Why did I feel like a breakwater when we chatted with others?

[From my diary]June, 25th 2021More often then not, it is not any particular action taken by him that brings me down.It is just a feeling, a small nuance.… Each time we go for a walk with friends — literally walking next to each other — he starts talking to someone, and then .. not sure, how it happens. He kinda … puts me between him and that person. Like he motions in space in such a way, that I end up in the middle, like a breakwater. And he and the other keep shouting in each of my ears while talking, me disconnected from the conversation.There is a difference between being in the middle of something and being part of it. He would put me physically between himself and whoever he was talking to, and the two of them would talk across me. I was the center of the arrangement and not in the conversation at all. None of it was nameable — he never insulted me, never ignored me, never did anything I could point to afterward and ask him to stop doing it.I did try in this particular case, but I could not even explain properly, and he could not grasp it either.That was the whole problem. A hurt with no name cannot be raised, so the annoyance just silently builds up in the background, until it reaches critical mass.Let’s look at some science behind these dynamics.In the middle of the talk, out of itWhen people talk, they build a little space. Adam Kendon spent years watching how bodies arrange themselves in conversation, and in the 1970s he gave the arrangement a name: the F-formation. Two or three people face inward and, without ever agreeing to, make a shared pocket between them — the o-space, he called it — that belongs to everyone in the huddle and to no one outside it. That pocket is where the conversation actually takes place, it is a small bubble, reserved for it.And what happens is that people start defending it without thinking. They angle their shoulders, close the circle, turn a newcomer into an outsider by nothing more than how they stand.So, what is contradictory or problematic about the past situations I described? The fact is that my body was inside the pocket—or bubble, you name it— the other two were using. I was standing in their o-space. But the words were passing over me, from one to the other and back, and I was the thing the talk went around.The hierarchy in a conversationThere is a second half to this, about roles inside this space. Erving Goffman, in Forms of Talk (1981), took apart the flat little word “listener” and found several roles hiding behind it. Some are ratified — they belong to the conversation whether or not anyone is addressing them at that particular moment. Others are only bystanders. And a ratified person, Goffman noticed, can be quietly demoted to bystander when the talk narrows onto two people and pushes everyone else to the edge of the frame. That was the line that cracked something open for me.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerI was not shut out at the start. I was let in, set down at the very center, and demoted while I stood there. Thus, the problem did exist, and my perception of it was right.Mattering has multiple facetsWhy did I actually feel “used” in this situation? Whether my ex-husband meant it or not, remains unknown, as none can look into his head, but there is a name for the sense of being significant to another person, called mattering, and the sociologists Rosenberg and McCullough noticed back in 1981 that it comes in pieces.“To matter” is not unidimensional. It has multiple facets. and the whole point is that they come apart — you can have one without the others.Attention is the most basic one: the feeling of being noticed, of your presence and actions being registered by another person. Rosenberg considered this the most central form of mattering — the ground floor.Importance is being the object of someone’s concern — the sense that another person cares about your needs, thoughts, and feelings and acts on that care. This is the “cared about” facet.Dependence means you matter because others rely on you. It is significance that comes from being needed, useful, leaned on. Rosenberg put the puzzle plainly — it’s obvious that our behavior is shaped by our dependence on others; what’s stranger is how much it’s governed by their dependence on us.Dependence is one of the three ways a person matters, and it is the thin one.So mapped onto my situation, I scored high on dependence — he relied on me, I was needed, load-bearing, but I scored low on attention (I was not noticed; on the walks, literally talked across) and low on importance (not treated as an object of concern or care). It all can be interpreted in a way that I mattered as something he depended on, and not as someone he noticed or cared for.