Relationships

Its a funny old business being a couple with children. You go from being each others world, to being united by your world's new centre. From being a twosome you're now a team and its how well you work together that defines the next phase of your relationship.

This can be extremely tough. It takes something particularly strong to weather the sleep deprivation, colicky screaming and parenting worries. If you're lucky though, you find yourself united in a new way, your bond redefined and solidified by becoming a family.

It draws to my mind a reading that we had at our wedding. Its an excerpt from A Gift From the Sea by Anne Lindbergh Morrow. I hope you like it.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. Its is an impossibility. It is a lie even to pretend to.

 And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.

We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror at its ebb. We are afraid it will never return.

We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense  that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. 

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.