Building a securely attached relationship is possible.
After three years of relating with my partner, I realised today that I feel we’ve finally built the foundation necessary to call our relating style “secure.”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up attachment styles. It’s epic seeing how our conditioning plays out in relationships (all types).
I would say that I land more on the spectrum of securely attached. I have two validating, loving, and extremely present parents. They demonstrated healthy love and security to me growing up. Of course, they are human and flawed like every single person on this planet, and therefore I adopted patterns, projections, and beliefs that shaped my own shadows.
So that is why I say, I lean more toward securely attached. Yet I don’t think anyone is ever “fully secure”—until we do the “hard work” to actively work with our shadow.
When I entered my partnership, I would say that E was more on the avoidant spectrum, and when this pendulum played out, I would swing into anxious.
We started off open relating due to having a long-distance relationship. Then I moved to China to live with him and things became really activated. We were both playing out our shadow, push-pull dynamics.
We now joke about the fact that we have a “Benjamin Button” relationship. It started out extremely difficult and now gets better and better. After three years, we are just entering into the honeymoon stage.
How is this?
My partner and I had a deep pull toward each other, something we could not understand with the conscious mind. One thing we both knew for sure was that we are deeply dedicated to the truth. Both deeply devoted to awakening and integration. Even though our spiritual paths look different, we share the same love for evolution.
This has become the glue within our relationship. We decided to commit to learning from each other and evolving, together.
How we moved into secure love required the following explorations:
>> Communicate with radical honesty (not for the faint-hearted)
>> How we manipulate and control
>> Our shadows around love and sexuality
>> Our masks and the way we seek validation and approval to gain “love”
>> Our mummy and daddy issues
>> Our communication styles
>> What freedom in love really looks like and feels like to us and learning to sit and be with the discomfort of that.
>> Our limits and boundaries
>> Our needs and desires
>> How we manipulate and control
>> Our shadows around love and sexuality
>> Our masks and the way we seek validation and approval to gain “love”
>> Our mummy and daddy issues
>> Our communication styles
>> What freedom in love really looks like and feels like to us and learning to sit and be with the discomfort of that.
>> Our limits and boundaries
>> Our needs and desires
We decided that we would try the best we could to talk to each other like you would a best friend—that meant that we would even reveal to each other if we were attracted or wanted to be with others. Or that we wanted a different life path than the other and maybe that meant the relationship ending at some point.
We’ve danced between “monogamy” and “open relating.”
And we also learnt that to be open you need to build a solid relationship to open it.
So we “closed” the relationship to build a strong container of trust. Who knows if it will open again or stay as it is.
The thing is, for me, a relationship status is simply a label. Both options are limiting in their own ways.
Now I feel it’s more about being honest with the ebbs and flows of what we want to express and seeing if that works for us. Checking in if our values are still the same and we want the same things. If your values are aligned, I’ve realised you have a good foundation for wanting similar things.
We’ve learned to let go of future projections, and we’ve found that possessing the other only brings density and apathy.
We work toward love every day, even when we don’t want to or we are tired.
All this has led to meeting each other with deep respect and love that goes beyond control, manipulation, and possessiveness.
Those things may arise, but we work with them, we honour them as our little boy or girl inside freaking the f*ck out.
We hold each other when we often have to die to the self-images we grip onto so tightly to control life and feel worthy, and we’d rather give space by feeling the pain and then birth something more real into the circle of not only our love but our individual lives as well.
Doing the work and getting raw, real, and honest is f*cking hard. And it’s worth it. It’s worth the freedom that comes in knowing that love is always there to serve us toward deeper awakening and truth.
The thing is, love is going to do this anyway. It’s going to rip us apart until we step up and fully show up and hold her hand, allowing her to take us toward truth.
You can either do it kicking or screaming, or you can do it with consciousness ( let’s call that “conscious kicking, screaming, crying, and purging”?).
The latter is much better, I assure you.
Secure love is possible, but the willingness to stop victimising yourself is necessary in order to be guided by love’s light (even if it is sometimes uncomfortable).
I leave you with one of my favourite quotes:
“I will not have you, without the darkness that hides within you. I will not let you have me without the madness that makes me.
If our demons cannot dance, neither we.” ~ Nikita Gill
If our demons cannot dance, neither we.” ~ Nikita Gill
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IMAGE: MAANEE CHRYSTAL JOY
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