Reflections On What Builds and Nourishes a Healthy, Enduring, and Deeply Loving Partnership

With my beloved in Oaxaca, October 2023

Reflections On What Builds and Nourishes

a Healthy, Enduring, and Deeply 

Loving Partnership

Deep thanks to the beautiful poet Chelan Harkin (https://chelanharkin.com/) who posed an inquiry into things that people are working on in their relationships. I responded with this reflection on what has enabled my husband and me to be grounded in such a mutually respectful and loving partnership.

Ron and I met over 13 years ago when he was 62 and I was 59. We initially connected through Match on-line dating. He had been single for 15 years following a 17 year marriage, and I had been single for 8 years following a 30 year marriage. Ron and I married 2-1/2 years later. Gratefully we had each learned a lot from the difficult and painful experiences in our first marriages.

Several things come to mind related to the enduring and deeply loving partnership that my husband and I have now been sharing over the years and which neither of us had ever experienced before. This is a glimpse into what has made all the difference:

• Facing, identifying, and working with fears of intimacy and vulnerability and trust, fears of truly opening our hearts to love and then being abandoned, and fears of not truly being loved and lovable.
• Intertwined with all of this is being conscious and aware and accountable enough to identity and work with triggers and all the old places that deep relationships bring up rather than being stuck in projections and shame and blame and the fears of the scared little girl inside me.
• Placing a high value on truthfulness, honesty, and transparency. Not avoiding conflict. Addressing what is emerging as it happens. Which takes a lot of courage.
• Addressing, healing, and transforming the generational and cultural trauma that we each carry. This includes recognizing the impact of what bell hooks refers to as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” on us, our culture, and beyond.
• Getting help as needed. When I’ve felt haunted by old places that I know are negatively impacting our marriage, I’ve sought out the support of therapy and close friends. I haven’t had any expectations that my partner will “fix” me, which would be a betrayal of my highest good.
• Refusing to take on the projections of my partner and naming my awareness of his triggers just as I’ve assumed responsibility for mine.
• Owning and apologizing when I've messed up. Transforming my unskillful actions into opportunities for learning and growth.
• Recognizing that our partnership can serve as the sacred ground upon which we can support ourselves and each other to more deeply address, heal, and transform the old hurts and wounds that we’ve experienced. Understanding that this can be hard work and being committed to it.
• Deepening and evolving in our individual and shared spiritual practices. Seeking to grow healthier together in mind, body, heart, spirit and soul.
• Respect for our different needs and interests and needs for space.
• Growing and expanding the experiences, activities, interests, and spiritual and political perspectives that we each value and which strengthen our hearts.
• Recognizing, affirming, and supporting our partner’s strengths, creativity, and gifts.
• Opening our hearts to developing deeply loving relationships each other’s children and grandchildren and close friends. I am also grateful for my friendship with my husband’s first wife.
• Daily and multiple times expressing gratitude and appreciation, tenderness and compassion, deep listening and witnessing, affection and the sweetness of hugs and kisses and holding, and giving voice to how wonderful my beloved is and how much I love him.
• Recognition that we humans all have wounds and foibles, things that we struggle with, and are imperfect and will screw up. And letting that be okay, accepted, affirmed. Building trust and deepening our love for each other through the hard times and not in spite of them.
• Being committed to our ongoing individual and mutual growth and evolution as a couple and as human beings.

There’s more, but this is a glimpse. This enduring deeply loving relationship with my beloved also would not have been possible had I not been engaged in years of healing and transforming trauma and opening my heart to loving myself. There is no greater gift that we can give to ourselves, those we love, and the world than doing the deep and sacred work of learning how to undefend our hearts.

Blessings to us all on our human journeys,

💗

Molly