What’s Your Hurry, Anyway?

When does marriage become an endurance contest, rather than an enduring opportunity?  That’s a question that seems to be becoming of greater and, unfortunately, more pervasive importance.  Is that a relevant question for you in your marriage/partnership?  If you don’t know, you’re already at risk of finding out the hard way.

Somewhere along the line in your life, beginning in childhood, you were inundated with all kinds of images, stories, movies, songs, etc. that all seemed to point to the notion that marriage is an essential part of a “successful” life, but the main thing I remember being taught was that the biggest sign of a “successful” marriage was longevity.  Somehow, if you saw a couple make it more than x number of years, they had a “good marriage.”  Yet, it’s painfully obvious that this is not only hooey, but it’s dangerous hooey that has caused immeasurable amounts of suffering for couples and children alike.

If you were to take a look at your relationship (if you’re not currently in one, take a good look at your most significant past ones), do you even know anymore what the criteria for “good” or “successful” is (if you ever did)?  One thing’s for sure, as I’ve come to see in most of the relationships I’ve helped couples with: longevity isn’t the right linchpin to hang your relationship’s merit on.  That’s not to say that longevity is meaningless; it’s just to say that quality will trump quantity anytime when it comes to relationships, in general.  Having said that, though, there’s a double-edged, paradoxical sword when it comes to this.  That paradox is the fact that, while longevity is not a reliable measure of how great your marriage is, it takes longevity to have a great marriage/partnership.

You’ve seen other articles in this eZine about what commitment really means.  Without commitment, you have nothing upon which to hang your hat or to help you move through challenges.  When it comes to marriages, commitment can be the glue that gets you through the roughest times.  However, given the long lasting trend towards disposable marriages over the last 20 years or so (a trend that statistics are beginning to show is slowing down, incidentally), it is wise to be clear on what your committed to. [Thus that paradox just mentioned: commitment alone doesn't insure a healthy marriage, but without some clearly stated and mutually agreed upon commitments, your relationship can't stay healthy and vital.]  If longevity becomes a central criterion for how you evaluate the condition of your commitment and your relationship, it can lead to some blind spots that can bite you on the fanny later. One of those blind spots is staying in a relationship that has become irreparably toxic, just to honor the commitment or “for the kids’ sake.”

So, what is a wise and healthy mix and intersection of commitment and longevity?  I would suggest the following possibilities:

• Firstly, get clear with yourself and your partner about what “Quality” really means to you…not just in terms of your relationship, but in terms of your life as a whole.  What is a quality life to you?  If each of you are clear on that, then you can have truly intimate and meaningful discussions with each other on how your relationship can serve that happening.  It will also give you a metric to regularly evaluate how “on-track” your relationship is at any given time.
• Remove your parents’ relationships as a measure against which to evaluate yours, unless they truly had/have a fully functional, dynamic, vibrant, and consistently loving relationship. If I were to just use longevity as a yardstick, my parents’ 34-year marriage (the 2nd time) would seem something to emulate…but, they were miserable for most of that time.  Come January, my wife and I will have been together for 4 years less than my parents were, and our marriage couldn’t be more like night and day.  Why? Partly because I didn’t want it to be, but also because we’ve chosen to focus on who WE are, and what WE want/need.
• Don’t be committed to misery and suffering, just because you have a commitment…if you’re doing everything you can to try to make it work.  If you are making that assessment of “all we can do” on your own…that’s a mistake, particularly if you’re both noticing escalating conflict levels.  The road, and my workshops, have been littered with the shells of what could’ve grown to greatness, but are shells/”corpses” now, because the idea that “we’ve been together for so long means we must be doing ok” has been so inappropriately comforting.  That’s not the only reason, of course. But, if you and your partner are really suffering, and you’re trying to strategize and work on it all by yourself (and have been doing that for awhile with the continued undesireable results), you will very likely see continued erosion to a place where the relationship goes past the point of no return.
• Remember that the best of relationships are marathons, not sprints.  All relationships have challenges and trials.  Framing your marriage/partnership as the best vehicle for not only for learning more about yourself, but also for expanding the breadth and depth of who you are getting expressed in the world inside and around you, may give you the necessary breathing room when things are pretty bad to, hopefully, remember you’re both bigger than the conflict…and, so is the purpose and value of your relationship.
• Remember that conflict MAY not just be a sign of real “trouble.” If you use it early on to really get vulnerable with honest communications with each other, the conflict could also be a sign that your relationship has finally reached a place where you’re both ready to take a quantum leap in your growth…which scares your egos enough that fear comes up to try to temper the leap.  Don’t let it. 
• Stay Awake!  Again, my office has been sadly over-populated with people coming in, trying to avoid divorce, who say some variation or another of, “I didn’t know s/he was so unhappy…that things were that bad!”  This happens for many reasons, but one of the chief ones for you will be that you aren’t telling the truth to your partner (and/or to yourself) and being real with them in the moment about what you’re needing and feeling.  “I don’t want to upset them right now” will eventually lead to “I didn’t know things were that bad.”

