Enrich Your Relationships With This One Change of Perspective

One of the most important revelations I ever had about relationships is this: the ones that thrive tend to see the relationship as more than a product of the interaction between two people, but rather as a living entity unto itself.

This distinction is everything.

When we perceive our relationship as a living thing with needs of its own, we escape the persistent and damaging competition of whose needs are being met. Instead, we get to focus on meeting the needs of the whole which then creates the safety and space to meet all of the individual needs we bring to it.

Having raised four children into near adulthood, it is a thing of great joy when I get the chance to see them all together again. What is most noticeable to me is how my kids have grown up enough to put the needs of their relationship with each other above their own needs. One evening there was a little collision by the door that in their adolescent past might have turned into a brawl. But now, the injured one was able to walk away, deal with his own needs, and come back without having to hurt back. This simple act created enough space for his older brother to apologize authentically. Their relationship has grown into a haven for each of them, and it was clear how much they understood about its care.

Driven by meeting our own needs, our capacity for true relationship building is seriously compromised. Instead of building a safe space with room to grow into ourselves, relationships that are built on feeding the needs of the other eventually become fodder for betrayal and self-doubt.

It begins by score-keeping.

The endless tally of who did what for whom, who said yes, who said no, who asked first, who showed up, who didn’t…This keeping track of our needs met and unmet, becomes a cage with someone always feeling less than, and the weight of guilt dogging every interaction.

I know this space intimately as it characterized the beginning of my marriage–and dare I say, the beginning of many marriages.

We are all party to this mistaken notion that relationships exist to meet our emotional, physical, sexual needs. And then we are angry when they don’t. I have vivid memories of the disappointment and frustration I often felt after I got married, that my husband wasn’t in fact making me happy. I still had all of the same issues that I brought to the marriage, and I was so mean to him about how he was failing to fix me. In retrospect, I can’t believe we survived that stage. Most don’t.

This misperception is also the basis for most of the betrayal that develops in our intimate relationships. Not only do we feel entitled to have our needs met, but the ways in which they aren’t, whether sexually or emotionally, becomes the elephant in the room which justifies almost any act of betrayal. We aren’t thinking about the relationship, or the damage we are inflicting on what we’re building. We are thinking only of how we cannot get our needs met with our partner.

The more we focus on our unmet needs, the bigger they get.

When this happens, it is impossible to be honest about the ways the relationship is actually holding you, let alone the efforts your partner is making.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that turns into a million versions of the same story about how incompatible you both were, or immature, etc.

The truth is that no one ever really meets our needs — except maybe in the blessed early years of when our parents are charged with growing our tiny existence. Yet even then, in many ways, it is the special relationship of parenting that holds us.

Learning to think about your relationships as living, breathing organisms is how we can make the transition to feeding the needs that supports everyone, and surprisingly, amazingly will finally meet your own.

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