One of the latest toxic behaviours to raise its head is ‘pocketing’ – the situation where you keep the person you’re dating unseen, not introducing them to your family or friends, or posting anything about them on social media, including them not showing up as one of your ‘friends’. It can include routinely cancelling plans if they involve other friends or refusing to go to family parties as a couple. In other words, your relationship seems non-existent to the outside world.
If you’re the person who’s being pocketed it’s usually confusing and makes you doubt yourself. Why doesn’t your partner want to acknowledge you to the outside world? It stops the relationship progressing as there’s no openness about the person you’re involved with.
There can be a number of reasons for this – if someone is gay and hasn’t come out yet, if they value their privacy above all else, if you come from different cultures and their family might disapprove or if they’re already involved with someone else. Concerns about commitment are often a big part of pocketing too – your partner may not want to be open about the relationship until he or she is fairly sure that it’s going to be long-term.
However, the difference between pocketing and waiting for a good time to be more open is transparency. Working out the right time to introduce someone to family and friends isn’t always easy and doing it too soon can be off-putting for some people but waiting too long makes the other person feel you’re not that serious. If someone doesn’t do any introductions at all, after months of dating, that’s pocketing. It’s about creating distance and space in the relationship.
There’s also the possibility that someone you’ve been dating has been presenting you with a false image of themselves – a façade that they’ve kept up but that will collapse if you meet their family or other friends. They may be scared that you’ll be disappointed if you know the ‘real’ person.
So, if your partner
- Never makes plans to see you and meet up with other people
- You always meet at secluded out of the way places, never in their own neighbourhood
- Makes excuses why you can’t meet their family or friends
- Doesn’t introduce you if you run into people they know
- Doesn’t talk about people in their social circle and no-one in their family has even heard of you
you’re probably being pocketed!
If you recognise all of this, what can you do? The first thing is not to become confrontational, tempting though that might be. Try to have a conversation where you give them an opportunity to talk about why you haven’t met anyone else significant in their life. See whether you have different expectations about how a relationship looks and whether your ideas about that are compatible.
It may be that it’s this conversation that prompts your partner to confide about family issues that they’ve been trying to keep under wraps – it can even be a relief for them to talk about it and a chance to find the right time and place for you to be introduced.
But, there’s also the possibility that your partner, the pocketer, will be clear about their true intentions regarding your relationship. If you have very different ideas, you then have a choice about whether you decide to stay and see if things change, that they become more open about their relationship with you, or whether you decide to cut your losses and leave before you become even more involved. Remember, you deserve to be valued for who you are and for your relationships to be out in the open.
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