Living Relationship

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

… A living relationship is a relationship in which people participate voluntarily, they also voluntarily invest, and can voluntarily leave.

Living relationships are a territory of frankness, openness and non-violence.

And therefore living relationships are finite, they can end at any moment when one of the two, or both, decide that they cannot invest as much as the Other needs.

…. Perhaps these circumstances can be considered unbearable, given our desire for stability and constancy. Everything that is unstable and changing creates such a high disturbing background that we do not even come close to the obvious: all living things have not only a beginning, but also an end. And relationships as well.

I KNEW about it before, but, perhaps, for the first time I could really FEEL it.

Once again I am convinced that you can touch life only by being open to everything - both pleasant and not so much.

However, such openness to what is happening requires a full-fledged resource to digest and fit into the psyche the existential experiences of finiteness, death, variability, impermanence.

…. After I have allowed changes in my life, it inevitably begins to concern those who have a close and therapeutic relationship with me.

My message to change actualizes and, to some extent, tests the strength of the ability to change in people associated with me, and mutual willingness to withstand these changes.

And, it seems to me, latently frightened of such responsibility and fearing the transformation of my life, I often in the past refused to change, trying to maintain the compromise reached.

I ensured my safety, refused to experience the anxiety and terror that bring with them changes.

However, I clearly felt the unpleasant smell of betrayal of myself by what I could have become, but did not.

And now, precisely in a therapeutic relationship that is my model for the rest of my life, because of the boundaries I have built, because of my strong adult position, and thanks to the responsible attitude of my clients interested in growing up, I openly face the experience of the finitude of an important and valuable relationship.

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- Veronica, I read your post about the changes, that you are raising the price. I seem to have heard your message that your powers are limited and must be replenished properly, and I understand you.

But, assessing my capabilities, I sadly admit that they, too, are already at their limit. The previous cost seems to have been my ceiling. I still have a little time, I will think until September what can be done with this, but there is a possibility that I will not be able to continue therapy.

……………………………..

… In this moment of simplicity and honesty, in this moment of recognition of my partner that he cannot invest in the relationship as much as I need it, at the moment of my honest recognition that I cannot invest in the way she needs it; at this moment I am rapidly plunging into the experience of the finitude of the relationship.

This is something deafening and grandiose: there is bitterness and regret, there is a desire to replay and agree, a lot of sadness and respect for my partner, and gratitude. Awareness of the end not only does not detract from what is happening for me, but, on the contrary, endows it with great value and even something more. Something very subtle, tender and warm, like love.

…………………….

Later, digesting this experience, I think that the more in my past I clung to the relationship, refusing, out of fear of loneliness, to admit the inequality of contributions, afraid to leave, or let go, in an instinctive desire to survive at the expense of these relationships, the more they were dead, and even more so was I myself.