CHAPTER III

THE ESSENCE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP

1. Your Relationship as an Independent Entity

In alchemical symbolism, two substances combine to create a third, new entity. The relationship which you and Bill create together is a living thing, an independent entity in its own right. It has an essential character or basic nature just as any living thing does, and therefore its development process follows the integrity of its own inner law -just as a tomato plant grows from a seed into itself rather than an apple tree. This essential character might or might not be what either you or your partner has in mind as an individual. Probably it is a little of both. And neither you nor Bill may fully perceive the real essence of your relationship until sufficient time has passed for you to experience on the emotional as well as the intellectual level what you have created between you. Also, this mysterious entity has an outer personality which expresses itself in the world in very distinct ways which are different from your own personalities; and it may surprise you when friends or relatives or colleagues describe how they see you as a couple because you are not aware of the outer shape of the life-form you and your partner have created together.

Your relationship is the product of the mysterious chemical interaction that occurs between the two of you. Yet it is not wholly under the control of either of you, and it is possible that, while you can bring greater consciousness to the core issues expressed within the relationship, you cannot ultimately turn it into exactly what you want through any act of will. Once the ingredients for a cake are chosen, mixed and baked, we must accept the nature of the thing we have made. We can make certain alterations, like putting on a delicious frosting, and we can try to ensure that we have our cake at a time when we are hungry and will appreciate its taste. But we cannot unbake the ingredients and demand that they combine differently to get a different sort of cake. Once we create a relationship, we must also accept and work with the thing we have made,- for it is the product of a combination of individuals, alchemically mixed, cooked and brought to life.

The Magic of the Mind

The keynote of your relationship with Bill is communication. There is a quality of mental vitality, energy and inspiration generated between you which makes this partnership more than an emotional and physical bonding, for the dominant impetus within the relationship aims toward the formulation and expression of ideas. On one level, this may result in you and your partner both feeling more able to talk to each other, and share your respective views and interests, than either of you might have done in other relationship situations. On another level, the powerful mental energy of the relationship is likely to affect your individual ability to express your ideas, so that previously neglected talents may be invoked and you and your partner find your perceptions of life greatly enriched and extended. A natural outgrowth of this might be that you and Bill work together in some field involving communication such as writing, publishing, teaching or lecturing; for the energy of the relationship is likely to transform your thinking and open up areas where you and your partner share similar opinions, attitudes and concerns. Others may also respond to the creative and rather romantic ambience of your relationship, for as a couple you and Bill tend, consciously or not, to project a quality of drama and specialness which sets you apart from more prosaic partnerships. It is not likely that the two of you will air your difficulties before others, for there is a strong element of pride in the outer style of this relationship which requires the presentation of a sunny and optimistic face to the world. The romantic qualities of the relationship are also evident to others, and the two of you are likely to appear as a striking and stylish couple, a little larger than life, involved in exciting creative ventures and not bound like so many others to the narrow orbit of mundane routines and responsibilities. But this dramatic persona is not false; it reflects many authentic qualities which really are part of the relationship's heart.

But however the world sees you as a couple, the core of your relationship is a meeting of minds.

Because of your intensely individualistic personality and your original and independent approach to life and love, you are likely to find the creative possibilities of your relationship with Bill exciting and rewarding. Its strong emphasis on communication and the formulating and sharing of ideas can offer opportunities for you to enhance your self-expression and develop your talents; and the rather mercurial, airy and sometimes unpredictable nature of the bond will probably appeal to your need for freedom and autonomy in your interaction with others. You are better able to cope with crises and conflicts than many people because you enjoy challenge (even if you dramatise your difficulties at the time). But you are much less equipped to deal with sameness and boredom. Happily, this relationship, because of its open possibilities in the realm of the mind, ensures that there will always be something interesting and challenging going on which can stimulate your thinking and expand your vision of life.

