couples

Living Together: Guidelines for Couples

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Here are the seven principles of a couple's coexistence, according to emotional ecology. The goal is to create the best possible conditions to love and to be loved when you share a space with another person. This is also one of the hardest parts about being in a relationship and many have failed during the initial phases of living together because the people involved were not ready or failed to understand all implications that go along with co-inhabitance.

Personal autonomy.

Each person must be themselves and work to know how and and be autonomous. Everyone must be given the means to make their dreams (within reason, otherwise if they are too grand you might be better suited single) come true. Every person is unique.

Dependency prevention.

Don't play "mother" or "father" with your partner. Don't overprotect them or think for them, talk or do things on their behalf if they are capable instead. Don't always tell them what to do. Create a space of freedom where everyone assumes their own self-care responsibilities.

Sowing the Positive – Feed Back.

Everything positive that we sow around us is repaid to us. A simple principle in theory, but can be hard to achieve in a relationship. If we sow in our relationship as a couple joy, gratitude, tenderness, empathy, communication, love, generosity, understanding, independence; we create an emotional environment that pays off. Instead: selfishness, moodiness, anger, pessimism, complaint, criticism, jealousy, mistrust; will pollute the relationship.

Natural Morality.

Don't do to your partner what you don't want to done to you, that's the golden rule for life. It sounds logical, but this is often forgotten. Do not control, do not complain constantly, do not underestimate, do not yell, do not judge.

Individuality and Difference.

We are all different and that is precisely why couples are so strong. They offer each other a wealth of experience for a relationship. You have to respect different tastes and never impose your own, instead embrace it when interest is shown. Listen to your partner to discover their tastes and preferences so that we can share them, and not make differences a pitched battle.

Love Yourself

You can't give love if you don't love yourself. You can't give quality time, if isn't given freely. You can't smile if you don't have anything in your own life to smile about. You will not be able to collaborate on your happiness, if that person is not responsible for their own happiness. First we start with ourselves, and then we can give everything we harvest. This may sound self-focused but it is the opposite of an ego centric or narcissistic relationship.

You Choose.

Our challenge is to take responsibility for our own lives, for our actions. To achieve this we must provide relationship the right spaces to evolve and improve as people. We are responsible for our choice of partner and the decision whether or not to continue with it. If our relationship causes us a lot of suffering and lowers our self-esteem; if it reduces our world and our chances of being and relating, we have a duty to "clean up" and end the relationship.

If you are chosen without any action on your part is it really a balanced relationship?

Don’t Be Afraid – Show Your Love

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The opposite of war is love and the opposite of love is not hate, it is fear.

What is love? Love is the basis for a healthy relationship, and every healthy relationship is a garden, a mystery that happens, for example, between two people, a garden that depends on both people to flourish. In this encounter where a new universe is created, in that encounter where phenomena happen and where both people are exchanged and transformed. This is a lot easier than it sounds when you understand love, what it does for you and how one embraces it inside the context of a relationship.

When two people meet they are two separate worlds, how they meet and if they hit it off is something sometimes tremendously complex. Each person is a world unto themselves, a complex mystery throughout their past and their finite future.

When we enter into a relationship, no matter how close, it is initially located on the periphery border of our experiences. If it is allowed to grow it will reach intimacy, it will become deeper, and it will have an impact on our future. If you are in your center and the other person is at its center, those two centers will begin to get closer and closer and something we call love with unite the two. This is the opposite of war, which tears apart and destroys it does not create.

When the encounter is peripheral we can say that we are only befriended. Even here we can touch each other, we can even have sex, but it will be from the edges of our borders, that's an intimately close acquaintance This "friend with benefits," should not be seen as somebody we are in love with, as intimacy and lust is something else entirely when it does not flow from love.

No, love is so much more than simple lust or desire.

To get to know a person, to reach that center is to go through a great change personally, something that takes time; this profound inner revolution which occurs because if you want to get to know a person at their center you will have to allow this change to happen. And that change is the longing, the with that we all make, to get to know that person, to let them help us get another perspective, a companion for life who helps us avoid the holes and heal wounds that we all have.

If you want a relationship, one that is deeper, that it is not a peripheral but profound you have to allow that person to also get to know you (the real you), for which you must become a vulnerable, open person, and this demands a greater risk, it is dangerous because you never know how much that person could harm you by knowing your deepest secrets, everything that we have hidden for a long time, not only to others, but to ourselves and now that can be exposed, and that's where fear comes in, so it's not very easy to open up, because fear directly touches our vulnerability, our feeling of rejection, of failure. It leaves us thinking "I'm going to expose myself and they may leave me."

What we're hiding is an idea of what's inside of us, maybe it's not good and, when they really know me, maybe they're going to "abandon me," so there are so many people who have this mechanism of protection that rationalizes ending relationships before anything happens, before that idea has to end the relationship, people who stay on the periphery border because they are unable to deepen a relationship, because deep down the relationship has never taken hold, leave the relationship before the relationship has a chance to leave them. This is to abandon before being abandoned. Why? Because we want to be hurt, we are not willing to risk finding out.

There are married couples, there are lovers both who have been together for many years and who are only known on that superficial level, who have never really connected with each other; and there are situations where the more you live with someone, the more you forget that center of balance you built with your partner early on. They remain lovers on the periphery of their lives, even if they are lovers of years they know nothing about each other.

Sex is the same, as it can be making love on the periphery. Unless the centers are united, sex results only in the encounter between two bodies and not at the soul.

Sex is only love when both people feel it in a sexual relationship, when the are at their center truly in love, in that case not only is sex love, but sex is sublime, it is eternal.

And when we allow someone to enter our center:

We're without out fear.

The person oriented towards love is someone who does not fear the future, who does not fear the one who stands next to them, who opens up, who is exposed and does not fear the result or the consequences of opening themselves up to someone else.