Starlight Journal, 7 Qualities Of Loving Partnerships

7 Qualities Of Loving Partnerships
Susan Vaughn, M.A.

Love: we need it, we want it, but how do we do it? If we knew, our world wouldn’t be war torn, and our relationships wouldn’t be filled with conflict. Love is simple, yet enormously complex. Since learning how to love appropriately is a big entire reason we come to the physical plane, it stands to reason that it would take lifetimes to achieve. Love requires different actions with different people. A parent loves a toddler differently than an adolescent. Partnership love is even different still. Then there is the world to love, other people, plants and animals, as well as loving one’s ideals, one’s higher self, or God/Goddess. Each requires a specific set of actions to produce a specific response. In this article I will be describing the principles of partnership love.

Lazaris says that the steps to getting there are the qualities of being there. In other words, the way you become loving is to master the qualities or characteristics of love. And what are those qualities? What follows is a list of qualities inspired by Lazaris in his tape called Loving, which I have paraphrased and added to.

1. CARING: honestly caring about each other’s feelings in the relationship. When you care about someone, you care about how your behavior impacts them physically and emotionally. In order to feel good about a partnership, each person must be getting emotional, mental, spiritual and physical needs met. When this is occurring, the relationship is healthy for both people and adds to each person’s self-worth and self-esteem.

2. RESPONSIBILITY: we must take responsibility for the feelings the relationship is engendering, not for the other person. The most unloving thing you can do for others is to take away their opportunity to be responsible for the impact of their actions upon others. This is called enabling. It prevents all growth and transformation. If you are enabling someone else to be dysfunctional by cushioning them from the impact of their actions, you are not loving them. Rather, you are using the relationship to get your needs met without regard to the negative impact you are having on your partner’s spiritual growth.

You are not responsible for the reality others create, but you are responsible for the reality that you allow. According to Lazaris, we create our reality by either directly causing it through our behavior, (even "accidental" behaviors), or by allowing it. By choosing to be physical, we agreed to allow ourselves to be impacted by all the rules and realities of the physical plane. It is through this impact that we experience the pain or pleasure that motivates our evolution. This means that we agreed to allow ourselves to be impacted by the behavior of others. If a few people create global destruction, everyone allowed it for their growth and will have to deal with the consequences even though the majority of us did not actively create it. On a more personal note, if your partner is wrecking the family financially because he or she is an alcoholic who is drinking up all the money, you must take responsibility for what you needed to learn by choosing to allow this reality into your life. Taking responsibility means that there is no blame. When you process the experience, you must examine how it served you, as well as whether or not you dealt with it authentically. By sharing your feelings appropriately without slandering your partner’s character, and holding him or her accountable for the consequences of their actions, both you and your partner will grow.

3. KNOWING AND LEARNING: In each relationship there is a period of getting to know your partner and learning more and more about who they are, what they want in life, their desires and dreams, and what their agenda is, both hidden and explicit. As you get to know your partner’s likes and dislikes, through your reactions you conversely get to know yourself. For example, as you get to know your partner, you may discover that you have different sexual styles. As your partner leads you into sexual arenas that he or she enjoys but you’ve never tried, you’ll find out very quickly whether or not you share the same tastes. You must constantly seek to learn more about yourself and your partner. Never become complacent thinking that you've learned all there is to know. No matter how much inner work you’ve done, there will always be more to learn about yourself. And no matter how long you are with your partner, there will always be more to learn about him or her.

4. BEING INTIMATE: All conflict is an opportunity to create greater intimacy. When conflict arises, you must state your reactions and feelings without slandering your partner’s character. Then you must be willing to take total responsibility for your feelings by processing them in an open minded way. The “I’m right and you’re wrong” way, and “you’re a jerk because you think, feel and act that way” isn’t intimacy. Rather, that’s a declaration of war that never generates a positive response. Because it’s an attack on the other person’s self-esteem, it generates counter attack. True intimacy is the ability to open-mindedly explore the stories you each tell yourself about the activity that’s causing you to have the conflict. You must also explore what I call the “story beneath the story,” which are hidden beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and feelings the story is based upon. If you can do this exploration honestly and openly, without creating defensiveness or a need to be right and make the other person wrong, you have the opportunity to truly get to know one another.

This is often difficult to do because sometimes what we discover when we honestly explore the story beneath the story are things about ourselves that we may not be proud of, or that are socially unacceptable in the culture at large. It may also force you to reveal a hidden agenda that isn’t loving, such as being in a relationship not because you love your partner but because you like their financial support, which means you are using them for personal gain. It may take great courage to share these things, but when you share them in an atmosphere of open-minded acceptance and are also willing to take responsibility for what you find, it becomes easier.

Problems arise when what is revealed is threatening to one or both people in the relationship. It is in this phase of love that you may discover that you share differing agendas, or what John Gottman, in his book The Seven Principles That Make Marriage Work, calls “irreconcilable dreams.” There is a larger story beneath the story that may reveal unexplored beliefs about personal inadequacy, a lack of self-worth, or an inability to find and live one’s own dreams. This information would cause someone to further explore where the beliefs that create these feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem came from. One must ask oneself if they are true, and what needs to be done to change the mental or circumstantial reality that is causing them if they are. It might also cause a person to explore talents and develop potentials more fully. This kind of honesty can lead to enormous growth and change, which is what eventually produces true love.

