Growth in relationships: how to nurture partnerships that thrive long term
Episode 2
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Love … with Words: free relationship communication class
The Soul’s Code by James Hillman
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
Octavia Butler on change
Change is the only constant in life. So said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. If change is an inevitable part of life, why does change sometimes feel so scary, both personally … and in our relationships?
As much as we might yearn for something in our lives to change, there’s often another part of us that draws comfort from sticking with what’s known and familiar … a part that whispers to us, “c’mon, this isn’t so bad … it could be a lot worse.”
We cope with an unfulfilling job by reminding ourselves that if we take the leap and get a new position, we might not end up liking it. We might even end up being worse off than we are now. And that’s the thing with change, really. Change is always a step into unknown territory. We don’t know what’s going to happen when we take a leap of faith and make a big change in our lives. Of course, since change is inevitable … it’s not something we always get to choose. Sometimes change happens to us, and we just have to figure out how to roll with it.
When it comes to navigating change in our personal lives as well as in our relationships, our philosophy can be summed up in six words: “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” So, how are change and growth related to each other? We think of growth as a particular kind of change. Growth is change that happens in a desirable direction. It’s the kind of change that takes us in the direction we want to go in life. You’re growing when the ways you’re changing allow you to access more of your innate potential. You’re growing into yourself, into a fuller expression of who you are.
One of our favorite psychologists, James Hillman, wrote a book called The Soul’s Code, in which he describes what he calls the ‘acorn theory’ of personal growth. His theory is that each of us is born with an internal blueprint of our future potential. Just like an acorn carries the potential for becoming an oak tree, we each carry our own internal blueprint for growth and development over the course of our lifetime.
So growth is an expression of your innate potential, the potential you were born with, the potential that already exists within you and is completely unique to you. It’s how you become the fullest expression of your unique self.
When it comes to relationships, here’s how we see growth and change. We think of a relationship as a living thing that you create with a partner. It’s not something you can see, of course, but it exists. It’s alive. And that means that just like all other living things, your relationships will change over time.
That part is inevitable. Your relationship will change. But in order for a relationship to not just change, but to actually grow, it needs to be nurtured and cared for like anything else that’s alive. And it needs to be encouraged to change in a direction that allows the relationship to continue to flourish.
Just as you carry within yourself the acorn potential for your full development as a unique individual, every relationship also carries its own acorn of potential … to become what it’s capable of becoming. In an intimate relationship, what this means is that you and your partner can learn how to tap into more of the innate potential of your relationship.
This idea of developing the fullest expression of the relationship two people have created together sounds ideal. But of course, as we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, for most of us, change can be scary. It’s a step into the unknown, which is why sometimes we resist change, even when we’re not happy with our current circumstances. That’s where we get the saying “better the devil you know than the one you don’t”. It really can be tempting to just stick with what you already know, especially when you’ve probably learned how to cope with the downsides of your current situation. This is why so many people get stuck at this point, of thinking about making a change but never actually taking the leap.
In Episode 1, we talked about how we, as a culture, don’t have a model for what happens in relationships after the honeymoon stage. Well the same is true for individual life stages too, once we’re out of early adulthood. We’ve got all these milestones through childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood. You graduate from high school, go to college or get a job, launch your career, maybe you get married and have children, and then there’s like this 40 year gap until the next milestone of retirement. And this whole space of adulthood is just an open question mark. What does it look like?
Best case scenario, adult life is pure potential … decades of blank space that you can fill however you’d like. But so often, we have this pretty negative perspective on what it means to be an adult. The whole notion of “adulting” frames adult life as a never-ending to-do list.
As soon as you check one thing off the list, another takes its place. You have to do this, and then do that, and then move on to do this other thing. So adult life feels like a lot of anxiety and pressure with very little sense of freedom and possibility. Instead of being free, we’re supposed to go to work, make money, put that money in the bank account or the retirement fund, and then wake up the next day to do it all over again. There’s very little space in our conventional template of adulthood for any sense of creativity, for breaking the mold and going your own way.
