit, there's texture here. Like, they hear these conversations or they've been referred by a friend, and they're like, "If you really fucking wanna go there, you should work with her." Right? But that's not attractive to all people. And the same is true of, I'm kind of dovetailing more just into dating here of, of relationships, of dating. Easy is not the same as intimate. And what tends to happen is that we've internalized our needs so deeply, like especially from those early years, that we eventually lose access to them. Like, we can't articulate what they want to ourselves or to a partner There'll be moments in working with clients where people will come to me and, and maybe it will be at the beginning of our work together, and they'll say something like, "Well, I've gotten really clear on what I want in a partner, and I didn't know that before, and now I think I'm gonna be in a better place 'cause I'm really clear." And what's going through my mind is, you don't need to be clear on what you want. Yes, maybe you need to articulate some of those needs, but you need to work to be able to actually hold it, to be able to hold that you're allowed to have that need met. And that is only gonna come about ... That's why, like, trying to, like, orchestrate that or retrofit that, because even if someone's listening and they're single, they might be like, "Huh? What does that mean?" It's only going to come by way of the reversal of the behavior I'm going to get into, like, the to-dos, like what do we do here, but one thing I wanna make clear about not having needs and the lack of intimacy is there's a safety there, quote, unquote, "safety" 'cause eventually you feel the weight of the loneliness and the lack of connection. If you don't have any needs, no one can let you down. If you don't ask for help or open up with someone or share what's really true for you, yeah, no one can let you down, but no one can get that close either. And then in relationships long-term or in a marriage, this represents the real slow burn of unspoken needs and the rage and the resentment that that can lead to with two people just drifting further and further apart. So frankly, in my own marriage, feelings of resentment are just a guide for me. I'm like, "Oh, I'm feeling resentful?" Like, "Okay, what's going on here?" I don't berate myself for feeling resentful and say, "Oh, my God, I'm feeling that thing again." It's like, "Oh, okay, here's the guide. What do I do with that?" And being capable and self-sufficient isn't a problem. I'm very capable. I'm very self-sufficient. I love that my husband is very capable and very self-sufficient, and I connect deeply with people who operate in the same way. It's the pretending that you don't have any needs. And if you're listening to this and you're like, "But it's so hard to express my needs," then I hear you. That's okay, and, like, that's, that's the place to start. So that's where I want you to start noticing, like, where are you defaulting to, "Oh, you know, whatever, whatever you want. Like, whatever works. I'm fine with it." Yesterday as I was sitting with friends There was a conversation about, like, did we move to one area of the restaurant to eat or were we gonna go to another? And I paused for a second to consider, like, did I really care? And in that moment I said, "I, I really don't care. I don't have a preference." But in the past, I would've just breezed by that and thought like, "Oh, I..." Well, I wouldn't have thought at all. That's the thing. I would've just said, "Oh, I don't have a preference, I don't have a preference." But that was just a means to be easy or accommodating. So practicing stating very small needs correctly, not asking, not over-explaining. For dating, this can look like, "Could we meet at 6:45 instead of 7:00?" Or, "Could we meet at this restaurant?" The one that's like, you know, closer to your neighborhood, or closer to the subway stop, or more convenient for you. Or, "Could we meet on a Wednesday and on a Tuesday?" Because, you know, maybe you're out already and it's like, whatever is more convenient for you, whatever serves you better. Oftentimes when I'm working with people and they're scheduling a date, um, I'll be like, "How exactly do you wanna spend time with this person?" And they might be like, "Well, I'd actually rather like meet them and grab a coffee and take a walk through this park." And I'm like, "Great. Do that." Like, it doesn't matter to me. I can't control, is what I was gonna say. I cannot control whether the person that they're corresponding with is gonna be like, "Sure, let's do that." All I need to get my client to do is start honestly and consistently expressing what is true for her. And in the context of relationship, I'll share a story here. So more recently, my son transitioned from taking two naps a day to one nap a day, which is very annoying. I know. It's actually great in a lot of ways, and it's what's supposed to happen developmentally, so it's all good things. Um, but it changes up the schedule and the time that my husband and I have to ourselves. So a few weeks ago, and I can only say this in retrospect, I went to him in the morning and I was like, "Okay, so like, what are you thinking about the day? Like, you know, do you have a preference on like, what..." Like, I had all these time slots in my mind. I hadn't even talked to him about like the shifting of the nap schedule and what this was presenting. And James kind of looked at me like, "Uh, I mean, whatever, you know, whatever you wanna do." I could tell he was trying to figure out what did I actually want. Like, what did I actually need for that day? Which he wants to help me with. He's a proponent of- I found that I was trying to care for his needs actually, anticipate them based on the shifting schedule, versus coming to him and saying like, "Hey, on Saturday I wanna go to Pilates at 9:00, and then I need an hour in the afternoon where I can work on such and such, or I can take a bath, or whatever." That is direct. And I gotta tell you, once I started communicating in that way, it was so goddamn clear. Like, he was like, "Oh, okay." The let me try and maneuver the schedule to suss out, like, what kind of day that you want was completely flat-lining. It was not helping us at all. But the second I was like, "I wanna do this, I wanna do this, I wanna do this," he was like, "Okay. Cool. All right. Yeah. Well..." And then, and then it's like, "Here's what I wanna do." He was very clear, very clear with his needs. And I was frankly almost laughing to myself because I, I hope this presents to you an example of how this is such an ongoing practice, and there are some ways in which I, um, I do get frustrated. I'm like, "Why is this still a thing?" And other times I just have to laugh. So, um, it ... my attempt to be the Teflon, let's say, didn't, didn't take, didn't work, didn't take off very well. All right, y'all. Um, this was, this was kind of an episode I needed too. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, you want me to podcast about something else, head to @ithinkilikeyou.co on Instagram. Um, that is a pl- a great place to connect and chat about this stuff. All right, y'all, if you are in, in the storm, stay warm. Otherwise, have a beautiful week.