Great relationships are created, not found.
Great relationships are created, not found.
If there was one thing I could tell my younger self, it would be this. I spent so many years looking for “the one” with whom it felt joyful, deep, connected, natural. A person with whom I shared the same values and could walk along side as we grew through life together. I thought I could discern all this in a few dates or over a couple months, in order to spare myself the dreaded sensation of “wasted time” if it didn’t “work out.”
As I inquired more deeply into this, I realized it was an illusion. I was so focused on this illusory outcome that I was totally blind to the work required to get there. At first, the illusion bubble bursting felt a lot like despair. If great relationships weren’t *just* found, that meant I needed to learn how to create one. “Is that even possible?” 32 year old Me wondered.
It is not a casual affair to “create” a great relationship.
It requires forgetting everything you know and meeting the person in front of you as a blank slate; as a human being.
It means opening *wider* any time you feel like closing off. It means learning how to repair after inevitable conflict. It means learning a new way of communicating. It means adjusting adjusting adjusting, not for them, but for your own growth.
It means being willing to feel pain all the way through. It means choosing love all the time, over and over again, and especially when everything in your head is guiding you toward resentment, ambivalence, and indifference.
It means taking responsibility for your impact.
It means going out of your way to look for what’s brilliant in another person, particularly when what irritates you about them is super loud. It means getting and giving feedback that might be tough to hear.
It is HARD work to learn to be fluid with another in such a way that it feels joyful, deep, connected, and natural, and even after years of [inner] work, it won't feel that way all the time.
There isn’t an easy button for this for most of us. If you weren’t raised in an environment where these aspects of relating were modeled, the learning curve feels either incredibly steep or totally inaccessible.
But it’s not. Anyone can learn to create a great, strong, beautiful, partnership. Yes, you, too.