You don’t have to spend every waking minute together but, because you genuinely enjoy your partner’s

6 min readDec 8, 2020

Narcotics, sex, alcohol, prescription opiates, religion, and heroin are some of the only paths out of pain and into some place like pleasure. We live in a pain economy where we make pain all day long then pay to have it distanced, delayed. Pain is demonized, minimized, then normalized. It’s medicalized so that we can be told we are drug-seeking when we seek the condoned, licensed, capitalist-approved paths to pain-free space. But we need to be diagnosed, so we hope to make our pain visible, to make our pain worth something so that we can pay to enter the mythical pain-free space. We exchange our lives and hours for pain, hoping to redeem it for painlessness or maybe just pleasure which, despite what ads tell us, is never the opposite of pain.Obviously, feeling safe with a partner is critical. But you also feel safe to raise the “big” topics — that your partner will listen and their reactions will be fair and reasonable, even if they don’t always agree with you.Your partner likes you — the whole package — and tells you so, often. You like who you are when you’re with your partner. Which teaches you to like yourself more when you’re not.

Old keepsakes: It’s great to keep souvenirs or little gifts from family and friends, but do you really need to keep them all? Birthday cards, broken gifts, souvenirs from your first trip with your high school sweetheart you haven’t seen for decades. If they are too old or useless, toss them!We invade and colonize other countries, force them to adhere to our painkiller restrictions, force them to make pain in greater amounts, store it in banks, while shrinking the space that is painless, moving it farther and farther away. It only exists in the virtual, in media, the unreachable imagined space we are all dying to reach. A global Empire of Pain.You both own your mistakes and apologise appropriately when necessary. You don’t hold grudges or storm out of the house or give silent treatment or use sex as a weapon or any other dysfunctional “battle” strategies.But some of the best relationships work (and keep working) because of the ease both partners feel in the others’ company. Here are the key signs you might be onto a very good “easy” thing.While it’s true that all relationships have their challenges it’s can skew your thinking; it can make you think that being in a relationship is harder than racing Bear Grylls up a mountain.

When we met, he was 30 and had just come out of a torrid relationship; his girlfriend had been needy, manipulative and impossible to read: he never knew what version of her he was going to get.

He’d finally broken away but it had left him anxious, almost traumatised. And it was not the first time — all his relationships had been hard: unpredictable and confusing.

Nope. Relationships do take effort — you can’t afford to be lazy or complacent with them. And every relationship faces tests over time. But you shouldn’t wake up every day feeling like it’s all “hard slog”, like you’re going to work on a construction site (even if you are).

My client made a great point. Having an “easy” relationship is frequently under-rated because it might not seem edgy or sparky enough. And relationship are supposed to be hard…aren’t they?

Pain is the constant because we work at it day and night. It is only when we exceed our pain space, when we can no longer work to reproduce the pain of others by creating pain-saturated objects that are consumed by workers who must work more to buy them, that we are worthless to the pain economy.
You don’t have to wait nervously to see which version of your partner has shown up for your anxiety to settle. So you’re always happy to see them before they show up — as well as when they do.
We invade and colonize other countries, force them to adhere to our painkiller restrictions, force them to make pain in greater amounts, store it in banks, while shrinking the space that is painless, moving it farther and farther away. It only exists in the virtual, in media, the unreachable imagined space we are all dying to reach. A global Empire of Pain.

You don’t have to spend every waking minute together but, because you genuinely enjoy your partner’s

Written by Aiea