Your Courageous Life

leaning

The one and only–my one and only–Andy.

I was excited to see this article on Elizabeth Gilbert making the Facebook rounds today. Commitment in relationships is a topic of particular interest to me, largely because when I envisioned myself as an adult in a relationship, I never in my wildest dreams envisioned the relationship that I am actually in with Andy, today.

Now, since this is not Andy’s blog and he’s entitled to his privacy, there are certain things that I just don’t share about our relationship, certain struggles that I personally think it would be okay to talk about, but that I recognize he wants to keep private as he/we work through them. So I give full disclosure with admitting that of course, we have struggles in our relationship that I don’t air here. That would not be fair to him.

But even at the same time that I say that, I also am so in awe of us, of what we have created. Sometimes, when we work through something particularly sticky and difficult, it feels almost holy or divinely protected. I’ll think, “Where did we get the strength to turn that around? We were so angry a moment ago. How did we do that?”

The answer lies in years of hard work, and of now maintaining that work and of really playing an active role in one another’s lives while also allowing one another a degree of space that, from what I understand of the things that have been shared with me/said, would not work for some other people (i.e., my trips abroad have put me away from my partner for weeks to a month at a time).

Even if I don’t want to share specifics that might compromise our intimacy as a couple, I do feel compelled, in the interests of the topic of commitment, to share a bit about what I see as the tools that help us find our way back to peace.

First, there are some general practices that we try to use in our everyday lives, with everyone we know, that become more important in an intimate relationship. Those include:

1.) Asking for our 100% (respectfully) and not attaching to the person’s response.

2.) Clearing withholds and resentments.

3.) Not taking things personally (i.e., if he’s in a pissy mood, I try to remember that that isn’t about me, it’s about him).

4.) Doing our own personal work to process out fear, shame, guilt, old wounds so that we don’t take out our triggers on one another.

Then there are some other practices, that are all about us.

a.) Asking “How can I support you now?” when one or the other of us is upset.

b.) Taking time a few times a week for a check-in that involves giving appreciations, clearing withholds, making amends/apologies.

c.) Saying “Re-do, please,” when someone says something disrespectful.

All of this sounds like a lot of work–all of the work on the self, the work on the relationship. At this point it doesn’t really feel that way, because it’s become a lifestyle. It’s no longer weird or different to use these tools, whereas at one point in time, one or both of us had resistance to using them and the effort of trying to do something new would spark more fights. But having established some kind of pattern with using them, they get easier (even if, I confess, a few times a year we still have those really nasty arguments that last for hours).

I guess that for the most part, we’ve arrived at a place where it takes less time for our 20-minute check in with one another a few times a week than it does to have one of those exhausting arguments that can last into the wee hours of the night and leave someone with an “argument hangover” the next morning.

But again, I never could have imagined, when this relationship began, that it would end up here. Movies and television and the filtered reports on relationships that I got from friends never taught me what a real, healthy relationship looked like. Certainly, I did not see it in my parents, who divorced at seven, and who maintained something like abject disgust for one another for several years following the divorce.

I am most proud of us at times such as the past two weeks, when Andy has had an influx of freelance work, and I have started a new semester of teaching, and there are days when we are like two ships passing in the night (quite literally, there are days when he is heading into San Francisco while I am home, and then I am heading into San Francisco when he’s heading back to the house!).

We checked in with one another last weekend about all of this–about the things that need to be done around the house, the watering schedule for the plants, how to meal plan and get cooking done, how to do laundry. And it suddenly dawned on me that despite all of our connection, we still separate a lot. We do separate bill paying, separate grocery shopping, separate laundry, separate chores. It was a surprise to realize that there are all of these things that we haven’t integrated, and that the idea of integrating them scared me a little–I was running up against an edge of my comfort zone, a little edge of intimacy that keeps me from fully integrating my life with his.

So, I took a step out of my comfort zone, getting a little more dependent and integrated in a kind of funny way: I asked him to make me a package of chicken once a week.

(I’m totally laughing at myself right now).

Since letting go of vegetarianism about a year ago, I still have never gotten over cooking raw meat. I hate it. I find chicken to be particularly disgusting, and I’m paranoid about getting salmonella juice all over the place. Andy cooks a package of chicken for us whenever he’s eating it, too. I’ve never asked him to make it for me just because I needed some help with meal planning and it was a task that I really disliked doing.

He agreed, without hesitation.

And this is where I get the gift of all the work that we’ve done to be connected–I feel truly appreciative to have a guy who would help me out by grilling up some chicken once a week and putting it in a tupperware container for me to parcel out during the week.

When I saw, earlier this week, that he was inundated with work, I took over watering the plants and sweeping up the grounds, even though this is a job that he normally takes on. And why? Because it needed to be done, my man needed help in that way, and I was stepping up. He was totally appreciative.

It seems to me that what so much of this work to be connected–and committed–is about is staying in a place of gratitude and appreciation for one’s partner. Even when we are having a rough time, we still always have these moments where we will laugh and laugh, or replay one of our inside jokes, or do something sweet for one another. It’s that thread of gratitude and appreciation that has carried us through tough times. Even in the hardest periods, I can always find something about him that I love and appreciate.

It is a scary thing to commit to someone in this way, and it involves a lot of dropping of Ego and my own crap and attending to the matter at hand. It is the most wonderful journey I’ve ever undertaken, thus far, and by far it has been the most rewarding, the most steeped in benefits.