Because there is such a strong emphasis on the life of the mind and the communication of ideas within the relationship, it is also likely that frequent and extended arguments may also be a part of what you generate together. Debate and argument are an inevitable aspect of communication, and one can only formulate and articulate one's own ideas if there is something - or someone - against which to compare them. The expressive nature of your relationship will probably push both of you into a greater need to exchange ideas, and inevitably you will not always agree. But such disagreement can be as creative a dimension of the bond as the discovery of shared viewpoints, because both of you are called upon by the nature of the relationship to become more conscious of what you really think as individuals. The areas where your most fruitful dialogues (and most heated arguments) are likely to occur are those concerned with your joint financial affairs, as well as your individual values and tastes. You and your partner may find yourselves increasingly interested in money matters, and in the building of a stable material base for yourselves, because the energy of the relationship focusses itself strongly on such issues; but the expression of what each of you needs in order to feel secure and happy is really an expression of what each of you values most, and these matters are not as mundane as they might at first seem.

However, there is an innate dilemma presented by such a strongly mental and communicative focus in your relationship. The life of the mind is so active between you that the subtler, nonverbal modes of exchange and sharing so necessary to the emotional and sexual life of a relationship may easily be neglected because the two of you are so busy talking about everything. The need to share and communicate ideas is a creative and positive dynamic in your relationship, but you and Bill may also find yourselves getting bogged down in discussion as a means of avoiding other, more visceral issues between you. If problems should arise related to the instinctual side of your partnership, the two of you are likely to start analysing them in the hope that communication and understanding will make the problems go away; and you may even find yourselves arguing about something quite unrelated to what is really going on between you because you can let off steam that way without confronting the real issues. Difficult feelings may have a hard time getting an airing because the tendency to rationalise may be activated in both of you by the energy of the relationship. But the magic of the mind is such that, even when this more difficult and evasive dimension of the relationship intrudes, sooner or later the need for honest dialogue will prevail, and the two of you will go on learning from each other.

The Unpredictable Adds Spice to the Dialogue

Your relationship with Bill is full of lively mental energy which can stimulate and transform your thinking and your attitudes toward life. There is another element within the relationship which both enhances its creative mental potentials and injects it with an unconventional and unpredictable ambience. The combination of these two factors may sometimes be upsetting and disturbing, but it will never be boring. However, if you or your partner are seeking a quiet, emotionally comfortable container, you may be in for a surprise. The erratic qualities of the relationship may sometimes cause one or the other of you to pull away abruptly, creating a climate of emotional distancing and separateness which may be hurtful; for there is something at work within the bond which requires cyclical periods of withdrawal and independent expression. In some ways this harmonises with the strong intellectual and communicative emphasis of the bond, for it means you each need periods where you pursue your own independent thinking and interests. But you and your partner may sometimes feel this is altogether too much of a good thing. While this energy within the relationship does not mean you can never experience a sense of permanence with each other, it does mean that you need to let each other alone at times. It would become truly problematic only if you and Bill attempt to force the relationship into too conventional a form, where your mundane routines and responsibilities bind both of you too tightly and do not permit your erratic and stimulating mental exchange a sufficient variety of outlets; or where you and your partner are too emotionally symbiotic and dependent on each other, and cannot allow the breathing space which the relationship requires.

The more unpredictable energy of the relationship is most likely to surface in particular areas of your life together. If you wish to avoid an unconscious eruption of this disruptive energy, you and your partner might need to develop greater independence from each other in terms of your friends and social circle, and in terms of the ideas and ideals which you hold toward life. Although the relationship emphasises the lively mental exchange between you, you also each need separate areas of interest and the right to have your own attitudes and viewpoints; and you may also need intellectual stimulation from a variety of different sources which are not always equally pleasing to both of you. Other people may often be the catalysts for triggering a strong sense of difference between you, but this may not be a bad thing at all; in fact it can help to enliven the exchange between you, because you are not constantly influenced only by each other. The unpredictability of your relationship can greatly enhance the originality of your thinking, and can open up new worlds to you both. But you and your partner are not likely to win awards for being the stablest and most serene of couples. If you can appreciate the intellectual vitality and eccentricity of the relationship without trying to turn it into something from the pages of Women's Own, you and Bill will be able to get the best out of this stimulating and inspiring combination of energies generated between you.

