What we Don’t know CAN hurt us.
On Sunday I gave a talk at the Celebrate Life Festival on ‘The Architecture of Love Relationships’ (AoR). It was cold and it was Fathers day so I was pleasantly surprised to have a full lecture room. My experience so far has been that we live like ostriches with our heads in the sand thinking ‘what we don’t know can’t hurt us’. Especially in relationships.
I explained to my audience how our naiveté and optimism about what makes us successful in relationships is currently hurting us.
What we don’t know that hurts us #1: In the Western world, 60-80% of marriages fail. In South Africa, two out of three marriages end in divorce. Please tell me another industry that would still be thriving if it only had a 20 -30% success rate. I am not against marriage. What I am against is our current approach for entering into and navigating the complexity of the contemporary relationships.. It is not working. We need a new approach.
What we don’t know that hurts us #2: No education about how to have and be in healthy relationships. We yearn for intimacy but ironically, school education does not teach us what we value most. We are left to figure it out by watching our parents. Yet our parents themselves were trained by their own equally well-intentioned but uninformed caregivers. We are forced to ‘learn on the job’, leaving the majority of us with no mentorship and little educated advice. We need some education on what is required to have a healthy relationship.
What we don’t know that hurts us #3: We have Unrealistic expectations. It is not the responsibility of a relationship or another person to fulfill you. Culturally we are led to believe that it is the responsibility of a relationship to fulfill us. To complete us. This unrealistic expectation further contributes to romantic relationships falling apart, unable to withstand the pressure. We need to adjust our beliefs and expectations of the 21st century marriage.
What we don’t know that hurts us#4: Traditional assumptions that being single is bad. Historically, society implies and assumes that if you are single there is something wrong with you. This feeds our fear of being rejected, our fear of being alone, our fear of not being good enough and so we go rushing into a marriage to lessen societal and internal pressure. We go rushing into any relationship just because we don’t want to be single in our 30’s or 40’s. We need to accept being single as advantageous and even desirable so that we take as much time as we need to find a suitable match for ourselves.
Does it sound to you like it does to me that we are doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
Ok. So what is the solution?
Iits time to do something different. To take a new approach. A new approach for entering into and navigating successfully through the complexities of relationships and its challenges. And it starts by understanding a simple framework. The Architecture of Love Relationships.
Like an x-ray, which shows how the skeleton supports the body, AoR shows the framework that exists which supports sustainable, healthy relationships. We could say I developed this model but it feels more like I stumbled across it, that it has always been there but I was the first to notice it. The reason I am so passionate about it is because I truly believe that if you understand this, you can turn your life and relationships around.
If you are someone who wants to have and be in a healthy relationship, call me for some coaching and watch your relationships transform in front of your own eyes.