The Power of Creating Harmony in Relationship

My husband and I have definitely been through significant seasons of trials and immense heartache where early on in the relationship we did not know if we would recover. In the last eight years, it is hard to believe that we are in a harmonious place that is filled with security, compassion, and playful hearts once again. I am incredibly grateful for all the hard truths, tears, and setbacks because we would not know any different if we did part ways early on. The best piece of advice I ever received during trials in my young twenties, was, "no matter you who enter in relationship with, you will have to go through pain because no one is ever 'healed'". This ultimately changed the way I was looking at staying with someone long term and allowed me to ask the hard questions. One being, "is this person's indifferences and past pain someone I want to grow alongside with?".

Continuing to choose each other day in and day out has led us into a recent year of more opportunity for caring connections and rebuilding a solid foundation we both align with. For me, I am in a stage of life where I see my husband as a genuine, kind-hearted man and honor the ways in which he feels most excited to provide, serving a greater purpose for a future family. For him, he shared recently, "I see you growing into a new version of yourself, more gentle and understanding, yet, the same amount of excitement and adventurous soul you have always been". I believe the secret to helping rewire old narratives and keeping one another out of past negative cycles, is more often naming what you love seeing in the other on a weekly basis. When we both started naming what the other is naturally good at, it took away from the built up negative perceptions that were becoming an enemy in the relationship. Ultimately, you choose what dies. The key is it starts with you, not waiting on the other person to do it.

I had a perspective shift recently that 'time does not heal, the capacity to sit with old wounds and keep choosing loving interactions does'. An easy way to disrupt our old trauma narrative is actively being conscious when it comes to witnessing how one another is choosing a softer behavior or interaction that goes against what their 'normal' response would be. At my core, I believe we learn to live with our pain and overtime the wounds act as a bruised part of our story. The hurt still presents itself, yet, we hold the past experiences with a compassionate embrace, knowing, that no matter what we just would not have been able to do it differently.

In my personal opinion, there is young wild-natured love and aging mature love. When you choose to be in a long term relationship you have to move through it all together and this is something we do not talk about. Our wild-natured Selfs had purpose back then (even if we did not know better) and our tame mature Selfs have freedom in the ways we get to keep choosing new ways of a deeper connection now. It makes me wonder if in the young, wild-natured years that is when people can "entrap" the other because realistically you are both exploring all of who you are and want to become. AND when our identity or authentic self gets threatened or we "fear the person we are with could take away from our future ideals", it puts you both in a dance of uncertainty and anxieties. How many long-term couples stay together out of fear verses love? I am not sure, however, a concept I thought about often when I was questioning what growing together with someone really meant several years back.

I am finding it very exciting to look at the relationship we have now with more creative, mature choice and freedoms that once felt more like 'being trapped in a one way cage'. My husband and I are learning what it means to break out of societal norms, past cultural ideologies, and bring in our own truths that is not influenced by anything outside of the relationship. This has been HUGE in regards to cultivating more peace in our conversations.

I had a friend this year ask what it was for me that allowed me to keep investing in our relationship back then, even on the darkest of days. My response was, "When we first met we both fell in love quickly with the immediate feelings we had for one another. I was comforted by his calm demeanor and more grounded personality. He was captivated by my energy and bold personality. These basic qualities have stayed the same about us even through exposed traumas and heartache that was, at times, a mirror back into the parts of us that needed to change most". However, even though our initial experiences together were blissful and infatuating, I also know it was not the right time for us to start dating when we did. We both agreed recently that even though it was not the right time, we would have never done it differently either (which is where compassion comes to play). There were many shared experiences where we had a mutual understanding of our colored pasts and also were not able to have a lot of empathy for one another because we were both hurting at the same time. This was a barrier in communication and ability to really hear one another early on. The truth here is we had to be self-serving for a point in time because we could not heal the other person's trauma. We have learned you restore parts of the relationship by witnessing one another act from a place of true growth verses pain. As we support one another in ways that are no longer heavy hearted, I know it is also restoring parts of our brain chemistry too.

In the last couple years we had a larger realization that we have been able to stay together because we also fell in love with older versions of who we would become (without knowing what that would actually be). Maybe we had room for the young and old versions of us to exist altogether. You can never exactly pin-point it, however, I have to think this is the part of life we are not meant to fully understand.

I think a lot of us question what it means to love someone, while also trying to 'undo' behaviors from our upbringing at the same time. We never talked about these things explicitly early on, partly because our brains are often playing catch up from other wounds that never fully had time to be rewired and most people were not taught how to resolve conflicts in their home. Therefore, you could hop into one relationship after the other and enact the same behaviors because you are not actively ending a cycle. You will never be able to plan ahead for "ending a cycle" in your life. I say this because we never know what it is that actually needs tending too until we are in relation to someone else. You have to be courageous enough to start acting differently when pain becomes the only lens you are living from.

The sign for my husband and I was when our interactions with one another started feeling like it was ALL based around triggers and less from a place of compassion and understanding. When I reflect back on the awful patterns we would get caught in, I'm also very thankful for them because it was a wake up call that we both needed to make significant changes in order to overcome what felt like 'saturated pain' for some time. Through anger, frustrations and grief, we both chose together that was no way to live life and it was time to pave a new path. Currently, the path we are walking feels like we have been able to exhale and really show up as ourselves without any constraints or expectations.

As much grace as you give yourself in your story, give grace in your spouses journey too.

ART