One final quick tip to use if you’re struggling, but wanting your relationship to be an enduring opportunity: if you have any kind of commitment to sacredness and sacred living, remember that your relationship isn’t the source of the sacred, but is a reflection of it; treating it as such, and relating to your partner as just another (albeit unique) expression of the Divine in you, may also help you use tough issues as a growth opportunity to get closer to the Divine that your relationship could be…if you’d only allow it.

“It is with the interior eye that truth is seen.  Our whole business, therefore in this life, is to restore to health the Eye Of The Heart whereby God may be seen.” – St. Augustine

Is Nothing Sacred?

I had a delightful breakfast yesterday with someone who contacted me through seeing me on FaceCrack.  Both of us are middle-aged and have been around the block more than a few times.  Somewhere in the midst of our conversation, we started talking about divorce.  My new-found friend, Mary Grace, said “It seems like more people are actually reversing the trend of just going right to divorce when things get tough, and are trying to work things out first.”  Later in the day, I was reading Huffington Post, and saw an article about a conservative group that’s trying to lobby for Congress to enact a bill that would require a one-year cooling off period for people considering divorce, that would include mandatory “reconciliation counseling.”

Not withstanding the potential that has to make me much busier, these two coincidences really struck a chord that I want to encourage you to feel into if you’re in a relationship or marriage that is struggling in any significant way.  When you got married, for example, you said vows to each other that (for most weddings) include the words “For better or worse.”  You may have said those words in some kind of religious/Spiritual setting, where the implication was you were committing to those vows in front of God/Spirit/The Divine, thereby lending them a certain cache of Sacredness.  When you said those vows, I imagine you meant them.  But, things – like all of life – change.

You may have grown apart…economics may be driving a lot of tension and disconnection into your marriage…your kids may be going through challenges that are so intense, you can’t even think about putting any energy into your relationship…it’s just about surviving and getting through.  That’s all understandable and widespread.  However, the key question is what are you going to do about it?  Just continue surviving and trying to get through it?  That’s a one-way ticket to you and your relationship becoming candidates for getting cast in that Zombie TV show on AMC, called the Walking Dead.

So, what does all that, and Sacredness, have to do with anything?

Of all the things that could have enormous potential to be of service to you and your Partner, besides all the obvious communications issues that most distressed couples are in the throes of, is to re-visit what was/is Sacred about your relationship.  First, though, let’s grab onto a definition of Sacred that might work for you.  Here’s a couple that blend well together:

• Worthy of or regarded with Awe, Reverence, and Respect
• Dedicated to; in honor of

Now, when you’re feeling stressed to the Max, overwhelmed, and lonely – especially in your own relationship – Sacred may be about the last thing you want to be paying ANY attention to; in fact, your Ego is probably screaming in your ear hogwash like, “Sacred doesn’t pay the bills;” or “Sacred sure isn’t getting me the help (or, for some, the sex/affection) I need.” That would be totally understandable.  What I want to encourage you to try on for size, however, is what happens if you actually do the heavy lifting it often takes when you want to rip your hair out (or someone else’s) to FIND the Sacred…even the Sacred in the disagreement or tension you’re experiencing in a given moment that has you just wanting to say “Screw this!”?

