I jokingly told a friend the other day that I miss the intensity of a new relationship. “I hate vanilla” I told him.
I don’t really hate vanilla. It’s just that vanilla is really hard.
It’s when things get real. It’s when the honeymoon faze is over and the real work begins.
It’s also the time when couples, if they take the opportunity, rise. This is when each person in the relationship has the opportunity to cultivate the next level.
Fall in love, get married, start a family… it sounds great on paper but for those of us with any sort of relational trauma it’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s easy to have a relationship when you’re both feeling good and happy but that’s not where the love happens.
Which brings me to why I’m writing about this. Every time my wife gets upset or reacts unfavorably to something that I do I find myself wanting to shut down. Sometimes it’s for a couple of minutes and others for an hour.
People want to feel safe and regulated in a relationship but how can we if we bring a version of ourselves that doesn’t feel safe in the world? I’ve been working toward this my whole recovery and I got there when I was single. I got to a place where everything aligned perfectly around me and I felt safe and then I entered a new developmental stage, being a husband and a father.
Being in a healthy intimate relationship is the hardest work I’ve ever done. Every single day something gets reflected back to me that I need to work on. Every day. Throw in a child, money stress, change of jobs, new nannies and a gaggle of other things and it hammers all of the work that I done on myself over the years from a totally different perspective.
One day your needs are being met, the next day they’re not. One day you’re being vulnerable and the next you’re not. It’s a doozy.
When we get into a relationship with another person we have the opportunity to take everything that we learned when we were single(if you took that time for yourself) and learn to practice it in our relationship and learn even more. It’s about staying in a healthy relationship with yourself as you learn how to be in a healthy relationship with another person. And that’s the work and I hate to say it but it never stops.
I don’t say that to discourage you. It does get easier over time. You just never know where it’s going to come from. You’ll work through your fears and you’ll get to solid ground and feel good and then something will hit you from somewhere else.
Point being we’re never going to get to that magical place were it all stops and we’re good all the time. We’re just not. And that’s a good thing because that means we get to keep evolving. If we want to.
This doesn’t mean you’ll be in therapy your whole life nor does it mean that you’ll be miserable your whole life. What it does mean is that the more work we do on ourselves the more practice we get and the more prepared we actually are for those times when we get whacked upside our heads.
If we are growing we are putting ourselves into new uncharted territory. We will never have the exact road map to stay away from the land mines and that’s okay. In fact that’s a good thing because it means that you’re cultivating the next level.
So…
What do you need to work on in order to step into greater self-love for yourself and/or your partner?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Love,
Zachary