Maybe that’s why movies so often tell the story of the person who was going along in life, taking care of business, doing what they were supposed to do, and then suddenly … out of the blue … it all falls apart. You get fired from your job when you think you’re about to get promoted. You discover your wife is having an affair. You get into an accident, your hands are crushed and your career as world famous surgeon comes to a screeching halt. And then things finally start getting interesting … or, perhaps, strange.
Change is inevitable, growth is optional. Before we go any further into this discussion of growth, let’s talk about what growth is not. Because there are actually two different models of growth and the distinction between the two models is really important. One model of growth is the expansion model. You can see this model in action in economic growth. It’s quantitative growth, meaning it’s all about things that can be measured. Money, for example. Expansion growth is always about more, more, more … and wherever you’re at … it never feels like enough. In this model, more growth is always better, even if it’s not sustainable over the long-term or it has negative consequences. That’s obviously not what we’re encouraging.
The kind of growth we’re talking about is organic, natural growth. And it’s qualitative rather than quantitative. Instead of more, more, more, organic growth focuses on the quality of your life. It centers on creating the conditions in your life for flourishing and finding a healthy balance that’s sustainable over time.
So, there’s no pressure to grow at a consistent pace or to keep growing all the time. That’s not realistic or even desirable. The truth is that for living things, growth happens naturally when it has the right conditions. So personal growth—and growing in a relationship—is really all about creating the conditions for flourishing. You don’t have to force it. You just need to watch for opportunities and recognize invitations to grow. And when it comes to relationships, trust us, those opportunities to grow will definitely come up.
Did you know that trees respond to the stress of drought by growing their roots even deeper into the soil, in their search for water? Trees are so determined to reach water that their roots are capable of burrowing right through concrete.
The challenges and stress that we experience in relationships are also a time when we’re called to deepen our roots, to discover parts of ourselves we hadn’t known before, to discover that we’re far more resilient and capable than we’d ever imagined. And to grow, like the acorn, into a fuller, more beautiful version of ourselves.
So we never have to make ourselves grow. We just have to watch for invitations to grow, which often present themselves as challenges in life. But it does help to have a vision for the ways you want to grow, both individually for yourself and within a relationship. Having a vision for how you want your life to look or the qualities you’d like your relationships to have gives you a direction to move in and a way to know whether you’re currently moving in the direction you want to go in. It’s like having a compass and a sense for what your true north is. When you have a sense for the direction you want to go, you know whether you’re headed the right way … or not. We discuss this more in Episode Nine, “How do you create a vision for your life and relationships?”
What’s interesting about growth in relationships is that it’s not talked about much. Most of the couples we work with have never thought about—or talked about—their vision for their relationship and how they’d like their relationship to be. The fear of change that most of us have means that a lot of couples avoid having the kinds of conversations that would help them create a shared vision for their relationship. This is unfortunate because, without a commitment to grow toward a shared vision, relationships still change. But the change often ends up taking the form of declining happiness over time.
One consistent research finding is that fulfillment in romantic relationships tends to decrease over time. Researchers used to think this was related to couples having children and they expected that happiness and satisfaction would rebound after children were grown and out of the house. But more recent studies have actually shown that’s not the case.
From our perspective, this is what happens when we don’t prioritize nurturing our relationships so that they can continue to grow over time. Instead, what often happens is either a decline in happiness over time, or that the relationship ends when one partner is growing and the other isn’t. When this happens, it widens the gap of understanding and connection in the relationship until one or both partners decide the relationship can’t meet their needs any longer.
It’s really easy to slip into routines in relationships. This is why it’s easy to overlook how a relationship is changing over time, because the routines make a relationship feel like it’s staying the same. But what’s actually happening is that the vitality of the relationship is slowing diminishing. Things start to feel predictable. The relationship has gotten stuck in a rut and is being run by routines that aren’t intentional or thoughtful any more. When this begins to happen, time spent together no longer feels connecting and so the relationship starts to feel a bit lifeless, which is what these studies on declining fulfillment in relationship are reflecting—this process where the vitality of the relationship slowly drains away with time.
