Meet a couple called Margie and James.
They are very different types from each other, as many couples are of course.
She is generally calm, loves to be spontaneous and enjoys gregariousness and
social activities.
He is much more of an orderly type of person. He can be rather uptight and get stressed easily. He actually needs order and to know what’s happening all the time.
As you can imagine, he gets quite stressed out when Margie suddenly comes up with something spontaneous and not in his plans.
Spontaneity is difficult for him whereas she would love more spontaneity in their relationship. So, you can get the picture that these differing needs might be challenging for them both
This is one area where they were a little bit at odds with each other.
Their work, as you can imagine, reflects their types of personalities. She’s a freelancer and has her own small business. This works around their young children. His job is with a financial investment company providing a structure of meetings and work hours.
Margie feels like James is always ‘on duty’ and always has to respond to his boss. This is hard for her because she has much more space and time and would love them to be together more. Their two children take up a lot of their time understandably and rightly so.
Both James and Margie are pretty good with the children in their own different ways. He is good at getting them in order and she reads them lovely stories and runs around the garden with them. James gets quite jealous of Margie’s free time, especially when he finds himself working late in the evenings.
Consequently, they do have quite a lot of arguments and have become fairly disconnected from one another. It has never been easy, even before the children came along, for this couple to find a way to truly meet one another. Their ‘coupleness’, their special relationship, was not ‘winning’ in this competition of ‘how to live their lives’.
They rarely manage to make time to be together.
I asked them “Who does this relationship belong to? Who do I need to ask about this”?
They looked at me rather bemused and said, “Well it’s our relationship, of course!”
Yes, indeed it is theirs (and yours, if you are a couple reading this!) and if you want it to flourish and feel more connected then you two need to nurture it and look after it because it is yours no one else’s!
I offered them a little analogy that I use which I think is quite helpful:
If you throw seeds on the earth in your garden and you just leave them there for days on end, and you don’t go and see how they’re doing or chat to them or water them or feed them, what’s going to happen? You know the answer…they will struggle.
They are struggling to be a couple and, of course, if you’ve got two young children, it’s very easy for family life to take over especially when your couple-ness isn’t foundationally in place.So, what it amounts to is how do they keep their couple-ness and their love alive?
They looked at each other when I asked them this question and it felt quite sad to me because they weren’t really attuned to one another. And, they were sad too. They knew something was not quite right but they didn’t bring that into their consciousness on a day-by-day basis because they were so distracted by their own different ways of managing life.
Do you, the reader, know how to keep your love alive and keep your couple-ness and your relationship intimate, warm and loving?
Please reply below and share your own tips.
Priya
♡