Couple Support

You Want Interest? Don't Just Observe - Participate!

Life that you engage with is inherently more interesting than life that you merely observe. This realization came to me during the time that I was involved in therapeutic and personal growth groups. Group members who sat on the sidelines and observed what was going on tended to be critical of the group and to find it boring until they abandoned the observer role and began to participate.

When people got involved - sharing their own experience and engaging with other people's experience - their attitudes changed. The group had become their group.

What you invest yourself in acquires a much different meaning from what it had when you were the uninvolved observer. It is a fact that when you participate in something, it becomes interesting to you partly because now it has you in it.

The generalization holds for the community you live in, for your garden, your kids' activities - and for your marriage. It also holds true for this blog. CoupleSupport.com will be a much more interesting, dynamic and useful blog when you and other people contribute to it.

As a couples counselor and coach, I am glad to write a piece each week about couple relationships (based usually on my work with couples and sometimes on my own marriage also).

I strive to write material that will be useful to you and to others. However, CoupleSupport.com becomes something much richer than a "The Doctor Says..." monologue when you use the Comments section to add your experience, your observations, your agreements and disagreements and your questions and other people come along and add their comments to yours.

You have your own lived wisdom to share. Get involved. Basically, you can do so anonymously if anonymity matters to you. You can contribute first-name only, and the email address you include won't appear with your comments.

I hope you will join us.

The Sweetness of Feeling Fond of Your Partner

Do you ever catch yourself in a moment of special fondness for your partner? Maybe at a party you see your wife talking animatedly with a friend and feel a rush of fondness for her. Or as you watch your husband working in the garden, you suddenly feel really fond of him.

Fondness is one of the special rewards of a genuinely warm and caring relationship. Obviously, I'm not talking about the "nothing special" form of fondness that people have in mind when they say things like, "I'm fond of him, but I certainly don't love him."

The fondness that I'm speaking about is a gentle, quiet emotion, not passionate or intense but heartfelt - something that is likely to endure. The experience of fondness has little or nothing to do with thinking or attitude. It is instead an act of seeing, in which you catch your partner doing something endearing.

Fondness is a gentle mix of friendliness, affection and affinity. It is the sort of thing you might say about a good friend. To be able to say it about your partner is a special treat. Fondness is often the mellow experience of a well-burnished relationship that has endured for some time.

How do you get to experience fondness toward your partner, if you don't already? You have to like that person; the relationship has to be free enough of conflict for the sun to shine through, so to speak.

You have to experience your partner in order to feel fondness toward her/him. This sounds self-evident, but some people seldom have a simple experience of the other person; instead they are full of ideas, concepts and conclusions, and thinking about those is what passes for experience.

You must have stayed together and worked at the relationship long enough to come to an acceptance of the other person as s/he is. Fondness often is what you feel toward your partner after the tempest, when you have made piece with the relationship as it is. You get to experience fondness after you have stopped trying to change your partner.

Please comment: When do you feel fond of your partner?