• 2. Your Relationship and Yourself
• The following sections describe the effect of this relationship on yourself. While the previous sections of text always spoke to both of you, you and your partner, the focus here will be on your side.

  A Stirring of the Heart and the Passions

  Your relationship with Bill is likely to activate particular aspects of your personality very strongly, and this includes first of all a stirring of your emotional and instinctual nature. The ways in which your passions, your needs and feelings, your sexual responses and your inner sense of self-worth and lovability are aroused - sometimes happily, sometimes through conflict - all contribute most powerfully to the transformative effect the relationship has on you.

  In the Beginning Was the Word

  The particular quality of mental rapport inherent in the relationship is likely to have a very positive effect on your sense of emotional security and wellbeing. You may feel especially "at home" in this partnership because it will seem at times unusually easy for you to express your feelings and be understood. Also, your inner world is likely to be stirred, so that you feel more imaginative and receptive; and this could result in your having more energy to put into creative activities because you feel inspired so much of the time. There may of course be deeper conflicts arising between you and your partner; but because of the way in which the relationship gives you outlets for emotional and imaginative expression, you are never likely to feel bored, and you also have the great boon in this relationship of being able to talk about what you feel.

  Chafing at the Bit

  The limits and obligations which this relationship brings into your life are likely to sometimes make you feel very angry indeed. It is not that your partnership with Bill is going to irrevocably block your goals and freedom of action, as you may sometimes fear; it is that you may react rather badly to being slowed down in getting what you want. You may not have realised how resentful you can become at having to compromise your own wishes; and you may respond with an acute, impatient and highly subjective emotional response which generates pointless and unproductive quarrels. You may need to be careful not to accumulate a big reservoir of resentment which smoulders away beneath the surface and eventually erupts in destructive ways. Your impatience with the restrictions which the relationship imposes on you could lead you to make some very creative changes in your and your partner's lives, because your own vital energy and spirit may take these obstacles as a challenge and you may work that much harder to find solutions which your partner might miss. Also, the restrictions and difficulties inherent in the relationship can make you more acutely aware of just what you really do want. But you will need to be very conscious of your perhaps previously underestimated capacity for anger and impatience, and you may learn a hard lesson in the necessity for compromise, adjustment, and respect for the healing powers of time.

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  Your partnership with Bill will probably have a profound impact on your emotional life, for its creative energy fulfils your deepest emotional needs and gives you a sense of coming home. Somehow you feel looked after by the relationship, even if you sometimes feel you are the one doing the actual looking after your partner; and it is likely that over time you will come to depend on the life-giving qualities of the bond for your sense of security and well-being. You may experience a sense of meaning and belonging which nourishes you on the instinctual level, giving you a feeling of purpose in life and satisfying your need to be needed. Because your attachment to and need of this relationship are likely to be so great, you will probably be willing to accept many compromises or sacrifices which you might not have tolerated in past relationships. Through this you may also discover facets of your own ability to care and nourish others which you were not fully aware of before. This is an extremely important relationship for you, because it touches you at such deep levels and gives you such a strong sense of being rooted in life.

  Deeper Levels are Activated Within You

  However, your relationship with Bill also has a powerful effect on the deeper and more unconscious levels of your psyche, constellating profound and often permanent changes in your attitudes, your outlook on life, and your understanding of yourself. Because of the more complex effect this relationship has on you, it may not always invoke pleasant responses; for no deep change can occur without conflict, and you may not always like what you discover about yourself. But if you are willing to accept the importance of this partnership, and its potential to heal old wounds and make you more whole, you may be able to tap hitherto unknown resources within yourself andfind the most creative ways of dealing with the process of transformation which the relationship will very likely set in motion - with or without your consent.