Lao Tsu once wrote, “A sensible person prefers the Inner Eye to the Outer Eye, and Plato said, “There is an eye of the Soul which is more precious than then thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.”  Those were written a long long time ago, but they still hold enormous wisdom for you with your relationship.  When you committed to your marriage and relationship, did you hold that commitment as Sacred, by the definitions offered above?

You’ve read here, in the past, about how most – if not all – conflicts in relationships is really about the conflicted relationship you have with yourself.  So, when you are seemingly unable to find anything sacred in your partner anymore, the first thing to do to try to begin shifting the situation is to do whatever it takes to re-connect with the Sacred in you.  One way to do that is to dig as deep as you have to to re-connect with what you saw as Sacred in your partner when you realized you were falling in love with them…then, re-see the mirroring of you that that is.  When you can see that, and (importantly) FEEL that, it gives you a greater potential to create a ground of working something out that’s based not on the projections you may be throwing all over your partner, but on that Sacred mirroring that you both “signed up” with each other to provide.

Additionally, the Sacred trumps anything the Ego-Mind comes up with.  It’s not at all that the issues of poor communication, upset feelings, broken promises, lack of attention, etc. aren’t relevant or important.  However, trying to work those out when you’re in the midst of your Ego telling you that those behaviors are the truth about who your partner is, and what they REALLY feel/think about you, is an almost certain dead-end.  But, if you’re looking at that stuff from inside a true heart-ful connection to the Inner Sacred that you are and have available to you at all times, that creates different perspectives. Those perspectives offer you breathing room that allow the other, more mind-ish, stuff be worked out as a pathway to re-aligning yourself with your True Self, rather than as a way to just get what you need to make you feel better (rather than BE-ing better) in a transitory Ego-based way.  What you can newly create together when you’ve both gotten back to that kind of State is way richer than anything the mind alone can come up with.

Another Lao Tsu quote comes to mind here: “Those who are open-eyed are open-minded; those who are open-minded are open-hearted.”  So, the next time you’re royally pissed off or disappointed in your partner, to test out this orientation I’m sharing here, try these two things (and then let me know how they work, or not, for you):

1. Excuse yourself and get yourself into a nature environment, which – for most of us – can get you totally re-connected to the Energy of Sacredness, from within which you could allow yourself to feel the Sacredness inside you.  Then, from there, allow your heart to guide how you’re going to work out the issue with your partner.
2. Create the time and space for you to temporarily detach and go look inside to see what is the conflict/issue (and your Partner) now here to teach you?  Rather than feeling persecuted by, or made invisible in some way by, the other…what happens if you regard the person and “the issue” as a Spirit-sent teacher/teaching especially brought to you to be able to expand and deepen you, not attack or demean you.

In closing, I want you to be clear that this is simple, but rarely easy.  The hold of the Ego, and our commitments to being right (or not being wrong) are extremely powerful.  This is not a practice I’m sharing here that’s likely to be mastered overnight.  You have to be committed to just going for it one moment at a time, because these are not the times anymore for resting into complacency or resignation.  Like a lot of things, if you practice, mastery will come; if you don’t, you may be throwing away a Sacred commitment – and relationship – for all the wrong reasons.

“It is with the interior eye that truth is seen.  Our whole business, therefore in this life, is to restore to health the Eye Of The Heart whereby God may be seen.” – St. Augustine

It’s Not What You Think

Do you ever notice how much time you spend trying to “figure out what’s going on” in your life…and in your relationship, if you’re in one?  If it ends up being a fair amount of time, how’s it working for you?  When you do get some “answers,” what’s the most common result you get from having obtained that answer?  Furthermore, where do those “answers” most frequently come from for you?…others?….your mind?….your heart?….or, from your intuition?

Perhaps the most important question is, once you figure out what’s going on, what are you actually doing about it?  How often are you actually making some kind of change that makes a lasting difference in your relationship and/or your life? This gets so tricky, because we believe what our minds tell us…we actually often think it’s The Truth. For generations, we have been conditioned to believe that the sure-fire way to “success” is to strategize, plan, and think our way into our destiny. Surely, if you can figure that out, you’ll know how to “do” your life, right?

