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Emotional Geometry: The Shapes We Live In

By Dr. Stella Bullo

As a linguist, I have learned how we understand emotions as metaphors, images and shapes that can become hidden maps for our relationships. We speak of vicious circles when problems loop without resolution, of love triangles when affections pull in three directions, and of going back to square one when a process returns to its start. Shapes are metaphors we live inside. Once we name the shape, we can start to see how it works.

I learned the triangle early, sitting at a table for three. Two points drawn together, one left apart. I did not have the language for it then, but I carried the shape into other places, into friendships, into the pull between cities, into the way I managed closeness and distance. The names and settings changed, the geometry stayed the same. Over time, it became less a memory and more a map, my internal chart of emotional geography.

It has always been easy for me to think in shapes. Some relationships have felt like circles, safe, enclosing, everyone equidistant. Others like lines, clear beginnings and clear endings. More often, they became triangles, stable from a distance, tense from within.

Triangle One: The Balanced, Fated Shape

Some triangles seem perfectly balanced, three points equally present, the sides equally strong. Inside them, the pattern can feel inevitable, almost fated.

I grew up in such a triangle. My father’s aggression and absence on one side drew my mother and me together on the other. In her quiet way, she made me an ally, someone who could share glances, small strategies, and unspoken understandings. The arrangement gave me a place, and it also gave the tension a purpose.

Thinking of our family as a triangle became so natural that when my father passed away, my mother and I found it strange to be only two. Almost without realising it, we began looking for the third angle, first in an extended family member, then in my husband, and now in my daughter. We struggle to see our family as just us. The triangle feels like the natural order.

The stability of the shape came with a cost. Without my father, there could be no alliance, and with it went the quiet complicity that had defined much of our relationship. The loss was not only of a person. It was also of the geometry that had held us in place.

Triangle Two: The Outsourced Ending

Other triangles lean differently. Two points hold a fragile thread, and the third is less a participant and more a catalyst, the one who does what the others cannot or will not do themselves.

You see this in some romantic triangles. A person in a struggling relationship begins leaving traces, a forgotten text, a story told too loudly, almost as if they want to be caught. The discovery becomes the reason for the ending, and it spares them the discomfort of speaking it aloud.

I have seen a version of this in my own family dynamic. That early training in alliance making means that without a third to unite with, bonds can shift in unexpected ways. Today, my mother sometimes aligns with my daughter, spoiling her in secret, defending her when I try to set limits. The triangle reforms, and I find myself in the other position, the one left out or the one cast as the obstacle.

I have lived it in friendship too. One of my longest and closest friendships had already been worn thin by distance and diverging lifestyles. It was still intact, although no longer effortless. Then a third person entered the picture. Through an act that seemed innocent, a casual remark, barely worth noticing at the time, they became the catalyst for the final break. On the surface, it was their doing. Underneath, I knew that the shape had been waiting for someone to step in and finish what I could not.

This shape offers protection from open confrontation, and it demands a price. As long as the ending comes from someone else, you never build the ability to cut the thread yourself.

Triangle Three: The Overt Break

Some triangles collapse into lines. There is no third point to absorb the action. The decision, the cut, the change happens directly between two points, and the responsibility is fully visible.

I remember ending a professional collaboration that had become too strained to continue. No one else intervened. No one carried the weight for me. The conversation was uncomfortable, and it was clear. It had the steady authority that comes from acting directly.

This is the shape of overt power. It is not necessarily more virtuous than covert action. It is more self reliant. Once the muscle for direct endings is built, it does not disappear.

How Metaphor Shapes Experience

These three triangles are not just diagrams of interaction. They are frameworks for thinking. If I see a situation as fated, I am unlikely to redraw it. If I call it outsourced, I may avoid acting directly. If I frame it as an overt break, I might accept the fallout as the price of autonomy.

Metaphors compress complexity into an image we can hold. They also set the boundaries of what we imagine possible. Changing the metaphor is often the first step toward changing the reality.

Redrawing the Map

Leaving a triangle does not always mean breaking it. Sometimes the aim is to soften it, letting the sides curve until the angles blur into a circle, a shape where closeness to one does not require distance from another. Sometimes the triangle opens into a line, which allows movement without fracture.

I think about this now in my own life, in connections where I try to keep the shape flexible enough that no one feels pushed to the edge. Emotional geometry is not fixed. It can be bent. The act of bending often begins with language, in the metaphors we choose to describe where we are.

Closing the Loop

To notice the triangle is to name its logic. To name it is to hold it still long enough to ask whether the shape still serves me. The shapes we inherit are not the shapes we have to keep. With the right language, we can redraw the map.