Letting go of old habits, and learning news communications skills of conscious relationship takes clear intention, and can take time.
When I work with a couple, we generally make a commitment for a year. You can always cancel at any time, so you are not contractually obliged, but we set a clear shared intention: it is going to take about a year to turn all this around. Why does it take time to interrupt and let go of what is familiar, and to learn new habits?
There is a great book by Dr Eli Finkel called The All or Nothing Marriage. He traces the history of marriage and committed relationships, going back as far as we have evidence. For a long time, marriage was primarily a kind of contract of ownership, dominated by men. A man could own a house, a business, a vehicle and a wife. Once that contract was formed, the role of the wife was to maintain the house, look after the children and to be somewhat subservient.
That may sound very old fashioned, but it’s not so long ago! In the United States, up until 1973 a woman could only get a credit card or a bank account with the co-signing of her father or her husband, we are still in the process of extracting ourselves from this patriarchal, imbalanced way of relating.
There is something people often say, maybe as a joke, that on the wedding day, that’s when sex goes out the window. We still have a shared understanding that we can enjoy sex and romance up till the wedding day in the courtship phase, and later either partner might rediscover that in clandestine affairs, but committed relationships don’t foster sexual intimacy.
In order to keep a relationship alive, it requires deep work to recognize the habits which cause relationships to break down. Our brains and nervous system are very much accentuated towards the habitual. We will continue to do things that don’t feel good, just because that’s what we know. That is why people stay in jobs they don’t like. People stay in unhappy relationships, because the habitual is preferable to the brain than carving a new pathway.
In the Tao of Deep Intimacy, we are interrupting familiar habits and replacing them with the relationship habits that create connection, trust, and intimacy.
It’s a work that requires some dedication and long-term commitment. It might be the most rewarding area where we could invest energy.
