How's My Relationship Growing?

When you choose your partner and commence a full-time relationship, you look forward to a future of love, support, encouragement, communication and intimacy. Right? After all, you are in love and you're both on your best behavior--so how could there be any problems?

Learning how to establish and maintain a loving, supportive relationship is much like creating a beautiful garden. It takes information, planning, thought, skill, time, and most of all, attention. Like many gardeners, you learn your skills and styles from your parents, close friends and relatives. You watch them from the time you are little. They teach you both your roles in a relationship, and how to play them, through their example. This happens in every family and much of the teaching is unintentional and unconscious. Many of you did not like what you saw and, yet, in your poorest moments, you may behave just that way. In angry, tense times, you revert to the ways you learned in those early days! No wonder your relationships provide you with challenges that cause you to forget the "honeymoon" period sometimes!

The good news is that you can learn how to have a full, rich, loving relationship that allows each partner to express his/her thoughts, feelings, wants, needs and vulnerabilities AND FEEL COMPLETELY SAFE!! You can learn to be assertive (not aggressive) and to collaborate with your partners. You can learn to listen with your minds and hearts. You can learn to fight fair and resolve conflicts equitably and sanely. You can learn to value and acknowledge both yourself and your partner. You can learn to speak from your hearts and be safe. You can learn to ask for what you need and want. You can learn to love more fully. You can learn to DEEPEN your love. It may take some unlearning, releasing habits, fears and beliefs that are blocks to experiencing and expressing love but YOU’RE WORTH IT!

Remember, too, that you are teaching your children how to have a relationship by the way you are conducting yours. What would you like them to learn? What are you showing them every day?

Healthy relationships allow you to fully express yourself and fully expand your capacity to love. Remember, most of your relationship skills are caught, not taught. So, if your relationship is not what you know it could be, there IS a remedy. You can learn new ways--if you are willing and you really want to. What is it worth to you?

If love, acceptance, approval, respect, safety, trust, honesty, integrity, and wholeness are what you want in your life, begin by giving these things to yourself now so that you will have those gifts to bring to your relationships. You cannot give a gift you do not have, can you?