Do you know the most common struggle couples face today?
The conflict between the seemingly opposing needs of individuality and connection.
Wanting to stay connected to the person we love yet not wanting to give up our own individual growth.
We live in a culture that is increasingly focused on the freedom of choice and individuality, yet we haven’t updated our relational skills to fit this culture.
Most of us still relate the way our grandparents did, when connection and romantic relationships were needed to secure our family’s survival.
We literally needed our partner to survive back then and that's what's still impacting how we relate today, even though we are perfectly fine to survive without a romantic partner.
This leads to big challenges as soon as the honey moon is over and we're face with the reality of changing needs or circumstances.
So as the needs of the individuals in a relationship change, we’re left with two choices: suppress our own needs for the sake of keeping the relationship like previous generations did, or leave and hope for the next relationship to better fit our needs.
This is why divorce rates are skyrocketing and there is such a thing as serial monogamy, where you go from relationship to relationship, changing partners as soon as there’s the slightest challenge.
The thing is: we are relational beings, needing connection to live a fulfilling life.
So while we are focusing more and more on our own individual growth and development, we still try our best to meet this need for connection as well.
This works out in some cases where we're lucky to match perfectly in our individual needs or have enough relational skills to move through challenges, but in most cases it doesn't.
What we need is to upgrade our relational skills to enable us to navigate this conflict that breaks up most couples.
How can I stay true to myself and my needs while staying in loving connection to you?
What if there's a way to hold the tension of opposing needs in connection with each other until a solution for their coexistence emerges from within the connection?
As we are ever changing beings our needs will keep changing, what if its possible for our relationships to evolve with these changes too?
This shift in how we relate is not only needed but inevitable, since this is where evolution so clearly is taking us right now.
And evolution is life looking for more life, love for more love and truth for more truth.
So we might as well listen.
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In service of this need for a new relational paradigm me and Rouven have started a series of conversations on this topic.
We will share the recordings on Idas podcast on Spotify: ”Somatic Relating” and Rouvens Youtube channel: ”Evolutionary integrity”, follow us there to stay tuned.
There you can also find the links to the recording of our first conversation, where we talked about our relational evolution so far and why there is a change needed now as we are facing this conflict of needs in our relationships.
At the end of this week we will record the next topics and we would love to hear from you in the comments: what would you love for us to address?
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