Comfort Killed the Connection

I had a theory that people start showing their real selves after 3 months. Its kinda like the three month rule that psychologists talks about.

The longest most people can pretend is 3 months. Even shorter if you made them comfortable enough and believe that no matter what they do is ok with you. That’s the paradox of comfort at least, in my experience. I used to think it would bring closeness or intimacy. But sometimes, the more at home people feel, the more they start treating you like an object or something they own, or worse, something they can use.

There’s this song I used to listen to where the lyrics go: familiarity breeds indifference. And we all know that indifference is the opposite of love right? Not hate but indifference. I don’t believe that though. I think familiarity breeds the truth. Sometimes, it uncovers a persons unfiltered versions. Sometimes, that truth is hard to look at. Sometimes it’s beautiful.

Comfort gives you the space to say every single thought in your head, even the weird ones, even the ugly ones, even the ones you didn’t realize were bothering you until they spilled out. It lets you verbalize the constant stream of noise that lives in your brain and know that someone’s listening and not judging you for it. When you find that with someone, it feels like magic.

What kind of person do you become when you know that there will not be any consequences or judgements on your actions? Because that maybe is the real you. Maybe it’s not black and white and people are soft on good days and sharp on bad ones. It seems like we’re all just trying to figure that out as we go. Before I spiral into an existential confusion, I’ll just say my conclusion: I don’t think comfort ruins a connection. I think it just reveals what’s already there.

Update at 3:16 am in May:

I’ve come up with another theory! Sometimes when we get too comfortable with someone we start to mirror them. In our eyes everything they do is acceptable no matter how extreme to the point that it blurs your own sense of right and wrong, and you don’t even realize it because being with them makes everything feel normal even when it’s not.

Update at 12:50 pm in June:

Sometimes we start treating the people close to us the same way we treat ourselves. I guess that’s why they say you can only truly love another person if you learned to love yourself.