More often than most people realize, we bind and limit ourselves in order to preserve our primary relationships. Sometimes we actually choose to remain the same and, in various ways, encourage our partner to remain the same in the mistaken belief that this will protect our relationship. The thinking goes something like this: Even though I am not being emotionally fed or stretched in this relationship, I won’t ever leave, because I would rather be safe here with you than on my own.

The second illusion, and the flipside to wishing our partner were our ideal parent, is the tendency to see and hear our literal parents when we look at and listen to our partner. When our spouse behaves in ways that even remotely resemble a parent’s behavior we can forget who is standing in front of us and react not so much to our mate but to our parent and all they ever did to us. The psychological term for this phenomenon is transference.

Don’t confuse a partner’s right to autonomy with what is part of a reasonable relational agreement. If your partner continually arrives later than promised for dinner, it is appropriate to insist he keep his word.

If you can, insist your partner keep his word and he continues to disregard you, create effective consequences; the more creative the consequences, the better.

Equally important, let the consequences fit the occasion. For example, with a constantly tardy mate, you might stop taking him into account for your evening plans.

The light of awareness, the third principle of love, is the tool of tools for emerging out of the swamp of emotional struggle and suffering. It is the simplest of tools, for it is our birthright, yet it is also the most difficult of capacities to master.

For the mind’s tendency is to dodge and weave, to use denial, delusion, stupor and all sorts of other crafty means to avoid seeing what otherwise lies right in front of our nose. No one wants the pain of perceiving their own frailty, hurts and unmet needs. So though many of us pay lip-service to the great value of awareness, to some degree we all avoid it.

Until you are deeply confident of your capacity to relate under stress, do not even think about having children. Children are major stress-creators. Raising them requires a whole set of difficult skills and even then leaves most people, at least occasionally, bewildered and bedeviled.

The amount of time children take greatly limits a couple’s opportunities to play together, nurture each other, communicate, make love, and generally do the things that keep a relationship on a healthy keel.

Children are also financially costly, which adds to the stress level. Probably most important, children rearrange our psyches, as if they were removing one program from our psyche and adding another.

If you want to enter the heart of relationship – and enjoy the abundant fruits and riches to be found there, marry for the right reasons. When you marry for the right reasons it is as if you have already passed Go three times and are leaping immediately into the fourth truth of self-care.

Marrying for the right reasons is taking care of you from the onset. It is the simplest way to limit the struggle and suffering stage and move directly towards the ultimate phase of personal power and selflessness. First, what are some wrong reasons to marry?

Many of us would be better off devoting years to developing relationship tools and practicing more manageable sorts of relationships, such as friendships and separate-abode romances, rather than to become pulled into the vortex of a traditional, committed marriage. (If you truly love someone, Katherine Hepburn once commented, live next door to them.)

If having children is your prime motivation for a relationship, explore arrangements for conceiving or adopting without a mate, and for single parenting. While single-parenting is a handful, it beats constant conflict with a partner. And some people are better equipped for parenting than for marriage. If you are getting married so that you can make love, seriously consider a more liberated approach. Enjoy love-making and leave it at that.

If love and committed relationship is not what means most to you, don’t expect much to come of either, anymore than you would expect to become an Olympic gold winner, a multimillionaire, or an astronaut without giving a great deal of yourself to the process.

Enduring, healthy couplehood is probably the single most difficult human task. Albert Einstein described making a mess of two marriages: he could deal with God and the Universe, but not with wives. Heroes and geniuses fail at it.

Sex and Communication

Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, poor sex and poor communication do not ruin relationships; poor relationships ruin sex and communication. If communication skills made the difference specialists claim they make, then therapists and communication specialists would excel at marriage. They do not.

When I ask couples who come for help about their difficulties, often each partner acknowledges that the other was more adept at both love-making and communication in their earlier, better days. It isn’t that people forget how to communicate and make love; they lose interest in trying.

At the heart of the couple relationship is the eternal dream that our partner will be the wonderful mother or father we never had. We desire nothing more than that our partner give us the love, care and protection we didn’t get enough of as children. We never had the perfect parents, but we are still looking for them.