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We come to every relationship shaped by our own history, experiences, and ways of seeing the world. At the same time, relationships only work when we share meaning, coordinate, and stay connected with other people. These fundamental aspects of relationships inevitably lead to some degree of tension, especially in relationships that actually matter.
A lot of the time, our impulse is to get rid of tension. Smooth it over. Ignore it. Avoid it. But there’s a more useful question to ask instead: What is this tension exactly, and what might it make possible for our relationship?
Recall a time when a small moment turned into a much bigger conflict than it seemed to warrant. Maybe it was someone being late, a comment that landed poorly, or a task that didn’t get done. On its own, it shouldn’t have mattered much, yet suddenly your reaction felt wholly out of proportion.
Or consider a conversation that kept circling the same issue without resolution. You tried different approaches. You adjusted your behavior. You worked around it. And still, something never quite settled, leaving a persistent, low-level drain.
Or maybe the opposite: a charged feeling that wasn’t negative at all. A sense of excitement, curiosity, or possibility, like something meaningful was forming between you, but without a clear shape yet.
It’s easy to misinterpret these instances. Overreactions and low-level drains can be dismissed as "drama," incompatibility, or personal failure. When not quite fully formed, a sense of possibility might be fleeting. In all these examples, the true potential of what’s happening is overlooked.
What’s actually happening in situations like these is simpler and more useful.
You’re sensing relational tension.
Relational tension is the felt sense that something could be different between you and someone else. It’s how you experience the gap between what is and what could be. Sometimes it shows up as disagreement, recurring confusion, emotional friction, open conflict, or a pattern that never quite resolves. Other times, it shows up as excitement—a kind of creative energy, like something new wants to emerge.
“Tensions pull us towards our potential.” — Chris Cowan
Whether negative or positive, tension is potential energy that hasn’t yet found its form.
At MetaRelating, we often use the word tension because that’s how it usually feels at first. It's charged and uncomfortable. But it’s just as accurate to think of tension as unrealized possibility: the energy of something important that hasn’t been articulated, integrated, or acted on yet.
“Tension, by definition, is neither naughty nor nice. It just exists, and, in fact, some level of tension is necessary for you to live a healthy life.” — Royce Holladay
You can’t actually feel another person’s tension. You only feel your own. Everything else has to be inferred through observation, conversation, and empathy.
Relational mindfulness is your capacity to sense tensions and their resolution. When you can stay present with what’s happening moment by moment, tension stops being something you need to escape and starts being something you can actually work with.
Anytime you care about a relationship, you naturally notice what’s working and what’s not. What you notice is tension. It isn’t automatically a problem to solve. It’s more like information about what matters to you, what you want, or what feels off.
In the broadest sense, tension is present in every relationship. Anything other than total neutrality qualifies as tension. It’s what causes anything to happen at all between people.
“Tension is the energy that drives change in human systems.” — Royce Holladay
Not all tensions are the same. Yet once you start paying attention to them, you’ll notice common themes to the different ways they show up.
At one end of a spectrum, tension arises from a specific moment or situation. In many of these cases, it’s clear where the breakdown in understanding, in your connection, or in how your actions fell short of accomplishing some joint task. You probably have some clarity about how things could have gone differently, which informs how you’d like things to go under similar circumstances in the future.
Think of tension in a bowstring, pulled back and ready to propel an arrow toward a target.
This kind of tension is gathered and directed so something can move. It’s present when you’re trying to decide something, resolve a conflict, or move toward a shared goal.
This flavor of tension raises questions like: What specific action would improve this situation?
At the other end of a spectrum, tension can feel more about the space between people—in trust, emotional safety, communication patterns, and mutual understanding. It’s more like the ongoing tension that keeps a relationship healthy.
Think of a stringed instrument. For the strings to resonate, there must be adequate tension, each one tuned to the right open note.
Or think of a partner dance. For the dancers to coordinate, there must be just the right degree of muscle tone in their frame, not too loose, not too rigid.
This kind of tension isn’t meant to be released. It’s meant to be continuously adjusted. It supports responsiveness, connection, and flow as the relationship develops.
This flavor of tension raises questions like: What is needed to protect, nourish, or restore the quality of our connection?
The truth is there’s an underlying unity across this spectrum of tension. Successfully working through something specific and situational builds mutual trust in the relationship itself. And a relationship with healthy communication habits and high trust makes working through specific situations easier and quicker.
Like two dance partners who repeatedly return to the dance floor together, their connection becomes more nuanced, expressive, and elegant with practice.
This interplay can surface in the middle of a conversation. Like one that starts out about logistics then suddenly touches an ongoing pattern, like feeling dismissed or unheard. When that happens, confusion usually comes from responding to the wrong kind of tension—pushing for solutions when what’s really needed is relational repair, or staying “nice” when action is actually required.
Working with tension begins by noticing it. When you feel that tug of discomfort or possibility, pause long enough to sense what it’s pointing toward. What value or need is asking for attention? What could change for the better if this tension—or potential—were explored?
