Design your Relationship with Intentionality
Humans are social animals. It is inherent to our nature to seek human connections. Our lives are filled with social interactions, mostly based of strangers and our day-to-day studies or work environment. We have the family we are born into, where we learn about deep bonds and how to maintain relationships (mostly from our parents / caretakers). Then we have those people who we choose to create meaningful connections with, because we believe they have something to contribute to our lives, or because we believe that we have something to give to theirs. And of course, we have our life partners.
It is well known in child psychology that the earliest connections and bonds we make in life are the ones that define how we will form connections in the future. They define how we give love and affection and how we expect to receive it. They also define what kind of reactions we have to certain emotions, based mostly on how we saw others react as we grew up.
As adults, I believe it is important to look at every relationship we form also as mirror to understanding ourselves. I have spoken about this before, every judgement or emotional reaction we have towards someone else is based on our own traumas and self-judgement. Ideally, instead of pushing people away when reacting to our triggers, we could use them to get closer to them.
This is mostly true with the people we interact most, especially with our partners. They say that when you marry someone, you also marry their family. Well, I also say that you marry into their parents behaviours… unless there is an intention to design your own relationship.
Personally, Sherry and I grew up with parents that did not necessarily know how to communicate to maintain a healthy connection and relationship. From the beginning we knew that we wanted to change that, to break from their negative patterns and grow together, really together. Needless to say it was way more challenging than we anticipated. Especially after our son was born, we stopped prioritizing our relationship and we fell right back into less healthy communication, and it created a wedge. We realized that we were exaclty where we did not want to be, feeling like we are “better off alone” because only we see ourselves. We were great parents and roommates, but we forgot how to be a couple.
Thankfully our intention was strong enough to help us bounce back and look at our traumas with a magnifying glass. We decided that we would design our own relationship, breaking free from our old habits. We first needed to know what it is that we need and want to get out of our relationship, without expecting each other to “guess” those needs. We started listening to each other again, and we realized that we had changed and we did not really know each other anymore. We saw it as something exciting, as if we had a chance to start a new relationship and get intrigued and excited by every small detail.
I always use the analogy that a relationship is like two curved lines evolving through time and space, each defining the individual changes. As the lines get closer, the connection is deeper, whereas when the lines diverge or separate, a small wedge appears.
Inspired by the great Esther Perel, Sherry and I have come to understand that we are starting our third relationship together. The first one was a romantic and passionate one, which got us to know we wanted to get married. The second one started with the birth of our son, where we became parents, and in fact our relationship was defined by our responsibility and trust towards our son. Now we are entering the real partnership, filled with both passion and responsibility, adventures and stability, and growth and playfulness.
We are setting the intentions where it matter to us, and through that we are designing our relationship to provide us with the best we can get. In fact we now understand that the deeper our bond and the more work we put into our relationship, the more we can grow as individuals.
💡 Pro tip: We can design every single relationship we have, but how? As bad as it sounds, somewhat like a company:
- Define your why: set your vision and intentions
- Define your what: how can you be present for each other and help each other grow?
- Define your how: what things / activities are you doing together and which not?
Make sure to have really good and open communication, trust each other to take responsibility and hold each other’s space, create rituals for finding deeper connection, check in emotionally and share fun activities together. One may say that it is best when things happen spontaneously, and I say that if you leave things to happen only if and when there is time, then there will not be enough time for a meaningful connection.
Originally published in Notion.
For the full list of posts, see The Real 30 Under 30.