On the flip side, a lot of research has found that novelty is good for relationships. People feel happier in their relationship when they’re making an effort to do something new with their partner. It’s not just that it’s something new and different though. Novelty and newness wake us up from the slumber of familiarity in our lives, when we’re just going through the motions. Now we’re experiencing something fresh and full of vitality. We’re awake, we’re alive. We’re out of the rut and now we have an opportunity to experience ourselves and our partner differently.
The tendency to fall into mindless routines isn’t just true for relationships that that have lost their life force. It’s just as true for our individual lives as well. Without a cultural narrative around growth in adulthood, all we have are routines and external expectations. Get up, go to work, make money, come home. Have some leisure time. Go to bed. Wake up the next day and do it all over again. After a while, it’s easy to lose a sense of meaning in life. What is it all for? Why am I doing this?
The why is what it’s all about. When we have a clear why, a felt sense of what gives us meaning and purpose, there’s no such thing as thoughtless routines in life. Having a clear why gives life meaning, a sense that your life story has traction and momentum.
And here’s the thing about having meaning in your life: it transforms daily routines into rituals that are imbued with purpose and serve to nurture your growth and development. Because you have a vision for your life, you know why you’re doing what you’re doing. You’re not just going through the motions.
When there’s a lack of meaning and a lack of a clear why, that’s when life feels like a never-ending list of responsibilities and things to do. We can only keep this up for so long and by midlife, all of it comes to a head. We’ve maybe been working toward achieving certain goals for a decade or more and then we reach the goal. We get the new position, the raise, the promotion, the accolade.
Whatever it is, we’ve achieved what we set out to achieve. And it feels empty. It doesn’t feel like we thought it would. It doesn’t give us what we were told by society that it would give us.
Cue the midlife crisis. For all the caricatures of midlife crises—the sports cars, the affair, the dramatically younger partner—midlife crises are actually rooted in a crisis of meaning. You’re suddenly aware that your life feels strangely empty. One client described it to me like she had double vision. She could see all the good things about her life—her partner, her kids, her financial position—at the same time she felt this big hole in the center of herself. Something vital and essential was missing. Even though she didn’t know what it was, she still felt distraught that it was absent.
If you’ve been through this, then you know that when this happens, it’s very confusing. It’s like you suddenly wake up with this hunger … and you don’t know what it is exactly that you’re longing for. In my experience with people, it nearly always hinges on questions like, Why am I here? What am I doing with my life? What is the meaning of all this?
It’s like the famous line from Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? These kinds of questions are so big that it can feel impossible to answer. And yet, these kinds of questions are so vital and, going back to James Hillman’s idea that we’re like acorns, in that we each carry within us the blueprint to evolve into our most authentic, true self … then it really becomes a matter of asking the big questions and learning how to listen to yourself … because you have the answers, even if you can’t find them immediately.
So what about growth in relationships? What if you’re in a relationship and you’re not feeling satisfied with how things are, and you’d like your relationship to grow … and you can see ways that your partner would benefit from making changes? What’s the best place to start with this?
The tendency for a lot of us is that when something’s not working in a relationship, we’re usually pretty good at being able to recognize what our partner could or should be doing differently. We all know the sage advice not to go into a relationship thinking you can change the other person. And yet … it’s so tempting to try to get the other person to change.
The problem is, of course, that you don’t have the power to change anyone but yourself. No matter how persuasive you are, you can’t convince anyone else to change. And something weird happens on the other end, when we sense that someone else would like us to change. As humans, our impulse, when we can feel someone else trying to change us, is to resist. It’s like if someone tries to push you off balance … your whole body immediate tenses up. You become rigid. You dig in your heels. You will not be moved … or changed when you feel pushed. Change and growth are all about being flexible, fluid, and responsive to your inner callings.
