The Dance of Love

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Love is exciting! … LOVE is SO hard.

“Only once in your life will you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. …” (Bob Marley)

Ahh!!! … Yes! …  Love! …

I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but the love described above is, well – early love. As the months and years march on for a couple, the relationship is also described with other colorful expressions, like:

“I DON’T CARE!” Harry yelled at them, snatching up a Luna scope and throwing it into the fireplace. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE!” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

Ahh…. Yes… Love…

Love is also baffling, tormenting, exasperating. Can you have one, and avoid the other? No… not really.

Perhaps it will help if you understand the normal aspects of relationship development. We all have needs for connection, but we also have needs for separateness – or our own identity. So much of making a relationship work becomes a balancing act of supporting closeness while also allowing for separateness.

When the needs of one partner conflict with the needs of the other, things can get ugly. Couples that want to thrive can learn to support themselves and the partner in their ever-cycling needs for connection and separateness. But it’s not easy. It helps if you are aware of your own motivations lurking under the battlefield of issues. The more you understand these normal needs, the better equipped you will be to communicate clearly with your partner.

According to developmental psychology, there are three main styles of promoting connection: nurturing, merging, and idealizing. These are the qualities demonstrated in the first quote above. As the couple develops, these qualities are still necessary to sustain intimacy and passionate love, but they may have a less fevered style in there expression. When you are struggling for connection and feel your partner is not receptive, it may show up as pouting, jealousy, demanding, accusing, substance abuse or overeating, for example.

The main arenas that foster separateness are devaluing, controlling, and competing. The second quote above represents the desire for separation-individualization, and it’s not as horrific as it sounds! Think of the classic toddler who is infamous for saying “NO!” or competing with dad for mom’s attention. It’s normal to want to assert separateness. I get a warm nostalgic feeling when I remember my son Robby defiantly tossing his food on the floor, or carrying his potty trainer into my room when he was mad at me!

If only I could feel such warmth towards my husband when he insists on buying another motorcycle! Oh… wait… I DO!

But I first had to realize that his need for speed isn’t in direct conflict with my need to feel safe in our relationship.

If you are stuck in a negative-reaction-cycle to in your relationship and can’t remove yourselves to see more clearly, you may need help from a third party. Don’t hesitate to get into therapy with a qualified counselor (see Choosing a Therapist).

The Best of You – MBTI

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 “What’s right for one person may not be right for someone else.  And there are things that are important to me that others don’t care about at all.

And sometimes others’ behavior doesn’t make any sense to me.

I have my own Thoughts and my own Ideas that may or may not fit into your vision of who I should be.” ~PleaseUnderstandMe by DavidKeirsey

 The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The Theory of Psychological Types was described by C. G. Jung in the 1920’s. He theorized that much of the seemingly random variations in peoples’ behaviors are actually rather systematic and reliable. Their basic differences can be viewed as the ways an individual prefers to perceive reality – all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas, and then evaluate those perceptions – all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. Jung also talks of attitudes of consciousness, or the basic direction in which a person’s conscious interests and energies may flow – either inward to subjective, psychological experience, or outward to the environment of objects, other people and collective norms.

Isabel Briggs Myers studied Jung’s ideas and added her own insights. After 30 years of research and over 5,000 participants, she created a survey that would eventually become the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI ). It is the most widely used personality test.. Learning about our Personality Type helps us to understand why certain areas in life come easily to us and others are more of a struggle. Learning about other people’s Personality Types helps us to understand the most effective way to communicate with them.

This self-report questionnaire assesses the following::

  1. The flow of energy defines how you receive the essential part of your experience. Do you receive it from within yourself (Introverted) or from external sources (Extraverted)?
  2. How you take in information shows your preference for focusing on the basic information taken in through the five senses (Sensing), or by interpreting and adding meaning based on prior experiences (iNuition).
  3. How you prefer to make judgment calls— objectively, using logic and consistency (Thinking), or subjectively, considering other people and special circumstances (Feeling).
  4. The basic day-to-day decision-style that you prefer –  how you interact with the outer world — with a preference towards getting things decided (Judging), or for staying open to new information and options (Perception/Prospecting).

The test is amazingly accurate and informative. Why not give it a whirl?

I’ve searched high and low and found these great online tools.

  • The first link is to a very good adaptation of the original test (Copyright infringements prohibit the availability of the real one):

16Personalities- Get to know yourself – the BEST questionnaire on the web.  

 The Best of YOU!!!

Share your results if you’d like! ;)