What Makes Relationships Last?

Exploring how to grow a relationship through mutual interest

This week I celebrated 24(!) years of  marriage. It has me thinking about my own marriage and all the couples I've worked with over the years. I asked myself the question, "how do I know I am happily married?" The answers flowed easily. Because we are still in love. We are still best friends. We are still attracted to each other. We still have sex, experience intimacy, and feel aliveness and enrichment in our relationship. Eros is present even within the patterns of our day to day lives. Possibility exists to deepen. It is kind of like I feel about my own being, only expanded.

My musings this week have centered around what makes a couple able to weather life and its inevitable challenges. If you are not in a couple, everything I am writing applies to friendships as well. When we get caught inside ourselves, we miss other people. If we get caught too deeply inside ourselves, people who we are relating to start to pull away. I think about how many friendships over the years have fallen i…