5 minute read
Modern Love
A Recipe for Success
By Paige and Don Marrs
Modern love isn’t for the faint of heart. In today’s nonstop society, our relationships go up against increasingly busy work and family schedules, social commitments, and even social media pressure. Think about your relationship. Is it a deeply satisfying soul connection or simply “good enough”? If you answered the latter, don’t panic.
Our practice is dedicated to helping people achieve extraordinary love through evidence-based insights and communication strategies, not to mention our track record of thirty-three happy years together as a couple. Together we wrote Grabbing Lightning: The Messy Quest for an Extraordinary Love to serve as a road map to take your love to the next level. We want you to know you can achieve the relationship of your dreams by doing three simple things. And you can start right now.
1. Set the bar high by asking more from love—not less.
We see so many people who mourn the end of the honeymoon phase. Those bubbly, exciting days of bliss early on in a relationship are addictive, but it only offers a taste of what’s possible. Think of that honeymoon time as a call to embark on an amazing journey, one that offers so much more, much like a spiritual awakening. An extraordinary love expands and grows. It does not fade. If you approach your relationship with the mind-set that it is a cocreated union of love, trust, and intimacy, you both are supported in becoming who you are meant to be. This goes for your inner lives and the practical world.
Remember, this first step is not only possible but also imminently attainable. Think back to the journey metaphor. The beauty lies not just in the destination, but also in the road that takes you there.
2. Embrace the mess!
Relationships are hard and often messy, ugly even. We all bring our respective inner conflicts and demons to the table, and this inevitably leads to conflict. You can’t escape it. We certainly didn’t! In Grabbing Lightning, Don shares this look into the mess factor of our relationship:
“I’d sometimes feel criticized by something Paige said and would snap at her in anger—and she’d collapse into a world of hurt. We’d fight for a while, then withdraw in frustration. At other times, the hurt would hit, and we’d go straight into silence. Either way, a video camera would have found Paige in another room behind a slammed door, sharply muttering while reorganizing a drawer. And it would have captured me at my desk pummeling my keyboard or stomping out the door to walk it off.”
Those were dark moments, and we both saw what perils awaited us if we failed to get our fears under control and fix the disruptive patterns we had formed. If we hadn’t persisted in coming together and developing some form of self-intervention, we would have lost everything, and what a tragedy that would have been. It was trial and error, and we had some scary conversations. But, we came together to create a playbook for our relationship and its challenges.
3. It’s not always fifty-fifty. Be prepared to step up when needed.
You may not like this, but sometimes your quest for extraordinary love requires 100 percent from you, and you alone. Relationships are a dance of shared joys and hurt. You and your beloved come together in love, and sometimes you bump into one another and drift apart. It’s natural during a rift to want a quick fix, to talk it out quickly, but doing so often backfires. You want it all better, but you can only repair yourself. That repair process is almost all solo work. Why? When we’ve lost access to that experience of loving connection, we’re also locked out of our open mind and caring heart. This must all be restored individually before you can come back together in love as a couple.
This inner work can be brutal. It’s tough to look within, and even tougher to meet your partner with love as they’re doing the same thing. The antidote for us was to keep focusing on the inner work, shifting again and again from a defensive, critical flare-up back to that gentle place of trust, until our full connection was restored and we were more in love than before. The beautiful result was eventually reaching something more wonderful than we could ever have dreamed up, even during that blissful honeymoon phase.
There’s no doubt about it; relationships are work. It took us a while to realize that overcoming our relationship challenges had given us access to an incredible experience: the unmistakable alchemy that arises when two people merge themselves in transcendent love.
Choosing transformative communication in relationships is a gift to you and your partner, a valuable toolbox of actionable insights and skills. Use your glitches to get closer! It all comes down to a couple’s willingness to see their challenges as an invitation, a soul nudge. Are you ready for it? It all starts with you.
About Paige and Don Marrs
Paige Marrs, PhD, and Don Marrs have been happily married for over thirty years and have worked together since the day they joined their lives. They have coauthored two how-to memoirs, both of which teach through story. Executive in Passage: When Life Lets You Know It’s Time to Change, Let That Knowing Lead You chronicles Don’s passionate struggle to leave behind the ethical conflicts in his career in advertising and find work that would be truly meaningful for him. The couple’s second book, Grabbing Lightning: The Messy Quest for an Extraordinary Love, reveals their “messy,” intimate journey to a love greater than either of them knew to reach for. Paige and Don have offered their relationship program, The Love Conversation, for more than a decade, helping couples and singles resolve their challenges and experience the love they yearn for instead. TheLoveConversation.com