  No Discounts Available

  The way in which this relationship appears in the outside world, and the reactions it invokes in other people, may stir deeply ambivalent responses in you. On the one hand you will probably be moved by a deep sense of responsibility and permanence, which may make you want to create a lasting bond which the world can identify as a stable partnership. But you may also feel trapped or restricted by the strength and weight of this partnership, and the sacrifices it requires of you. The feeling of structure and permanence which the relationship constellates in you satisfies your deepest security-needs, and may go a long way toward healing hurts from your past. But you will probably also have to accept the occasional feeling of being burdened, weighed down or disillusioned - particularly if you have been a more romantic temperament in the past. Put bluntly, you will grow up a great deal through the effects the partnership has on you, especially in your dealings with the collective. You may have to make important sacrifices to have this relationship; try not to resent the price.

  Close Encounters of the Healing Kind

  This relationship is likely to have a profound effect on your inner life, because it touches and opens up understanding of areas of your personality which have been hurt or blocked since early childhood. Because your insight into yourself is likely to grow, you will have the opportunity to face these early issues and heal or make peace with problems which may have troubled you for a very long time. In the past you have probably avoided emotional encounters which were able to penetrate your defences and which might have confronted you too strongly with this more vulnerable aspect of yourself. But a quality of generosity and faith inherent in your relationship with Bill not only makes you more aware of your own complexity; it also offers you enough optimism and trust to enable you to express this vulnerability. Your reactions to such psychological exposure will probably be very ambivalent, for self-confrontation is inevitably painful at times. But the healing and expansive effect the relationship has on you is potentially extremely positive.

  The Bulldog Within

  The limits, obligations or constraints within your relationship with Bill may have a somewhat disturbing effect on your emotional life. Where the difficulties of other relationships might merely lead you to take stock and make reasonable compromises or adjustments, in this relationship you may experience a sometimes frightening degree of anger and a tenacious determination to sweep the obstacles out of your path. A deep and primitive level of your feeling nature is constellated by the frustrations inherent in the partnership, and your responses may well be somewhat out of proportion to the situation. Every relationship has inherent limits, and you may be quite realistic about life's limits in general. But not this time. You are more prone to becoming involved in unconscious power battles with your partner than would normally be the case, even though it is not your partner but the relationship itself which seems at times to thwart your will. However, if you can refrain from either totally annihilating the relationship in anger, or becoming obsessed with changing or dominating your partner whatever the cost, you may find that these restrictions can help you to understand and come to terms with a darker and more archaic side of your own emotional nature - one which you might not have recognised before.

  3. Your Relationship and Your Partner

  The following sections of text describe the effect of this relationship on Bill.

  Your Partner's Heart is Also Stirred

  Your relationship also has a powerful effect on particular aspects of your partner's passions, feelings and emotional needs; and this means that he, like you, is liable to experience a definite enriching and deepening of his heart and instinctual nature even if this sometimes occurs through conflict and upset.

  And They Lived Happily Ever After...

  There is a magical, elusive and dreamlike quality inherent in this relationship which is likely to arouse some very strong erotic feelings in your partner. He is particularly sensitive to the subtle and elusive promise of perfect love which the relationship generates, because his own ideals and values are so closely attuned to it. This partnership has a way of enchanting him and capturing his heart because it reflects back to him his own vision of love; and he probably feel at times both loved and lovable, desired and desiring, to a very intense degree. Initially at least, he may well believe that he has truly met his soul-mate. However, despite the magic, he may need to keep his feet firmly on the ground and not allow his state of enchantment to blur the boundaries between your reality and the love-dream which the relationship invokes so strongly in him. For if he sets his expectations too high, and expects a 24-hour-a-day free entry pass into the Paradise Garden, he may be setting himself up for a lot of confusion, hurt and disillusionment not because either of you is at fault, but because your partner has forgotten that both of you are human after all. But if he can accept the ordinary everyday limits and constraints which accompany any partnership, he will find that this relationship has the power to truly open his heart and imagination, and can help to restore his faith in the power of romantic love.