In another common example, you may discover that your partner only feels fulfilled sexually in an open relationship where they have access to many sexual partners. You, on the other hand, only feel fulfilled in a monogamous one. Although one’s religion and culture may say that open relationships are immoral, which is why it may be hard for these facts to be revealed, the truth is that as long as no one is being hurt and everyone is open and honest about what they are doing, this activity is merely a matter of preference. It will only destroy the relationship if it’s an unmatching agenda or “irreconcilable dream” that the other partner can’t agree to. When we become truly intimate, we discover our unmatching agendas, as well as our matching ones. Once discovered, you enter into the fifth quality of love: respect.

5. RESPECT: This is the hardest and most determined aspect of love, especially if you have a co-dependent relationship with your partner in which property and children are involved. You must respect other people's right to be the way they are without needing or wanting to change them, even if there are parts of their personality that you don't like, don't approve of, or scare you. Trying to change. people isn't respecting their right to be who they are. Because you can't change anybody, you must accept them the way they are. If they have an agenda that you don’t share, or are behaving in a way that isn’t enjoyable to you and they do not want to change this, you must tell yourself the truth about how likely you are to feel fulfilled in the relationship. If you are not likely to feel fulfilled, you probably won’t be happy. You must then decide whether or not you want to stay in the relationship. If you decide to stay, you must do so without resentment or bitterness. If you decide to leave, you can still love them, but you will do so from afar.

Love doesn't involve manipulation. As a loving person, although you can invite change, you don't require it. You can love someone but realize that a life spent with them will ultimately be unfulfilling because you won’t be getting your needs met. In fact, if staying with someone whose behavior is un-enjoyable enables them to be unloving, it is not a loving act. This quality is the most determined, taking the greatest will and determination to do, for it isn't always easy. Anyone can do the first three steps. Step four requires a high degree of responsibility and step five the highest of all. This step challenges us to do the right thing whether it's comfortable or not. People who can do the first three steps but not the fourth or fifth are just acting like they are loving when they actually aren't. Though you may say you love each other, you are actually deceiving yourselves. In fact, if you are confused in a relationship because things aren’t adding up, the chances are good that there are hidden agendas that aren’t being expressed and may even be actively denied.

6. COMMITMENT: This is intricately linked to intimacy. In fact, until you've created intimacy, commitment is meaningless. To be committed to someone is to take intense and total responsibility with them for the reality that you are jointly creating. In other words, the commitment is about continuously creating and maintaining the love that exists between you by authentically expressing your feelings and concerns and processing your conflicts together. When you commit to someone, it means that you are willing to process your conflict with them no matter what they do, how much they hurt you, or let you down. This kind of commitment can only come after you’ve thoroughly engaged the other five actions. You must first have been caring and responsible with and for each other. You must have learned more and more about each other and, when conflicts arise, become more intimate. Then you must choose to respect your partner, either choosing to love them from afar if the relationship won’t ultimately fulfill you, or staying in it without resentment or bitterness and without needing your partner to change. If you stay, you can then make a commitment to continuously care about how your behavior impacts your partner and to express your feelings when your partner has a negative impact on you. Any¬thing prior to this can't be called a commitment because you don't know what you are committing to. It would be like saying you'll do a job before you know what the job entails and whether or not you are even qualified to do it. In other words, commitment is impossible until you’ve really developed the ability to be intimate with one another and to respect your partner for who they really are. I suspect that it will take a couple of years of getting to know someone before commitment is even a possibility. People who commit to a relationship before they fully realize what they are committing to aren't actually making a commitment at all. Rather, their commitment is more likely a manipulation to get their needs met.

7. GIVING: This is the final component of love. Although you can give gifts in the beginning of your relationship, but your gift giving doesn't actually mean anything. Your gifts may even be manipulations to get someone else to love you. When you give gifts after you've made a commitment to love someone in a committed way, the giving becomes an act of love. You can give tangible gifts, or intangible ones, material gifts, or feelings and sentiments by writing love letters, etc. Whatever you do on a daily basis to tangibly show or let your partner know you love him or her is a gift. The more you can give, the deeper the love will grow. The gift giving must be mutual and it must be engaged in twenty-four hours a day.

Love is not something that you only do occasionally, but every moment whether you are in the mood or not. You have to do it because it fascinates you, the very concept and idea of it. Love must become totally compelling to you before you will be motivated to do all that work, and be so honest and self-revealing. As you practice the qualities of love, being loving will become a self-discipline. Once you start loving, you must never stop. If a relationship fails, you must process your failure by analyzing what went wrong and how you either created or allowed it. You must ask yourself what you could have done differently without judgment. After all, you did the best you could with the consciousness you had. Now that you have evolved, you can make a decision to do your next relationship differently. By exploring what went wrong, you are less likely to make those mistakes again. Be patient with yourself. It takes time to master the craft of loving. If you keep trying, in time you will create a truly loving relationship

Susan Vaughn is an author, teacher and counselor in the Humboldt area. She teaches The Art Of Conscious Evolution and has written courses for UMS. She can be reached at 707-268-0312

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