Gardeners of the Garden of Love

If there are such people among your relatives and friends, take care of them: it seems that such a phenomenon in nature is becoming less and less common. And since you have such a unique opportunity, watch how they behave together: how they look at each other, talk, touch each other. Evaluate how each of them is revealed in these relationships, and admit: they are clearly good together.

It is, as you may have guessed, about those whom we call a happy couple. “Personally, I was lucky in my childhood,” says 34-year-old Polina, “I often visited one such family: with my uncle and aunt. Such a wave of calmness, confidence, tenderness and joy of life emanated from them that I literally bathed in it. They shone, and their radiance was transmitted to those around them.

To meet such a couple is a great success. This is a guarantee that decades later we will be able to say to ourselves: “Yes, it is possible.” It is possible to live together for more than seven years – it is at this time, according to rumor, that the threshold of fatigue sets in. It is possible to love each other deeper and stronger. It is possible to build your house, your life, your world with the energy of this love… Yes, it is possible.

Talented relationship

The first and absolutely necessary feature of a happy couple is the duration of the relationship. So here we are not going to talk about doves in love, who, after three or four years of marriage, still do not take their eyes off each other and merge in a passionate embrace, not only in private, but also in public.

We are rather interested in those unions that still look encouraging after 10 or even 15 years of marriage. After all, such couples have already inevitably passed a very important stage: “they were able to transform their initial love, passion (“start-up mechanism” for most families) into a deep connection,” explains family psychotherapist Inna Khamitova.

But one duration of marriage, of course, is not enough. It happens that people over the years have literally merged into a single whole, but have not been able to accept the otherness of another or have lost their originality. Speaking of a loving couple, we do not mean some higher beings who live as if on a floating cloud, without hassles and quarrels, away from ordinary family conflicts.

“Something, and crises are well known to those who live in a happy union,” continues Inna Khamitova. “Such couples are strong because they were able to go through the trials, without which life together is not complete.”

It’s just that every time they knew how to adapt to difficult situations. Learned how to live together after many years of living on their own. Together they experienced an emotional upheaval when a child was born. We coped with the burden of everyday worries and the resulting routine. Withstood the gaze of his or her relatives … And managed to accept those shortcomings of the other, which in the blessed times of acquaintance were not even suspected.

Each time, not allowing the relationship to collapse, the couple becomes stronger. According to John Gottman, director of the Relationship Research Institute (RRI), happy spouses have a significant level of emotional intelligence: “They manage to find and maintain a balance in ordinary life that does not allow negative thoughts and feelings towards each other (and they exist in all families) to absorb the positive”¹.

In other words, even being annoyed at a partner for not putting things in their place or forgetting about important anniversaries, they are able to remember the talents and virtues of the person with whom they once wanted to live life.

Caring for the garden of living together

In order for this relationship to be maintained, and the desire to be offended and slam the door to give way to a constructive dialogue, you need a solid foundation: a deep desire that the couple you created continues to live and develop. And also the understanding that there is nothing more important than the relationships that you yourself create day after day.

Family therapists Steven and Ondrea Levin have been together for 26 years, so they can be trusted when they identify the three key components of a successful relationship: self-respect, clarity of intention, and commitment to developing and growing together.².

On this foundation, they say, their own relationship stands: “We raised three children together, and we no doubt had to go through moments when our hearts were closed to each other, when we moved away from each other … But we have always been determined to get through it, to work through the complexities in order to open up to each other even more and understand what is behind the words and actions of the other. After all, what defines us is different for everyone.”

Union can develop

At the same time, the word “work”, which psychotherapists like to repeat when it comes to a harmonious union, is rejected by many. It is so unromantic, so unlike the dreams and pictures of passion that have attracted us in love relationships for centuries.

“But you can not consider it work,” Inna Khamitova is sure. – Life in a couple is more like exploring a new planet, discovering unknown feelings, emotions, behavior. If we do not try to put the other in the framework we are used to, but try to explore it, this development of a new space will become very exciting. Moreover, our own scope will expand, and the inner world will become richer.

Another way is to talk about relationships in terms of abilities and skills, and then the couple is a place where everyone should develop not only as an independent person, but also as a companion of the other. Then happy are those couples in which the partners agreed to seriously engage in the development of the “craft” of living together.

And let the romantics calm down: for such a grand undertaking, you must first meet someone or someone who will awaken in us the desire to make so much effort. After all, the driving force of this project, of course, remains love.

Long term project

You should not get married, guided by the principle of “be patient – fall in love,” says family psychotherapist Anna Varga. What else hinders a successful start?

“Relationships should not start forcedly and hastily – for example, because it is already unbearable to live with your parents,” notes Anna Varga. Partners should have enough time to get to know each other better. They need to visit different circumstances – both on vacation, and in ordinary life, and in some difficult situations, to meet friends and relatives of another.

None of the partners should have a sense of internal compromise: something suits me, something doesn’t, but for the sake of something I am ready to endure. At the initial stage of a relationship, internal compromises are destructive. Of course, you can understand that you, for example, have different tastes, but the way you treat each other, what you yourself are in these relationships, you should like.

And of course, don’t get married with the idea that this is a trial. These thoughts undermine the relationship, and such couples tend to break up. Still, the family is a long-term project, and from the very beginning it is worth tuning in precisely for this.

¹ J. Gottman «Why Marriages Succeed or Fail». Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2007.

² The Utne, March-April 2006.