Are We Breaking Up?

We meet, we connect, we laugh, and it’s like a high. We push and pull then disagree. We fight, we cry, we disconnect…are we breaking up?

Love to Hate and Hate to Love

Being in a relationship is extraordinarily insufferable and at the same time, a most-pleasing phenomenon. Every relationship has such potentiality as this: to make us love and loathe a person at the same time. Our spouses, our children, our siblings, parents, friends, co-workers, co-authors; you name it, all relationships have such potential. This is the ebb and flow dynamic of a conscious connection.

Connections, as we all probably know, can vary in signal strength. Connections can be maintained for years and at the flip of a switch- can be severed within seconds.

When a connection is broken, there is both a power surge and power drain simultaneously occurring. It feels as if you want to shove her away as quickly as you want to drag her back in (only to shove her away again). Break-up to make-up and break-up again- sound familiar?

Can I Get a Connection?

A connection is easy to make. You sit down and plug in. It’s a gentle penetration to a port that opens you up to a new world of information you couldn’t have downloaded on your own. A connection is a collaboration of experiences melding together to create a new experience and a new memory for the cloud.

The Other that you connect with shows you a piece of God that you couldn’t have seen without them. When you connect to another, you strengthen your connection to God. Connection is a cure to so much, so it’s understandable why we have a yearning desire to be connected.

Break-ups Are Bipolar

But what happens when that connection is cut? What happens when the disconnection creates a dysfunction? How do we handle the break-up? Time goes by and we get stuck with the comfort in such a connection; that when severed, we experience an immense cacophony of powerful emotions.

Break-ups can turn you into both tyrant and victim within a matter of minutes. The power surge is an incredible force and our mind becomes inundated with alarms and confusion that, deciphering which codes to process and which codes to dismiss, is a process we altogether fail to apply.

Typically, at least in my experience anyway, many of us go through a climax of emotions then hit a plateau; few yet face either resentment or reassurance. It’s such a strange process. It’s bipolar really; manic and depressive in such extremes that the pressure from it all feels infinite.

Disconnected

Many of us believe that if there is a disconnection, that somehow it means that the relationship therefore must end. As if unplugging a cord means it can never be plugged back in again. Had that been the case for me, I wouldn’t be married to the most incredible man on the planet.

Disconnection isn’t permanent. Sometimes, the storms just create a temporary outage and we have to practice patience before the connection is restored.

Long-distance connections can suffer more seriously than close-range connections. Distance is definitely an impediment on signal strength. For my marriage, it was a deployment that created a disconnection. Which then led to further disconnection and put a strain on our marriage and created a decade of highs and lows and consequence that you wouldn’t believe!

The point is, disconnection isn’t always warranted or wanted by either member in the relationship, it just happens. Relationships are uncertain- as uncertain as the weather- and storms happen; tornadoes happen; blizzards happen. Shit happens…because we are only human.

Connection Consequence

In this era of technological modernity; many of us face an automatic distance inhibitor threatening our established connections. We are both limited by and privileged with the ability to insta-connect to others. Many of us lack the capacity to ever physically touch the people we interact with; we lack that ultimate intimacy of proximity. Unfortunately, that means it is both too easy to connect and disconnect with the click of a button.

There are times, however, where disconnection is both imminent and necessary. In my own life, I had to make a very difficult decision to sever a connection with many close family members- including my mother- in order to properly connect with others. Sometimes, some of our connections create viruses that spread like outbound traffic and affect so many in our network that, the only way to resolve the glitch is to sever a connection indefinitely.

Restart, Reboot

Finally, there are disconnections that occur simply from disagreement and a failure to process the data in a timely matter. Sessions time out. Data overload happens. Hard drives heat up and there will be times in which the best thing we can do is unplug from the mainframe for a time to properly analyze.

We aren’t all tech support experts, so the processing times will vary. But disconnection doesn’t necessarily mean death to the relationship. But maybe, we just need to restart or restore before we can establish a proper connection. If conflict creates intimacy, then a disconnection can potentially create a more stable environment for a re-connection to thrive in.

If given the choice, wouldn’t you want to temporarily disconnect in hopes that when you reestablish connection, the signal will be stronger than ever?

Is it Really Over?

Only you will be able to properly gauge whether it’s a temporary or permanent disconnection. Did the plug even fit in the port to begin with? Maybe you had an Ethernet plugged into a USB port the whole time, and upon cutting the connection, you realized your signal strength intensified?

You decide, with your heart, your mind, and your strength. You decide if you see Christ in the connection or if you see chaos in the connection.

Maybe you just needed space? I mean, I love my husband and kids, but 24/7 connection can sometimes be so overwhelming that I just want to yank out the plug! Don’t we all get that  way with people we are connected to? That’s normal. It’s human. We are communal creatures, but Jesus did retreat for 40 days; which I take to mean that we could all stand some self-care and alone time.

Maintaining a strong, clear connection in all seasons of life is an expectation that is far too high. We cannot predict the future no matter how prophetic we believe ourselves to be. All that we can be certain of is that uncertainty is certain. Life has ups and downs, why should any of us believe that relationships won’t?