What Love Asks of Us: Why Relationships Need Tending, Not Fixing

There is a strange thing we expect from love.

We expect it to become easier.

Not necessarily more exciting forever, or free of the inevitable difficulties of being two human beings trying to share a life. But easier. More settled. More natural. As though, once we've found the right person and learned each other well enough, the relationship itself should begin to carry some of the weight.

And sometimes it does.

There are times when being together seems almost effortless. You know the look across the room. You know what will make the other person laugh. You reach for each other without thinking. There is a kind of fluency that comes from having lived alongside someone for a long time.

But then there are other times.

You notice that something you used to do naturally now requires a conversation. You have to ask. Or remember. Or make a plan. You find yourself wondering why something that once seemed to happen by itself now takes intention.

It can be disconcerting.

Not because anything is terribly wrong.

Just because we have been taught to interpret effort as evidence.

If we have to work at closeness, perhaps we're not close enough.

If desire requires tending, perhaps the desire isn't real.

If we have to make room for romance, perhaps the romance has already gone.

I wonder if we have gotten this backwards.

Perhaps Effort Isn't the Opposite of Love

We don't think this way about anything else we love.

If you love music, you listen.

If you love a garden, you notice when the soil is dry.

If you love a friendship, you call someone you haven't seen in a while.

We understand, almost instinctively, that attention is part of loving.

And yet with romantic love, we can carry a peculiar idea that the very need to attend to it means something has gone wrong.

Maybe because, at the beginning, so much comes without asking.

Desire finds its own way and we make time without having to negotiate it.

We're curious about each other because we haven't yet exhausted the mystery.

We don't have to remind ourselves to be interested. We are interested.

Then familiarity arrives, as it inevitably does, and the person who once seemed endlessly fascinating becomes the person whose joke you know by heart.

There can be great tenderness in that kind of knowing.

But there is a danger in it, too.

We can begin to confuse knowing someone with continuing to discover them.

The Relationship Can Become Very Good at Running Itself

I think this is one of the quieter ways a relationship loses its vitality.

Nothing dramatic happens.

No great betrayal. No terrible rupture.

The laundry gets done. The bills get paid. Someone picks up the groceries. You know what you're doing on Saturday.

You are, in many ways, a very good team.

And perhaps you are still kind to one another.

But somewhere in the efficiency of a shared life, you can begin to lose the feeling of being met.

Not abandoned.

Not unloved.

Just… less encountered.

I think this is where people sometimes begin to wonder whether something is wrong.

They may not even say it that way.

They simply notice that there is less laughter.

Less anticipation.

Less of that little charge that used to move through an ordinary moment.

And because we are so accustomed to thinking of relationship problems as evidence of incompatibility, we may start looking for the explanation there.

Maybe we've changed.

Maybe we've grown apart.

Maybe this is just what happens.

But perhaps something else has happened.

Perhaps we have become very good at maintaining the life we built together, and forgotten to keep creating the experience of being alive inside it.

There Is a Difference Between Working on Something and Tending It

This distinction has become increasingly important to me.

There's a kind of effort that feels like trying to make a relationship behave.

We sit down to talk about what isn't working. We identify the pattern. We explain our feelings. We ask for change. We try to understand why the same thing keeps happening.

Sometimes this is exactly what love requires.

But there is another kind of attention that doesn't begin with a problem.

It begins with noticing. What has gone quiet here?

What do I miss?

What used to happen between us that doesn't happen anymore?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do I want more of?

These questions have a different quality.

They don't immediately put either person on trial and they turn our attention toward the relational field that's living between us.

Doubt May Not Be the Enemy We Think It Is

I've become interested in what happens when doubt appears in a relationship.

We tend to either believe it or fight it.

Something must be wrong.

Or:

No, no, everything is fine. Why am I thinking this?

But doubt is sometimes more interesting than either of those responses.

Perhaps it is simply telling us that something we care about has gone unattended.

You notice that you miss being touched.

Or that you want more laughter.

Or that you want to feel desired rather than simply loved.

Or that you want to be surprised by the person you have known for twenty years.

The temptation is to turn immediately toward the other person and say, You don't give me this anymore.

Sometimes that conversation needs to happen.