So what do you do, then, if you can’t change another person but you’d like your relationship to be oriented toward growth? What do you do if you think there need to be some changes in your relationship? Here’s the thing: You can’t make another person change, but you can certainly communicate loud and clear what’s not working in the relationship for you. And it’s important to do so, even if you expect that what you have to say will upset your partner.
If it’s true for you and it has bearing on the future of your relationship, it’s actually a gift to your partner to share honestly where you’re at, what you see, and what you want for the relationship.
Something we see a lot in relationships is that there’s actually an unspoken agreement between both partners, in which it’s one person’s job to get the other to change. If you think about your own relationships and those of others around you, you might recognize what we’re describing. Partner A takes responsibility for getting Partner B to change. Partner A makes efforts at supporting Partner B, encouraging them … pointing them toward helpful resources … or begging, or badgering and pestering, maybe even threatening what’s going to happen if Partner B doesn’t change. But nothing really gets better. There’s no growth in a new direction. The couple ends up locked in this cycle in which it seems like nothing’s changing, and yet over time they become more frustrated and disconnected from each other.
This is another reason why trying to get a partner to change is a losing prospect. If you’re Partner B, and you feel pushed to change, you’re going to resist and dig in your heels, even if there’s a part of you that would like to make some changes. If you’re Partner A and you’re focused on getting Partner B to change, your energy is all tied up in what’s going on with them and you’re not tending to and nurturing your own growth.
Focusing on yourself and your own growth is actually the very best antidote to trying to convince a partner to change. You just withdraw your attention from your partner and place it back on yourself, so you can rediscover yourself as an individual, with your own unique desires and sense of meaning and purpose in life. What’s interesting is that when you turn your focus back to your own growth, things begin to shift.
When I work with someone who’s overly invested in their partner’s change, I often use the metaphor of relationships as a dance. If you think about dancing with a partner, as soon as you change up your rhythm and your moves, the other person responds differently. When you attend to your own growth and personal development, and you nurture your own potential, the relationship is going to change as a result. Something will be different because you’ll be different. This doesn’t mean that the relationship will necessarily become more satisfying. For some people I’ve worked with, this process of change leads them to withdraw a lot of energy from the relationship and place it in other areas of their life while they wait and see whether their partner will take the initiative to make changes and if not, of course, ending the relationship becomes a real consideration.
What if you and your partner both are interested in the idea of growing together? Where do you start? How do you begin? We discuss this in Episode 3, which is all about why you need to rock the boat in your relationship. The place to start is with communication. We’re not taught how to communicate in relationships, especially when it comes to having the hard conversations or venturing into the unknown together. Open communication is a vital part of the growth process. Practicing communicating openly helps us grow, because it puts us outside our comfort zone. Opening a conversation with your partner is a way of stepping into the unknown, because you have no idea where that conversation is going to lead.
In our experience with hundreds of individuals and couples, we estimate that for about 90% of relationships that are having trouble, what’s needed at least in part is more communication. If this is something that you have difficulty with, know that you’re not alone. We created a free relationship communication program, called Love with Words to help people in relationships develop better communication. We’ve linked to that below, so you can check it out.
It’s not uncommon to fear change in relationships because of the possibility that it might disrupt the relationship in some way … again, even if you’re not satisfied with how things are now, it’s still the devil you know. And what about the devil you don’t know? That’s possibility.
One of the most beautiful ways we’ve seen relationships grow is when each partner commits to nurturing the other person’s growth. When this happens, the relationship itself becomes a supportive container that nourishes both partners’ individual growth. As each person discovers new parts of themselves, these new discoveries are woven into the relationship like threads, so that the relationship becomes a tapestry. Threads of personal experiences and new experiences together all become part of the relationship, making it richer, more varied, more beautiful, more engaging, and stronger too. This is how partners in a relationship can grow together, rather than apart, over time … even as the relationship continues to change.
We want to leave you with these words from author Octavia Butler: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
