A relatively healthy couple is brought together by love, joy, humor and common interests. Most couples are aware of this and expect this to be what a relationship is about. Beginning relationships hopefully offer all of these wonderful things.
There are also other things which bring a couple together. At the simplest level, to learn from one and other.
What is the essence of relationship? What, most fundamentally, leads to a relationship succeeding? What makes for fulfillment and satisfaction? What is it that most couples are seeking? Genuine connection. And what does that mean? What does one need to do to create or allow for genuine connection?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