But before we make the longing into an accusation, there is another question worth asking:

What is this longing showing me about what wants to come alive?

Perhaps doubt is actually a messenger.

That question has changed a great deal for me.

Because sometimes what we are asking our partner for is not simply a change of behavior.

We are longing for an experience.

To feel beautiful.

To feel wanted.

To feel playful.

To feel held.

To feel free.

To feel that particular aliveness that comes when another person is not merely beside us, but truly with us.

And once we know what we are actually longing for, we have more possibilities than simply asking our partner to fix the absence.

What If We Stopped Trying to Get Everything From Each Other?

This doesn't mean becoming so self-sufficient that we no longer need one another.

I don't believe in that version of love.

I like needing each other.

I like the vulnerability of saying, I want you.

But there is something different about reaching toward another person when you are also engaged in your own aliveness.

If I am lonely, perhaps I can ask for closeness.

And perhaps I can also notice where I have become disconnected from myself.

If I want more pleasure, perhaps I can invite my partner into pleasure rather than waiting for them to manufacture it for me.

If I want more beauty in our life, perhaps I can begin bringing beauty into the room.

This isn't about lowering our expectations.

It is about engaging again.

Because there is a subtle way we can turn our partners into providers of experiences we have stopped generating for ourselves.

And then love begins to feel like a series of unmet needs.

A Garden Doesn't Flourish Because You Found the Right Garden

I keep returning to the image of a garden.

Not because I think a relationship is something we should constantly be working on. Quite the opposite.

A garden is not an argument for labor.

It is an argument for attention.

You don't water a garden because you are worried that it might leave you.

You water it because you love what grows there.

You notice the light has changed.

You see what is flowering.

You pull something that shouldn't be there.

You plant something you have never planted before.

And sometimes you simply sit in it.

Perhaps this is closer to what I mean by tending a relationship.

Not endlessly discussing the relationship.

Not standing outside of it with a clipboard, evaluating its performance.

But being in it enough to notice when the air has changed.

To notice what is asking for more.

To notice what has become predictable.

To notice where there is still mystery.

And then to participate.

What If the Effort Became Part of the Pleasure?

Maybe this is the part we overlook.

The effort required to love someone over time doesn't have to feel like labor.

It can be the pleasure of knowing that you can still surprise the person you love.

Or the pleasure of making something beautiful happen because you want to see their face.

It can be the pleasure of feeling curious again.

Of making a plan neither of you really needs.

Of touching without knowing where it will lead.

Or asking a question whose answer you don't already know.

Perhaps the effort is remembering that this person isn't a character in the story you have already written about them.

They are still becoming.

So are you.

Perhaps one of the great possibilities of long love is becoming intimate enough to recognize the many tiny efforts we makematter, whether they are seen or not.

Before You Decide Something Is Wrong

The next time you find yourself thinking, Why does this take so much effort?, perhaps there is another question underneath it.

Not What's wrong with us?

But:

What are we no longer tending?

When did we last make room for something totally unnecessary and simply pleasurable?

When did I last do something simply to delight the person I love?

What have we become very good at maintaining?

And what have we stopped creating?

I don't think the answer is that love should be hard.

And I don't think the answer is that love should be effortless.

Perhaps love asks something more interesting of us.

To remain awake.

To notice.

To engage.

To keep making room for the thing that brought us together in the first place—and for the people we are still becoming.

Maybe Love Needs Somewhere to Go

There is a kind of love that is simply grateful to have found its home.

And there is another kind that keeps moving.

Not because it is dissatisfied.

Because it is alive.

This is part of what I love about being with couples in Mystic Rapture in Costa Rica. We aren't there simply to talk about the relationship or figure out what needs fixing. We create the conditions for something different to happen between two people that ordinary life can make surprisingly difficult to remember.

There is time.

Beauty.

Pleasure.

Attention.

And enough distance from the familiar rhythms of life that you may see each other in a surprisingly different way.

Sometimes what a relationship needs isn't another conversation about the relationship.

Sometimes it needs an experience of being together in a new way.

And sometimes, when we give love somewhere to grow, it remembers how to effortlessly reach towards the light.

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Love,

Amara