Couple relationships: when you don’t feel compatible

We often expect the right person in a couple relationship to be someone who shares our tastes, dreams our dreams, who is passionate about our interests and aspirations in life. This might be true when we meet and fall in love. But, over time, this changes and we see more differences in each other than similarities.

There’s something going wrong. Or, at least, that’s how it feels. But if we cling to the past, if we construct a kind of wistful harking back to how things were, we become lost and confused, grasping onto a kind of relationship disneyfication.

The person who fits us best is probably the partner who will consciously work to refit the relationship. In doing so, we both are required to be honest, authentic, resilient and forthright, knowing that this person will not give us everything. We, therefore, must ask what they do give us, what they alone give us that we don’t get from anybody else.

This is the uniqueness inherent in the couple relationship. This working through of difference creates a new compatibility, not constructed in the shadows and the shallows of the past but smelted out of past struggles into something new, a conscious relationship that has the capacity to accept differences which in turn are mutually nourishing.

There is a path here that is real in its uncharted and untried negotiation; it is endless in opportunity by virtue of its freshness and sense not of map but of open territory.

This is the mindful path of getting real love: relational mindfulness.