Intimate Partnerships -- Part 2 -- Working Together

My wife, Rebecca, and I have enjoyed very good times and weathered some very tough times. Both sides of life have been better because we share them. This year we will celebrate our fortieth anniversary.

We improve ourselves through the daily interactions of living together. These interactions are the deepest form of dialogue. The word “dialogue” is from the Greek meaning “two logics.” In our on-going interactions with our spouses, the two logics we care about the most deeply, our own and those of the person we love best, rub against each other in all kinds of ways. Some of those interactions are good; others are bad; many are just confusing. However, nothing else in life can teach us as well.

We will inevitably discover conflicts in those two, flawed ways of being. The question is, how do we deal with those conflicts productively? How do we move our relationship forward into something better? How do we work together so we don’t hold each other back, stagnating or destroying the relationship? We can never develop and intimate partnership and will lose the one we have if we don’t learn to work together.