The Missing Experience

relationships take work

Or do they?

What does it mean that relationships take work?

People say it over and over as if it’s a truism, like something your mother would say.  But earlier this year I did a workshop where the presenter (Kate McNulty) talked about dating and sexuality for people said by some to be “on the spectrum.”  She questioned it outright.  She was also concerned about how that admonition can be daunting for someone who just wants to have some companionship.

I forget the book, but in the beginning was a description of an experience the narrator had when he encountered a young hippie hetero couple.   Either he picked them up hitchhiking, or maybe he was the one who was hitchhiking, it doesn’t matter.  What struck him was how lighthearted they both were about the journey of life.  I forget how but somehow this got tied into Eastern spiritual perspective and practice.

I know that some couples trigger the heck out of each other and have a heck of a time trying to converse.   But personally, I don’t think relationships have to be hard.  Why can’t people just enjoy each other?

If there is work to be done, what exactly is the work to be done?

Is the work really like some sort of meditation practice?  The practice of bringing (or dragging) yourself from the past to the present?  The practice of seeing your partner in the present instead of seeing all the past crappy ways you have been wronged by your partner?  Stepping out of a trance.  Is the work the effort it takes to practice self-control?  To listen with the intention to understand and counter the reflex to respond, explain, defend?  Is it the effort to keep your mouth shut when that is the best thing to do?  Is the work some practice of calming yourself down?  Getting a grip?  Breathing slower until you can get your voice back?  Does the work consist of shuffling your thoughts around in different and more realistic or positive ways?  Does the work consist of finding words to fit your experience that might be helpful to share?  And being careful in how you put those words out there?

My sense that relationships don’t have to be such hard work comes from models of relationship from John Welwood as well as from Jett Psaris and Marlena S. Lyons, the authors of the book Undefended Love. 

I asked someone I see in counseling what it could possibly mean – the idea that relationships take work – and the person said that it means working on self – which means:  When taking things too personally, to take a step back, and examine it – because probably it’s not about you.  Again, it’s like a meditation – shifting your focus away from the other person to yourself.

My understanding of Tibetan Buddhism (from what I learned sitting in classes by Steven Goodman) is that the work is like an ongoing practice to develop certain muscles.  And it’s all for the sake of Compassion Practice.  So first, there’s a muscle of awareness of what’s going on.  Then there’s a muscle that remembers that you forgot what you were supposed to be focusing on.  There’s a muscle that brings your attention back.  There’s a muscle for staying with the matter at hand.  And then there’s the practice of wishing for the cessation of suffering.

So maybe the work is catching yourself when you have left your center, bringing yourself back to yourself, and coming back to the world.