We’ve Written About Relationships Every Week for 15 Years — Here’s What it Did for Us
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PHIL: Usually, we sit down together and jam on a topic to write about. Maude is away this week, so instead, I want to talk about the process of jamming itself. We’ve been writing a post each week for 15 years, and the starting point has always been what happened this week with us? How are we doing? We start there to keep it real, rather than using ideas from our heads or what we’ve read about how relationships should work.
Something that escaped my notice until recently is that the very process of sitting down and answering these questions is probably a large contribution to sustaining our relationship.
Look at all that it does. It keeps me informed about how Maude is – what is going on and how she is. Knowing this makes a difference in how I respond during the week. It’s not that I am making an effort to change my behavior, but I respond differently because of what I know. (I started out by writing “we”, because all of this is indubitably true for both of us, but in the spirit of a personal piece, I’m describing my experience of it.)
Another thing about talking together is that it often makes things clearer for me. My feelings and ideas are fugitive characters that can escape without trace unless they are captured in words.
A third thing about talking together is that we discover nuances and new ways to describe our relationship, and hopefully other people will appreciate these new angles, too. For example, we landed on the role of creativity as an aspect of free will. It fitted very well, as we have said many times that we choose to have a peaceful relationship, and creativity – creating it – is what makes it happen.
So I feel that writing these pieces gives us an unfair advantage over everyone else – we get a free self-directed therapy session once a week. I’m kidding, or maybe stretching the case here, but the lesson seems obvious: sit down with your partner or best friend regularly, block out the outside world, experience that direct sense of the other person (physical contact helps here, too), be honest about everything, be attentive and non-judgmental about where the other person is at. That’s it. Don’t let life crowd this out.
Photo credit: Phil Mayes
Photo note: Phil and Maude writing a post
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