(But, as I said, we will never know for sure…)But only their synergy makes you feel you matterSince attention is the most fundamental facet, its absence tends to be the one that stings most — being unseen is a more basic deprivation than being uncared-for, and the breakwater is almost a pure case of it.And there’s a relevant footnote in the literature: Schlossberg (1989), who extended mattering into adult life, observed that some people — she was thinking of caregivers — can feel trapped by mattering too much through dependence: relied on so heavily that the reliance becomes pressure rather than value. That is close to what “used as a breakwater” actually feels like. Being needed can sit right next to being unseen, and the needing does not help to fix the feeling of being unseen. Dependence is not a consolation prize for the missing care.An illusion of being socialInterestingly, my ex-husband looked much more social than I did. He also always started those conversations, or suggested those walks. Why would someone like him need a breakwater?This all feels very contraintuitive. However, I did find some possible answers.If he was the confident one who reached out, he clearly didn’t need a buffer to shelter behind. So the breakwater wasn’t protection. It was something else.Being the one who reaches out, who opens conversations, who fills the air — that is not the same as being socially self-sufficient. Very often it’s the reverse. The partner doing all the reaching is frequently the one who needs more social input, more stimulation, more response, and who is least comfortable in stillness. The quieter partner is not the needy one in that pairing. She’s usually the ballast. So “more social” may actually mean “more socially hungry,” and hunger is a form of need, not of ease.Now put that next to the fact that he brought me into it. He didn’t wander off to socialize and leave me behind — he pulled me along into conversations he started and kept me physically at his side. That is the tell. What he might have needed was not a shield and not an interlocutor. He needed my presence. Someone of his own, right there, anchoring him while his attention shot outward. In attachment terms it’s almost a textbook secure base: the one who ventures needs a fixed point to venture from, and he kept his fixed point standing in the middle of the huddle. He could be so social precisely because I was reliably there, next to him.An illusion of matteringWhich loops straight back to mattering. The breakwater is the dependence facet made visible. He depended on me being present — needed it, arranged the space around it — while paying me less to none of the attention or care. That’s the exact shape we named: relied on, not seen. His sociability might have existed thanks to my steadiness. The sad thing is that he never once turned around to acknowledge the engine.I was less an anchor than a fixture — kept close as something shown or possessed rather than leaned on, the calm partner they appear to overshadow, to hold himself steady. The breakwater is what that looks like from inside the wave.Tiny moments that matter muchIt took me years to understand how something this small could do so much damage. The answer is in what actually ends relationships, and it is almost anticlimactic.Illustration provided by Supportive StrangerJohn Gottman—whom I already mentioned before— has been recording couples since the 1970s, and the discovery that made his name is not about fighting. Couples who lasted and couples who divorced did not differ much in what they argued about. They differed in the tiny moments — the small reaches one person makes across an ordinary day, a comment, a glance, a look at that — and whether the other turns toward them or lets them drop. The couples who stayed together turned toward each other around 86 percent of the time. The ones who split, about a third. Those small numbers, measured once, predicted divorces six years later.Nobody remembers a single dropped moment. That is the trap. Once the turning-away becomes the pattern, the whole relationship starts to feel like weather rather than a sequence of events. Gottman has a name for that stage too — negative sentiment override — the point at which a person reads everything their partner does in the worst available light, because the critical mass has been “successfully” reached.A breakwater walk is one of those dropped moments, on repeat. And it never got fixed for the simplest reason: there was nothing to fix. You put me in the wrong place on the walk is not a sentence anyone can say out loud and still feel sane. So it was kept unspoken, making a solution impossible.What it doesn’t meanIt does not mean I was too sensitive, or made a problem out of thin air. The feeling was there.It does not mean he was cruel with me on purpose. He might also just have been a person who loses whoever is standing at the edge of his attention, which is common, and forgivable, and still wore a groove in me over time. Impact does not wait around for intent. I was worn down by something that may have been nobody’s fault.And it does not mean small things are small. That is the part I had upside down for years. I kept waiting for a real reason — an affair, a betrayal, one clean fight I could hold up as proof — and felt faintly illegitimate for being ground down by where I got placed on a walk. “Small things like this” work in silence, and the fact that I could never quite get it into words was not evidence that it did not exist. Unspoken conflicts are always the most persistent ones.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for the feelings that never quite make it into a sentence. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com