The release date of twilight in 2008, as it were, was also the release date of estrogen into my (and many other teenage girls') body. As Bella confessed the line "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him", my developing 13-year-old-girl-brain emblazoned this sentiment straight into the depths of my malleable, wrinkly, lump of neurons.
"That's love'", I thought, and if I didn't find that kind of love, then WHAT IS THIS ALL FOR.
It's not the first time I'd stumbled my way into this notion of love being this mystical, magical phenomenon of a perfect, good, idealistic other. Over and over again I saw it. It would be defined as magical- only true love's first kiss can break a spell for Disney's Snow White or Aurora. It is also broadly defined by it's functionality, such as in the 70's movie 'Love Story' "love means never having to say you're sorry".
We are supposed to find out "true love", and then "live happily ever after". I had always been kind of curious about that this 'ever after looked like', but we're not meant to really think of that part.
This brings me to my current musings, in the lead up to good ol' Valentines Day. We've seen what it takes for the 'falling in love' bit, what keeps it going?
While the bringing of people together may be a complex soup of attachment styles, the maps of love we learn as we grow up, and a sense novelty and newness- what keeps us together is a different thing.
No one likes to think of 'the work' that is required around this. I mean, if there's 'work', doesn't this shatter the fairytale surrounding this? This fate-like meant-to-be-ness? It's like seeing into the back room of Santa's workshop by accident and catching a glimpsing an elf on smoko. That's not very romantic, magical and mystical.
But this is where our dilemma is. We have become bombarded by a tsunami of messages that love is this a mystically idealistic phenomena, and we can feel bitterly disappointed when it doesn't live up to his expectation, and in fact can take on a messy, difficult and unglamorous (or in other words, realistic) form. It can leave us feeling 'if they didn't get me roses, do they really love me?', 'is this the one?', and thinking 'well my partner is supposed to complete me, but they don't, so now what?'
This is why there needs to be a societal shift to how love and relationships are seen. That yes, they can be thrilling and we can feel love and be smitten, but that this initial spark needs to be maintained.
Laws of thermodynamics, specifically entropy states that, left to it's own devices, a system wants to fall naturally into disorder, so we need to maintain it.
So how can we keep maintaining a relationship, and not expect the mythology of 'I feel butterflies' to carry it along on flimsy wings?
Relationship therapy meets business
Let's consider our relationships similar to that of people who are in business together. That's right, relationship therapy has now met business. In business, partners both have individual goals and needs, but they are working together to achieve joint and individual goals. Sometimes our goals will deviate so much that we need to leave the business, and take it elsewhere.
This here is a relationship is bi-directional connection between two people who hopefully have the important relationship goals and values in common, who are deciding that they are willing to do this journey on Earth alongside each other, ride out storms, support each other, grow together, feel encouraged and secure. This is complex stuff and hard to quantify as we're dealing with differing subjective definitions of this. One person's goal can be to have a sense of feeling supported, and for them that can look like receiving empathic questions, but for another person, it may be practical advice. One person's idea of intimacy may be sexually communicated, the other is only emotionally communicated. When our partner cleans the dishes it can make some feel cared about, others might feel stifled and controlled.
Relationships are not dissimilar to running a business. You need to keep checks on the health of the business, talk about our personal KPI's, have goals that are being worked towards and revised, make contractual agreements, and each person needs to be doing their bit to keep it running or else it goes bankrupt and collapses. It's one thing to have a brilliant business idea (falling in love), and another is making a life out of it (relationships).
So, I've begun playing around with the ideas, and one of them is the couples AGM of sorts, a way that couples can make time in their week to meet, and report back to each other on how their relationship/business is running, what isn't working, what can be tweaked, and what they need help with, what they see for the future and so on.
Let's call them... Weekly Meetings of Love. Here's the run-down:
Weekly Meetings of Love
Find a time in the week for an hour to sit down with your significant other to have this meeting. It can help to have eaten food prior, and to make sure you're not dog-tired.
Initial meeting: Figure out what it is that you'd like from these meetings, such as expectations for topics of discussion, or the agenda of the meeting. These can be:
Providing feedback
Asking for change
Re-visiting a change you've requested in the past
Ground rules for the meeting
Questionnaires
Follow-up meetings: here we continue to review the relationship and it's health, and check out what changes have happened since the previous meeting.
Materials: taking notes and documenting of concerns, and what actions are being taken make this measurable, and this can be done with simple note taking, to utilizing of questionnaires.
There are many ways these meetings can run, and if you're interested in finessing and fine tuning these meetings, a free resource is available to dive more into the bitty gritty of the above.
Finally, happy Valentine's Day, a day I hope we can separate a little from the pure whimsy (and consumerism), and focus more about how romance is really cultivated through deliberate, frequent conversations over time- not just one romantic day of the year.
- Chelsea
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