Yet, for all of that mental gymnastics that occupy you day-to-day, how much is really changing in your life, your relationship, and your family (if you have one)?  How long have you been suffering with some issue that – in spite of how much cerebral elbow grease you’ve put into trying to sort it out and “fix it” – you end up spending months or years tolerating in a masterfully inertia-ridden way? In my experience with SO many couples, the answer to that question is almost always “too damn long.”  It seems to be a human condition or dilemma that causes and/or perpetuates so much suffering, confusion, and inertia…particularly to the degree you’re fanatical about preserving your control of how you think your relationship is supposed to go, distinct from where it wants or even needs to go.

Where does your relationship want or need to go?  Hell if I know!  However, if you have the same response to that question, and really want clarity about it…and want that clarity because you actually want your relationship to look and feel differently…you better be taking a hard look.  Notice I didn’t say “figure it out.”  I’m saying you need to take a deep, comprehensive look at that question if things aren’t going the way you perceive you want them to be going with your partner on a consistent basis. While that big piece of tofu in between your ears (thank you Dr. Rick Hanson) needs to play a part in that process, I’m going to suggest that if you let it be the sole source of your seeming answers, you’re hosed.

So, you may be thinking right about now, you’re reading a lot of questions with no answers yet, or how to get there, right (damn, another question)?  Maybe you want the map?  Well, there are several different paths to taking that hard look, getting the clarity you need, and beginning to shift what’s actually happening in a way that your life starts shifting on a regular basis. Hell, I even know a few of ‘em.  But, I’m not going to give you any (at least directly) today.  Why? Because, chances are currently too high that you won’t do anything with them, even if I were to write them up right now.

It’s astonishing how many people tell me, “I don’t need any help with my life/relationship, particularly from someone else…I’m reading some books and figuring it out.”  Yet, even as they say that, if prodded as to how long they’ve been doing that, they often hem and haw before admitting that it may have been years, and that not much has been changing.  It’s incredible how easy it is for you to forget Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”  How insane are you and your partner being, not only with your relationship, but with your life?

You have to start being honest with yourself (if you want anything different, that is) about why you’re not doing anything about what doesn’t seem to be working.  You’re going to have to start facing the truth that if you keep putting up with what you don’t want, there’s something going on in your mind for which the misery is seeming to actually work for that belief structure.  If you can really allow yourself to get the truth of that, then you can begin the trip out of that loop, towards what you really want.  To do that, you’ll need a map.

Now, no map is worth a damn unless you have some idea of where you’re trying to go.  To figure that out without first acknowledging where you are (the origin point, as it were), is ludicrous.  Yet, even before that, you have to make the decision that you not only  want to take the trip, but are committed to it no matter what…and will do whatever it takes to get there. If you’re not getting the changes you think you want in your life, it’s a sign that you need to stop thinking…at least for a bit.  Instead, you need to start feeling into yourself, and begin seeing what your heart and your Spirit are telling you is wanted and needed for a change.  My suggestion is that you start that process with really going to your gut to ask “Why am I willing to suffer for so long?”  Keep asking it…don’t trust the first answer; particularly if it’s along the lines of “Because I keep hoping my partner will change.”  Your partner has NOTHING to do with it.  It has EVERYTHING to do with you.

If you can embrace that reality, then the answers to what’s helping you tolerate so much likely unnecessary suffering in your relationship will start surfacing.   Furthermore, don’t forget for a moment that, if you’re suffering, so is your partner…it’s just going to be a matter of whether they’re awake to it or not.  If they aren’t, they need to be doing the same process with themselves.  For many, doing that is going to be resisted like a mother…your mind does not want you looking at this.  But, what does your heart want?  Why did you get in the relationship in the first place?  If you can remember and reconnect with that, then this inquiry I’m suggesting is critical.  From there, you then have to decide if you’re really willing to do something about it.  All of that inquiry needs to start in your heart and your gut, I suggest.  Your mind has a totally different agenda, and you don’t really feel love and joy in your head.

You also probably won’t know off the bat what to do about it (which is where people like me can come into the picture), but without that committed decision to do something, you’re going to be ensuring that your life and relationship keeps heading towards becoming a testament to the expression “Same S**t, Different Day” that most relationships are unfortunately – and needlessly – settling into.

Don’t you deserve better than that?