Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we wrote about how important it is to make fairness a foundation of all your relationships. Here are some other posts we’ve written that speak to different aspects of this topic.
Why Fairness and Trust are So Important to Your Relationships “There are relationships built on power and dominance, but those do not create or further peace. For us, the key is a balanced relationship; it is balance without a balance sheet that we are talking about. What does that look like? We don’t count up how many times either of us has done our part in the upkeep of life activities or who is doing more or less. We have a rather delicious sense of how varied each of our contributions are, yet how balanced they are in the larger picture of our life together. At the core of this way of relating is a deep sense and commitment to fairness. A relationship built on fairness engenders trust and a commitment to act from that trust.”
How Trust and Peace go Hand in Hand in Your Relationships “Trust. What’s my personal way of experiencing that? Well, I think that trust and openness go hand in hand. To feel seen and connected, you need to be open and show yourself; whatever you feel, you share. That may sound extreme, but the route there is that you open up just a little, take just a little risk, and if you are greeted with acceptance and offered some openness in return, then your trust increases and your openness increases until you reach the experience that the two of you are operating from the same place. It’s a wild experience for me still because it presupposes a different kind of consciousness, or identity if you will, and there isn’t a space in material thinking where that belongs, so I am very much in awe of it, and that stands in stark relief against the rational mind.”
How to Deal With Decisions and Disagreements in Your Relationship “But once you know that you share the same values with someone else, you can deal with decisions and disagreements without generating rancor. It takes time, trust, honesty, and openness. You have to be willing to listen to the other person and find out what their wants and needs are in the particular situation.
There are multiple ways to solve a problem, and by exploring, you can find a solution that works for both of you because it will fit with your shared values. There is a solution out there somewhere, even though you can’t imagine it in the face of that daunting 100 ft. cliff. Here’s where the fun comes in. You can find a path toward mutual solutions: a place where both of you are happy, satisfied, and even enriched beyond your original version of the solution. It is a co-creative process of listening, exploring, and searching for the values and important aspects of what underlies each others’ wants, and then finding a path to mutual satisfaction.”