  Withdrawal Symptoms

  An element of erotic fantasy in this relationship is likely to invoke feelings of intense sexual fascination in your partner - a kind of erotic enchantment which may make him believe he has never experienced such strong feelings before. This is because the elusive promise of perfect union inherent in the partnership has a direct and potent effect on his desire-nature. However, Bill may also experience a sense of slowly accruing frustration, because somehow this tantalising promise is likely to continue to elude him - for no apparent reason and despite efforts on both your parts to make the dream into reality. Your partner may need to muster as much self-honesty as possible and look realistically at whether or not his romantic dream of an erotic Paradise Garden is humanly possible. It is not that some irreconcilable problem exists between the two of you; rather, it is the chemistry of the relationship itself which may lead him into expectations and fantasies which no partnership could possibly fulfil. This quality of enchantment which exercises such a potent but confusing effect on him is lovely and magical. But he may need to accept it for what it is - a beautiful dream which enhances the emotional tone of the relationship and not allow himself to be so seduced by the promise of fusion that he winds up abandoning his own goals and individual will, and ultimately feels disillusioned and resentful toward you for letting him down.

  An Activation of Your Partner's Creative Potentials

  Your partner can also benefit from the relationship on a creative level, for it is likely to activate his imagination and creative abilities as well as his capacity to express himself in the world.

  The Magic Mountain

  The emotional dimension of the relationship is likely to have a strongly positive effect on your partner's sense of meaning and his faith in life and in himself. Something about the qualities of containment and nourishment provided by the relationship also has the effect of bringing out his sense of burnout, so that he will probably find himself laughing and enjoying himself to a degree he has not experienced before. This relationship also provides a gentle spur to his imagination and sense of adventure, so that he is likely to feel more creative and more playful; and a little of the gambling spirit may come to the surface, even if he has been a more cautious and pragmatic type of person in the past. Bill could feel more generous and tolerant also, and more willing to accept the problems and flaws within the relationship and within you, because this bond has a way of making him feel that life might really be friendly and benign after all.

  Courage and Confidence

  Your partner's sense of self-motivation and effectiveness in life are likely to be given a strong boost by the creative energy of the relationship. Somehow its life-giving force inspires him to greater courage and a willingness to pursue his own individual goals in a way which he probably has not experienced before. His passions are also likely to be aroused, as well as his temper; and he may discover that he is a far more willful and competitive personality than he thought. Sexual stimulation is also part of the dynamism of the relationship's effect on him, but it is more than this; it is really a discovery of his own potency, determination and energy which he is likely to experience. Even if the quarrels become somewhat combustible at times, this bond has a way of making Bill feel more alive, more dynamic and more in charge of his own life.

  Your Partner's Mind and Spirit Come Alive

  The relationship also affects your partner's mental outlook and world-view, just as it does your own; and because of the way in which the partnership activates particular aspects of his mind and spirit, he could experience a definite broadening of his mental horizons and vision.

  How to Be a Rent-an-Argument Service

  Your partner will probably be highly energised by the mental dimension of the relationship, although this energising may have the effect of making him behave like a "rent-an-argument" service at the same time that it stimulates his ideas and expressive capacities. Somehow the dialogue which is fostered between the two of you activates his awareness of his own individual will and viewpoint, and in this way it has a very positive capacity to help him define his own identity as well as formulating his goals and objectives in life more clearly. But of course the more conscious Bill becomes of his individual right to think his own thoughts and pursue his own goals, the more likely he is to collide with you at times; hence the propensity for arguments which may arise, largely initiated by him. However, this does not have to be a bad thing; for if he can learn to turn argument into discussion and debate rather than blind verbal bashing, he will discover greater ability to go for what he wants in life, and to express himself more honestly to others.

  Listening with a Third Ear

  Bill may be disturbed and confused by the communication between the two of you, for there is an elusive element in the relationship's mental rapport which stirs the nonrational side of his nature into high activity. He may sometimes feel as though there is so much mental rapport that it borders on a kind of telepathy; but at other times he may feel baffled, inarticulate and misunderstood, and every effort he makes to express himself may seem undermined or misinterpreted. This relationship challenges your partner to learn to articulate his feelings - particularly the more romantic and idealistic fantasies and needs - in ways which may have previously been difficult or impossible for him. If he can meet this challenge, allowing words to become the vehicle for the more poetic aspects of his own nature, he will find that he is able to enjoy great creative stimulation from this relationship, and will be able to express his imagination and his inner world with greater clarity.