Relationships and Mindfulness

Falling in love is easy, staying in love, that’s the real work

I’m sure operating on someone’s heart is difficult, but with the right training, the right education and enough practice, you would make a good cardiac surgeon one day. Similarly, learning to dance could be tricky, but with YouTube and an endless supply of dance classes and keep trying again if it all fails — you’re bound to be able to shake your booty on something. But who teaches us how to love? it’s not on the high school curriculum and there are no lecturers that I’m aware of that specialize in teaching humans how to function optimally in a relationship. For most of us — being in a relationship is tough work.

For many of us our ideas of love and relationships are formed from a young age, what we observe in our environment; namely our parents or surroundings, to when we mature and begin to read books and watch movies like The Notebook. We see people around us talk about their feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams and we start to dream that maybe someday we too might experience something like that. Our ideas of love and a relationship mix with our delusions and get stirred by our beliefs which eventually results in our vision of an ideal relationship with an ideal partner. A vision we have great difficulty moving away from. 

That is why it makes so much sense that many relationships fail after the ‘honeymoon’ period ends. We tell ourselves that we’re fallen ‘out’ of love. We go from texting daily to avoiding their calls because we don’t feel like talking to them anymore. What once turned us on about our partners now annoys us about them.

But the ‘honeymoon’ period of any relationship could actually be seen as a state of Mindfulness. Mindfulness being our capacity to be in the present moment with a sense of curiosity and compassion. And we all remember those honeymoon periods, you start off by wanting to spend as much time with your partner as possible, you look for ways in which you can learn more about them or spend time with them. You are constantly asking questions and simply plus curiously observing their behaviour. The partner is showered by this attention. Then something happens, maybe they do not text back for a week or they forgot its date night, you compassionately offer them your support and laugh it off, because anyone can forget to respond or forget date night. You’re genuinely interested in your partner, you’re present to them and you’re compassionate and understanding of them.

Mindfulness is a basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. It’s not something magical that you have to spend hours researching, it is here and it is available to you, and your partner right now.

So the question remains, how can mindfulness be integrated into your relationships? 

1.    Your first relationship is to yourself.

First ask yourself, am I in this relationship because I’m scared to be alone? In many spiritual texts, the first teachings are about the nature of our most important relationship — our self. We are asked to listen, be patient and understand our own thoughts, habits and tendencies so we can find compassion for the parts of ourselves we might not like so much. Loneliness, anger, fear, jealousy — they tend to exist in all of us, some have a handle on this, some of us don’t. Having a truly meaningful relationship depends on our capacity to be alone and ok, with ourselves. A mindful person recognizes when they are ‘clinging’ to their partner out of a sense of lack. We can then detach from this unhealthy thought and develop more clarity from awareness around our tendencies. We can’t change what we can’t see, so becoming more self-aware is vitally important.

2. Be present.

This is truly a must in our relationships.  How can we relate to ourselves and our partners if we are not even there? And you know what I’m talking about, don’t even try to deny it. Scrolling through Instagram when your partner asks how your day was or watching Netflix when your partner asks if you can maybe help with the dishes isn’t being present. It’s being absent. Relationships can’t flourish with absence; they flourish when we are there for our partners. Try to put your phones down when you sit down or go out to dinner and spend a designated time during the day, morning or nights, to being fully present to your partner.

3. Listen, for no other purpose than to listen.

We humans are hard-wired to look for problems. To fix things. But sometimes we ourselves don’t need someone to fix our problems, just someone to hear them. Listening to our partners is a powerful exercise in presence and love. When we listen we open up our capacity to understand. And truly meaningful relationships thrive when we understand each other, our hopes, our fears, our stresses and our triggers. When we listen deeply, we can see not only what they are communicating through their words, but also their body language. Mindful listening opens us up to a much deeper level of connection.

4. Compassion

Compassion is the capacity each of us have to not only empathize with another person but to genuinely help them ‘suffer’ less. It’s born out of listening and understanding. It’s our capacity to help our partner hurt less after a long day at work or after something has gone wrong. It’s also our capacity to understand they are a human, not just a body that you live with. A human that goes through the same emotions as fear, hope, anxiety and overwhelm, like you do. Seeing your partner as a human can drastically change the nature of a relationship, because we see in them what we see in ourselves. An imperfectly perfect human trying to do the best they can with what they have. Someone that makes mistakes when they are scared, confused or tired. Through this lens of compassion, we better understand our selves, and each other.

5. This too shall pass.

Far from looking at impermanence (the nature of all things to eventually end) as a depressing topic, it can actually be the most liberating. This for me has been the most transformative practice in my relationship and life to be honest. Being aware of the fact that our time with our partners is in one-way or another limited means we don’t have to always get caught up in the little stresses of our life. Accepting that our time together will eventually come to end gives us a freedom to experience the moments with our partners with a sense of genuine love and gratitude.

The reality is all our time is limited. We can choose to spend it caught up in our minds or we can choose to live a life filled with what really matters.

A mindful life allows us to be fully present to what surrounds us, the people and the experiences all while we manage the ups and downs of life with a genuine sense of calm, compassion and clarity.

Want to learn how to be more loving to yourself and in your relationships?

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