A tool to help encourage and maintain a healthy and honest relationship
Relationships are difficult, painful, joyful, complicated, simple, invigorating, energy depleting, scary, exciting, obsessive, boring, fill in the rest. At the end of the day they are the most necessary element of life on this planet. How do we keep a relationship healthy and honest? There is no guaranteed way. People change and that’s the way it is. As much as we want to believe with all of our heart and soul that it’s not true, it’s still true. With that said there are tools we can use to help encourage health and honesty in a relationship. I want to talk about a tool called “The Weekly Check In.” To be most effective both parties have to agree to equal amounts of commitment and truth. Once both parties are committed equally, some ground rules are in order.
Ideally you reserve the same time each week. Kind of like therapy but not plus you don’t have to pay someone to be referee. Set aside at least an hour. Less than an hour may be fine but there will be times when more than an hour is needed, but an hour is a good place to start. If you start cancelling, know that we are always in control of prioritizing what’s most important. If having a healthy and honest relationship is a top priority in our life we will do whatever is necessary to accommodate that priority. For many relationships, after a significant amount of time has passed they forget that work is still required to maintain health and happiness.
Like almost everything in life, what we give is the most important ingredient in the cake. If we hold back from expressing what we really feel, regardless of how difficult and painful certain topics/issues/situations/feelings are, this weekly check in will become nothing more than an annoyance. When we’re serious about honesty we show up ready to be vulnerable. When both parties start phoning it in, it becomes nothing more than an exercise in pretending. How can your boyfriend continue having an affair if every week you’re expressing your love and your desire to communicate as openly as possible? How can your wife be seeing another man when each week you let her know how grateful you are and how willing and ready you are to talk about how you feel? When we ask our partner, “What can I do to make you feel closer to me? What can I do to meet your needs?” That creates a feeling of safety, caring and concern. All relationships are about connection and once that connection starts fraying, without the proper repair it will eventually tear and break off. How deep do you want your connection to be? Do you want your wife wandering off with another man? Do you want your boyfriend fooling around with other women? Do you have the strength to confront the difficult, the uncomfortable, the unspoken feelings that are going on between you and your partner?
The weekly check in allows the weirdness and the difficulty to get air time and dissipate. But only if we have the strength to share honestly. There are a myriad number of reasons why people choose to stray and one of the consistent themes is lack of connection. When we feel fully connected and our needs are being met, there is no reason to go anywhere. Whether it’s with our wife, our health club, our band, our firm, our pharmacy, our tailor, our therapist, it doesn’t matter. When our needs are being met, we stay. When our needs aren’t being met, we stray. It’s basic survival. Stray doesn’t necessarily mean leave, it means look elsewhere for needs that aren’t being met with the primary relationship.
The more open and honest we can be in our relationships, the more trust we can have. We will always have the choice of how open we want to be and how deep do we want to go, but having an opportunity for the weekly check in lets your happy and healthy relationship reach its full potential