How these two meet
Water and water: nothing has to be explained, and nothing stays separate.
One of you walks in and the other already knows, before the coat is off. Nothing has to be assembled into sentences first, and the two of you can go a whole evening on a look and a change in the breathing.
Being known without speaking is what water wanted first, from very early, and finding it in another person can feel less like meeting someone than like being returned to something.
A mood arrives in one of you and is in both of you within the hour, and by evening neither can say whose it was. You comfort each other from inside the same weather, which is warm and which is also why it never lifts. The stomach stays tight for days and nobody in the house is standing on the bank.
Small ruptures do not stay small either. A tone at breakfast is still being felt at midnight, absorbed rather than raised, and by the time it is spoken about it has grown a history neither of you can now locate the start of.
The question
Whose feeling is the one you are carrying right now?
Merging is not a failure of boundaries you should have known better than to allow. It is the native way water gets close, and it is also why water can be the most loyal element in the set.
What is missing is not distance. It is edges: being beside someone in a hard hour without becoming the hour.
One conscious action
naming whose it is
When the mood is in the room, one of you says out loud whose it is. This is mine, it is about the phone call, it is not about you. Say it early, while it is still identifiable.
The other says: I can be with you in it, and I am not going to join you in it. Say it plainly, as care rather than refusal, because it is care.
Getting close has never been the difficulty here.
What in you today belongs to nobody else?