Why Some Relationships Are Exhausting and What Nobody Taught You About It

Once upon a time I was a hairdresser.

I lasted around eleven years. On and off between kids. And by the end of it I was emotionally done. Resentful of the job. Sick of listening. I felt genuinely guilty about that at the time, because what kind of person gets resentful of a conversation? I couldn't explain what had changed. I blamed pregnancies.

I know now something that nobody taught me back then. And it's not taught in hairdressing school, which is a shame, because there is actual science to back it.

What Was Happening in That Chair

When you work at the nape of someone's neck, you are working on one of the most vulnerable spots on the human body. The vagus nerve runs through that region, and physical contact there activates a parasympathetic nervous system response. In plain language: the body starts signalling safety and trust before the mind has even made that decision consciously.

So what happens in a hairdressing chair is that people open up. Fast. The personal bits start coming out before you've even picked up the sectioning clips. The marriage troubles. The grief. The fear they've been sitting on for months. The heavy stuff they carry quietly. And there I was, standing behind them with zero training in what this sorcery between us actually was.

No framework for behaviour. No understanding of patterns. No language for why some conversations left me absolutely flat on the floor by 4pm. I just thought I was bad at switching off.

The Model That Reframed Everything

I wish I had found my mentor sooner. Joe Pane, founder of the Emotional Fitness Formula, is the human face behind this framework I trained in and whose work plays a foundational component of what I do at Leading Rein. And there is one particular model Joe teaches called the Boundaries/Relationships Model. When I encountered it, it gave language to something I had felt for eleven years but could never name.

Joe talks about connection operating at three levels, and uses three concentric rings as a visual. I love a good visual.

The Three Rings of Connection

The first ring is activity-based. These are the people who share the same space as you. Same workplace. Same hobby. Same community group. Same whatever-it-is that brings you together for a common purpose. This is where every relationship starts. It is the entry point.

The second ring adds ideas. You have the shared activity in common, and now you are also starting to share how you think. Your perspectives. What matters to you beyond the surface of the thing that brought you together.

The third ring is where activity, ideas and values all meet. This is the deepest level of connection available to us. Showing up as fully unfiltered yourself, without performing or editing or managing the impression. Most people will have somewhere between one and four relationships at this level across an entire lifetime.

One to four. That’s all.

What Was Actually Happening in The Hairdressers

People were arriving at level one and within twenty minutes they were operating in level three territory. Their nervous system had effectively given them the green light, potentially because of exactly where my hands would start and what that activated physiologically. They felt safe. And they went there.

I wasn't equipped for it. I didn't know what it was. And I felt a duty of responsibility to hold that space. Because the client comes first. Beacuse they paid for service. Because that is the job. Because somewhere in my key learnings was the belief that holding space for people was just what you do, whether or not you had agreed to it, whether or not you had the capacity for it.

The Boundaries/Relationship model gave me a framework I didn't have before. And it is one I now bring into almost every session at some point, because when women understand which level of connection they are actually operating at in the relationships in their life, something clicks in to gear.

Why This Matters for You

Some of the most exhausting relationships in your life are probably not the obvious ones. They are not the ones where someone is openly difficult or unkind. They are the ones where you gave a lot of yourself, before you really knew who you were giving it to. Where someone arrived at level one and you somehow ended up in level three with them long before the relationship had earned that depth.

That is not a character flaw. There was no framework available for most of us. Nobody handed us a map for this. We were not taught that emotional labour in relationships has levels, that depth has a pace, that your nervous system does not always make wise timing decisions on your behalf.

Understanding the model does not mean you become guarded. It means you become clearer. It means you start noticing where your energy is actually going, and whether the relationship in front of you is one that genuinely operates at the level you have been giving it.

That is not about pulling back or stonewalling someone. It is about choosing, from a place of awareness rather than autopilot.

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