Issue 46 –
The Top Ten Challenges to Relationship:
Keeping Your Love Alive Amid Life’s Routines
Challenge 6: Doing Rather Than Being
Most people have within them a pusher that pushes them to do more and more. They must learn more, accomplish more, earn more, be better, be smarter, expand, succeed, be the best. For our pushers, standing still is unacceptable. We must never waste a moment, we must always be doing something. When we reach one goal, our pusher sets another. There is no rest, just constant doing.
Unfortunately, this constant action makes linkage impossible . You have to stop moving in order to connect to another human being. This is not encouraged in our culture. We are not given permission to slow down long enough to connect with one another and to nourish our relationships. As a matter of fact, we are encouraged to move faster and faster. We’re like the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland running as fast as we can to stay in the same place.
Now there is a new challenge to relationship. We have a New Age pusher, who, in addition to everything else, is pushing us toward growth, consciousness, greater spirituality, and, for the most ambitious of us, enlightenment. This New Age pusher will stop at nothing in its quest for growth. It has us learning about ourselves, working with our process, paying attention to our dreams, doing our spiritual practices, and following a myriad of new rules. It thinks nothing of breaking the connection to our partners and taking us away from them for months at a time.
Again, it is a matter of linkage. If the relationship connection remains primary, the partners will be able to handle the demands of this New Age pusher. However, if the primary linkage moves elsewhere, we are no longer linked to our partners and the relationship is severely challenged. When this happens, there is a chance that the relationship will not survive as our partners feel abandoned by the loss of connection and look for their linkage elsewhere.