A Relationship Has a Mind of It’s Own.

You’ve probably intuited this, sensed it vaguely. When you reach a certain level of maturity  you can really see this. But it takes effort.

When my collaborator, Marilyn Bronstein, and I interviewed really successful couples, this is what we saw: they not only had a significant amount of self-respect (The “Me” mind) and they not only had a genuine and intelligent appreciation for their partner (The “You” mind), they also had a reasonably solid sense of how the two of them fit together into a “We.” And more than that, the loved the “We.” Sometimes they thought the “We” was so cool they were blown away in awe.(Wow!)  You. Me. We. Wow.  That’s how great relationships seem to work.

So let’s look at the We.

(This is a little abstract, but it’s a start.)

A relationship is a shared mental process. In fact, at times couples aren’t sure who thought what, i.e., “Was that my idea or yours?”

• A relationship has a presence, a personality and an emotional impact. If one partner has an intense emotion – anger, lust, sadness, pick one – the other person feels it. An emotion is alike a rope both people are holding; it can and will make demands on both partners. It shapes how partners see each other.  It is a lens through which partners understand each other. When there’s lust, they see each other as attractive, when there is anger, they see each other as dangerous, and so on.

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Tags: crisis, Marilyn Bronstein, Maybe Except, relationships

Sometimes intimate relationships fail because the partners grow to hate each other’s company. “Hate.”  It’s a strong word.

Hatred is wild and strange.  I’ve counseled people who are dealing with an ex who is intoxicated by hatred.  Such people are willing to use children, the legal system, and vandalism to make a former partner’s life miserable. They do it in a gleeful frenzy. They are scary because they feed off their hatred and there’s no stopping them except by going to war against them and defeating them thoroughly.  Most of us don’t like going to war.

For most of us hatred is  uncomfortable.  For most of us, when we are angry we are angry about a principle, a value, something that seems bigger than the issue at hand.  But when anger shifts to hatred it’s because we’ve made the issue personal. Often people who like to hate are also proud of the fact that their values are so personally held.

Because hatred is a personal matter and because the pain associated with it is often so close to the surface, most folks shift from hatred to disgust.  Disgust is the way we put distance between our self and the thing we hate.  In disgust we don’t have to resolve the hatred. We can simply go past it and seek the more comfortable state of denial.  We resolve to simply never see, speak or think about the person we “used to” hate.  We do this for our protection, and sometimes for their protection. We cut them off.

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Tags: baggage, change, midlife, Yom Kippur

Sometimes I find the same basic idea in contemporary psychology and also ancient wisdom. So then I think there is a lot of truth in it. And then, when I find it in a quote by an artist I admire, I feel that I’ve found something especially trustworthy.   Here is the quote:

“We have to invent and reinvent who we are until we arrive at a self we can bear to live with and die with.”

It’s by the poet, Stanley Kunitz and I don’t know how he discovered the principle. I hadn’t heard it elsewhere. Usually what I hear is “Be true to yourself.” How do we reconcile those two thoughts? How do we reconcile “being true,” with “reinventing?”

Kunitz died in 2006 at age 101. He was twice named as U.S. poet laureate.  Younger poets made pilgrimages to be with him. I’m sure he practiced what he preached. In the quote, he was talking about how he became a good poet.

The more I thought about what he said, the more I felt that it also applied to becoming a good  partner. If you have a love relationship and the two of you are building a life together, all that he said about being a poet is also true for being a partner.  What’s true of creating is also true of co-creating.

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Tags: Jewish New Year, love, relationships, truth

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Tags: Getting Angry, Getting Resentful, Primal Avoidance, Relationship Destroys Itself

I had a very interesting conversation over the weekend with a man I’d just met. The conversation was so good that  we ended up with a better question than an answer. It’s always very satisfying to walk away with something to think about. I’ll share the question first, then the story of how we got there, then how I think I’ve answered it.

First, here’s the question:  How can you live your life according to your highest purpose and also live in the moment? And this wasn’t an idle question. It had serious consequences.

It all started on a Sunday afternoon in late August in one of Montreal’s most beautiful city parks. There was a lake with ducks, people wandering the paths around the lake, a white lodge with a café on the terrace serving lunch under the trees, a man playing accordion near the lunch tables, a great lawn with many picnic tables and grown-ups and kids and dogs all over the place, everyone very happy. Cyclists and joggers passed by one the paths and mountainous clouds passed by overhead.

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Tags: love, Marilyn Bronstein, Pastor Rick Warren, relationships

I was at a funeral. This woman who died was one of those heroically wonderful women one meets only some times.  She was beautiful and brilliant and a great mother and an athlete and light-hearted and friendly and dearly loved her husband and her life with him.  He was handsome, successful, good-hearted and very much in love with her. They were generous people. They had three children and adopted a fourth. It was a picture too good to be true, it seemed, and in her late forties when she went for her yearly check-up, they discovered a brain tumor.

“We will remove it,” they said, “But when it comes back, and it will because it’s that kind of cancer, you will only have months to live. So prepare yourself.”  Brain cancer.  I remember speaking to her in her final months. She was all puffed up from her medications.  She said to me, “Well, I’ve lost my ability to listen to classical music. My brain can’t handle it. Dying is so weird.”

I share all this with you because, at her funeral, her husband, who wanted us to understand who they were to each other and why he loved her so, shared the story of the moment he knew that he was going to fall in love with her. It’s an amazing story and it is the perfect example of what I wish to share with you in this writing.

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Tags: FECK, intuition, love, Marilyn Bronstein

(So, I’m taking a break from talking about really, really good relationships and I’m going to talk about really bad ones that usually don’t last.)