Not all tensions need to be addressed through conversation. Sometimes it’s best to just be aware of it and stay in contact with it as a way of sensing the unique energy pattern in your relationship. What’s important is not to avoid it or pretend it’s simply not there. You might even adjust your behavior to see if the dynamic between you shifts for the better.
Sometimes a tension will ripen to the point where addressing it together is best for your relationship. A situation might be weighing you both down, dimming something that used to feel bright, or just blocking something you both say you want but can’t seem to make progress toward. Perhaps you’ve been aware of it for some time, even adapting your behaviors to see what might shift, but to no avail.
Relational communication comes into play when you initiate a conversation about a relational tension. This typically involves sharing what you’re noticing in a way that invites understanding rather than judgment. It also includes asking how the other person sees it. Differences as well as commonalities between you will become clearer. Ideas for how to make positive change together often result.
Addressing tensions early matters because this is the primary way a relationship grows and evolves. Working through tension is where learning happens. It's where differences surface, assumptions get updated, and people adjust to one another as circumstances change. Without this, a relationship will be limited in how it can grow and what it can accomplish.
When tensions are engaged as they arise, a relationship becomes more responsive. Small misalignments get noticed and worked with before they harden into patterns. New information can enter the system. Over time, this allows the connection to develop nuance, resilience, and depth.
When tensions are repeatedly ignored or worked around, things may feel smoother on the surface, but the relationship gets flatter. Less gets said. Fewer adjustments are made. What could have been fuel for growth instead goes unexamined. The connection can remain functional while quietly losing vitality.
Tension doesn’t disappear when ignored. What might have been explored early accumulates instead. As time passes, that pressure has to go somewhere. And it can show up later as overreactions or conflicts that appear out of nowhere.
Have you ever had a big fight over a seemingly small thing?
Maybe it was simple like someone being a few minutes late or leaving out a dirty dish. In isolation, it would not have been a big deal. But when tied to larger, unaddressed patterns in a relationship, a small incident can become the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.” The fight is about more than the moment that sparked it.
In the early stages of most relationships, it’s common to want to make a good impression and put forward a “best self.” There are understandable reasons for letting small things slide: it doesn’t seem like a big deal, it feels manageable, it’s possible to work around it, and bringing it up can feel petty or unnecessarily disruptive, especially when the other person doesn’t seem to be acting with bad intent.
Yet avoiding tension and conflict, no matter how well-intentioned, won’t work indefinitely. The sooner it can be worked with successfully, the less likely it is to fester, compound, or become entangled with other tensions. As they grow larger and more complex, they become harder to work with and increase the likelihood of an explosive conflict—the kind of conflict that might damage the relationship irreversibly.
Addressing tensions early and often means engaging them when they’re smaller and more manageable, usually not long after they arise.
Each successful experience builds confidence in your ability to handle future tensions. Like building strength through regular training, frequent, manageable efforts will increase your capacity one bit at a time. This builds both stability and growth, reducing the likelihood of major breakdowns while keeping relationships responsive, adaptive, and capable of evolving with experience.
At the start of a relational conversation, clearly express the tension you wish to address. It’s normal for a tension to be entangled with other ones, so it takes some patience and discipline to remain focused on one tension at a time. It’s like the care and precision required to untangle a mess of knotted string or yarn. Just grabbing and pulling impulsively will tend to make the tangle worse.
It might be tempting for either of you to bring up a different, but related tension. Focusing on one tension at a time doesn’t mean holding rigidly to the original tension until it’s resolved. You can jointly steer the conversation to address another tension, if you both consent to that. The key is to track which tension is the focus and the discipline to not let the conversation unravel.
This balance between focus and flexibility makes you more likely to resolve tensions successfully.
During a relational conversation, you might notice that something feels different, though it hasn’t gone the way you initially imagined. If things seem good enough, you can wrap it up there.
Relational mindfulness helps you sense when things have shifted in a positive direction. No matter how skilled you become at relational conversations, you cannot fully control how they will go, just as you cannot fully control how a relationship will go.
Resolving a relational tension is more of a co-creative process than it is a clinical or mechanical one. Let go of perfection and embrace what’s mutually workable. More tensions will inevitably arise, and you can make a choice about how to handle them when they do.
MetaRelating is an approach to relational communication that treats tension as a natural and meaningful part of connection, rather than something to avoid or eliminate. It begins with the understanding that tension carries information about what matters, what’s misaligned, and what is asking to be seen or addressed as a relationship develops.
The work focuses on developing core relational capacities: sensing tension as it arises, discerning how best to work with it, and communicating in ways that support both clarity and connection. With these capacities, difficult moments don’t have to spiral or be sidestepped. They become workable inputs into how a relationship adapts and grows over time.
In this way, MetaRelating isn’t about “fixing” relationships or making them friction-free. It’s about building the ability to work with them as they evolve. Tension doesn’t go away—but when it’s met skillfully, it becomes a source of learning, coordination, and shared meaning over time.
“The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