I saw a great TED talk. If you’re considering websites and online dating, as many are, this talk is very helpful.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tedtalks/amy-webb-ted-online-dating_b_5460048.html#es_share_ended

However, the main reason I mention this talk is that she tells a very dark, funny-but-dark story of a first date, arranged on line, and the guy turns out to be a sociopath. Only a small surprise.  The internet dating scene is filled with such folks and my experience as a coach in these realms has included hearing many such stories.

I got close to this sociopath stuff with the most popular blog I ever wrote.  “Is your boyfriend a Werewolf?”  https://www.drbelove.com/?s=werewolf  But the guys in that article were basically good guys with a dark side. When it comes to sociopaths, I’m not so sure. But maybe it’s the belief that he’s not so bad, really that tempts people.  There is a cartoon in the New Yorker that I love that shows a woman introducing her boyfriend to her parents and the boyfriend is obviously a vampire. He has those long teeth and his hair comes to a point and the woman is saying, “I know, but I think I can change him.”  Good joke.

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Tags: dating sociopath sex-in-dating

Let’s look more closely at this and we’ll start with the least sacred way of thinking I can imagine: cold, impersonal, chemical interactions inside the brain. Ah, psychology has a way of getting to the heart of things, don’t you think? The presence of loved and loving partner, may I say, “the sacred presence,” triggers a specific brain chemical called oxytocin.

Now it would be a great mistake, if not a modern one, to reduce all this to oxytocin and say, “Well Really, it’s just a change in brain chemistry.”  I cringe. That would be like saying that the chemical level is the only level that really matters. But still, in the presence of the Sacred, we do have a change in brain chemistry and this change makes a change in the way we experience life. Oxytocin makes us get personal and gushy. Oxytocin is the cuddle neurochemical. It appears in the brains of babies and mothers during nursing. It’s in lovers in their sweet afterglow. It appears in the brain when two become as one. It appears when we become part of something bigger than just ourselves.

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Tags: change, love, Paul Zak, relationships

I was going to call this post, “How to make a relationship sacred,” but that can’t be done. You can’t make something sacred. You can recognize, or discover it. You can’t make it. And there is something sacred within some relationships. However it exists independently of you or your wishes and schemes, and that’s partly what makes it sacred.

What you can do, in response to that sacred something is honor and protect it, or desecrate it. Either/or. I don’t think there is a neutral position.

But first, I’m going to try to define the sacred without using words like “God” and “Spirituality,” words that are equally mysterious and poetic. (I am trying find ways to think about my experience of these things that feels fresh and personal. I don’t want to just listen to elders without including my own voice, especially now that I’ve become elder myself.)

What does it mean when I say something is sacred? I was fascinated to learn that the Hebrew word for “blessing” was very close to the word for a fresh water spring. It also means something set apart.

I like looking at how humans first start using a word. I helps me understand the deep meanings of that word. Maybe the old word for holiness is an ancient metaphor. Suppose we lived in a desert and one day, one of us found a fresh water bubbling up, a spring. Imagine that, water, the stuff of life, coming up out of nowhere right in the middle of a desert! We’d all stop and look and remember this place forever, something we discovered that changed our life for the better. That is want it’s like to find something sacred.

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Tags: love, Old Testament, relationships

We told friends we were submitting an article to “Jewrotica.org” in response to their “Hottest Rabbi Couple” contest. They said, “You’re kidding.” We heard those exact same words a year ago when we told them the title of our book.

Our book, “Rabbis in Love” is a book of conversations with rabbi couples who are very much in love. The picture above is a picture of Rabbi Ronnie Cahana and his wife of 35 years, Karen, taken by their daughter, Kitra, in the hospital as Ronnie recovered from his stroke. (http://kitracahana.com/) They are the first couple in the book, the one who inspired us to do the book.

Reb Leibish and Deena Hundert, another couple in the book, gave us a story about sexual curiosity that comes from the Talmud, surprise! A Rabbinic student hides under his teacher’s bed to observe how his teacher makes love to his wife. The punch line comes after he gets caught. He explains, “This, too, is Torah I need to learn.” The point of the Talmud story is that earthly love and spirituality embrace each other. Being romantic and passionate is a high calling for Jews. Doing the book, for us, was a modern version of hiding under the bed.

We interviewed ten couples and included nine in the book. One couple felt they had revealed too much and they backed out. These conversations are about what really happens between the partners when they are alone. It’s about how they figure out how to love each other across time.

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Tags: Hottest Rabbi Couple, love, Neshama Achat, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, Reb Haim Sherrf, Zalman Schacter Shalomi

For many spiritual traditions, sacred space is a place to be alone. Big churches, a man alone with a flute, an empty forest, a woman doing meditation, these were the images of sacred space offered up by a Google search.

However, for many of us, sacred space is also a place to not be alone.

My colleague, Marilyn Bronstein, and I just finished a three-year project interviewing couples who loved each other deeply and who were also committed to a spiritual practice. One or both of them was a Rabbi. (Read all about it “Rabbis in Love,” available soon on Amazon or at www.rabbis-in-love.com) Sacred space was part of how they loved each other. They created sacred space for their relationship. It was a great lesson and very touching. The book was full of “I-want-that-in-my-life” moments and this was certainly one of them.

Rabbi Ronnie and Karen Cahana talked about Sabbath. For them, it was a sacred space that was also a sacred time. Every week, on Sabbath, they set aside a time only for them, away from what Rabbi Ronnie called, “the bluster of the void.” (By that I think he meant all that busy-business we get caught up in. )

Within that special time, they “raised each other up,” as he put it. I understood him to mean that they appreciated each other, in doing that they increased their value both to themselves and each other. They cherished each other, loved each other, and revealed to each other their most tender secrets.

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Tags: Every Shabbat, Karen Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie, Sacred Space