10 insightful lessons.

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Relationships have recipes.

The more you work on the right ingredients, the healthier your relationship is.

Every now and then, I talk to couples whose age is the same as my mom’s. Who gaze at each other with love even after being married for years. Who have the utmost respect for each other. This week, I talked to a 25-year-old married couple whom I met through one of my students.

They gave me a master class for maintaining a healthy relationship. Love does not waltz away with the currents of emotion. Or passion. It goes beyond the electrified nights and passionate love.

They asked me questions:

. What do you do when your salt is tested in your relationship? When the storm strikes? When disaster barges in? Is your relationship made of fire or fantasy?

Sometimes you learn about the right ingredients for a healthy relationship by turning your phone off and listening as a couple talks about their stories, their highs, and lows, how they kept loving each other even after all these years. You learn about new ways and vocabularies to talk about love. And what it means to be there for someone you love through the good days and the bad days. Especially the bad days.  

I took notes.

Here are 10 insightful lessons from a 25-year-old married couple whose bond is still strong:

1. Allow yourself to feel painful emotions

And nurture yourself through them.

“When we lost our son in a car accident five years ago, my husband sucked all his emotions. After the tragedy, he marched through life stoically, his heart neatly sealed, safe from the joys and sorrows of life.” The wife was crying when she told me this.

“Even though I was grieving, I promised myself I would not let my husband remain in emotional solitary confinement for the rest of our lives. I begged and begged for him to cry. To let me in. To allow himself to feel painful emotions. In time, he opened up. It was like a host of sinister bats leaving a subterranean cave at night. I kissed his tears away. This isn’t a Disney fairytale. We’re still grieving. Sometimes our pain is too suffocating that we can’t even breathe. But we have bared our hearts in more ways than we can imagine and we have become a better, more loving human being thanks to that.”

Allowing yourself to feel painful emotions is a battle.

It’s something I struggle with.

But I’ve learned if you do not allow yourself to feel painful emotions, your capacity to love and feel empathy, sympathy, and compassion for your loved ones will diminish.

You will be unable to participate fully in the grandeur and poignancy of life.

2. Take action based on love – rather than fear

20 years ago, when they quit their jobs to build their first business together, the husband’s family blamed the wife.

How could she think they could start a business when they had no prior experience?

Fear breathed down their necks. They had never run a business before. They were in a new city. They did not know whether they were going to be successful or not.

This is what fear does to us: it prevents us from listening to what our heart desires. To what it speaks. It distracts us from what is important and that is to take action based on love.

This amazing couple had a gut feeling. That they needed to take a leap of faith and build their startup from scratch. They needed to do that, even though every member of their family warned them they were making a huge mistake.

They took action based on love – rather than fear.

At first, it felt like something was choking them to retreat back to their safe old job. It took them years to find their safe ground on their business.

Still…

In their relationship, fear did not take away what is possible and what could be possible.

3. Shower your relationship with kindness

After their 2 children left for college 4 years ago, the wife stopped going to their offices. She was depressed. They run big companies and she could not do any of her responsibilities.

Every night, the husband came home after a long, tiresome day. His wife is lying on their bed just like the day before and the day before.

He let her be.

Things at their company were not good at the time. Even though he needed her support, he took all their company’s responsibilities. He chose to let her have time to process her feelings regardless of his need for her brilliant mind and for her to be by his side.

Now that’s kindness.

In your relationship, to be kind is more important than to be right.

4. Delight in your loved one’s success

I read Sean Kernan’s Quora’s answer to the question, “What relationship sin should you avoid at all costs?” He talks about Stedman Graham. He’s an American businessman, author, and speaker. He’s not a celebrity. But he is successful by any reasonable measure. This is what he had to say about his partner:

“I want her to succeed and be as successful as she possibly can. I’m not threatened by her fame, her money, or her success.”

Guess who she is?

Stedman is the 30+ years longtime partner of Oprah.

When your girlfriend gets a promotion. When your husband gets a pay rise. When someone you love gets something they have been working hard for.

Be delighted for their success.

If any sinister emotion other than delight creeps into your mind and heart, this is the relationship sin Sean talks about that must be avoided at all costs.

5. Power does not belong in healthy relationships

The old couple told me:

“Most relationships fail because one partner exercises power over the other person. You fight to be more powerful than the other as if you are on opposite sides of a team. You forget you are on the same team.”

If at any point in the description of your relationship, the notion of “power” is brought up, if you have any thought at all as to who has more or less power, you need to reconsider its entire construction, disassemble it brick by brick and begin again.

6. Love with non-attachment

“Love lightly, my child,” the wife said.

She continued:

“My husband spends weeks and months in another country, 3 or 4 times a year. If I hold him tightly refusing to let him go, I will suffer. If I cling to him suffocating the life out of him, we both suffer. You do not love someone when you put that person in a box where you hope they will stay and never change.”

Of all the insights I received, this one is my favorite.

I’m sure by now you’ve read Kris Gage’s How to Love With Nonattachment article. If not, read this insightful piece again and again until its message unclenches the tight hold you have on someone you love.

In your relationship, your joy will be doubled when you meet your beloved – not out of quiet desperation – but out of the sheer delight of sharing your life with another.

7. Do some things together

And no, she was not talking about watching TV together.

Her husband comes to her book club and participates even though it is not his thing. She attends company shareholder lunches and dinners even though it is not her thing.

There is also every Saturday afternoon dedicated to themselves. Even their children are not invited. Sometimes they take a train from Dubai (where they live) that would take them to Abu Dhabi. They would spend the weekend exploring their neighboring city. Sometimes they spend the entire afternoon visiting a local market. Sometimes they go to college to surprise their children. Sometimes they go to a friend’s coffee shop and sit to gaze at each other.

Doesn’t that make you stop reading this article to call your partner and do something, anything together?

I hope you do.

8. Don’t take what your spouse does for granted

“I forgot how to prepare pasta,” she told me.

This happened over 10 years ago.

“My husband loves cooking. He prepares our meal every day and he enjoys it. But somewhere along the way, I took his cooking for granted. When he had to go to America for 3 months I could not even prepare a simple pasta. I had forgotten how.”

Our tendency to divide roles and tasks bring unhealthy behaviors in our relationship.

Time went by and things she was not inclined to do in the first place became things she never do.

Whatever weak “muscles” she had became weaker.

Just because something is easier for the other person does not mean you can’t do it.

9. Don’t be so absorbed in your relationship that you allow every “me” to become “we”

Abandoning certain interests or parts of you (from your hobbies to your friends to your job), even leaving thoughts unexplored – is not how you build a healthy relationship.

There are many things left for you to discover. Many things you are interested in. Pursuits that might become a part of who you are.

If you turn your back on this – for the sake of your relationship – you lose yourself.

A healthy relationship is a result of who you are together to be something that expands both you and your loved one. Both of you can grow, learn and stretch, instead of wither.

Creating boundaries is how you do not allow every “me” to become “we”.

If you want to say ‘no’ to certain things, you can say ‘no’ and still love that person you said ‘no’ to. If staying at home to do your work is what you want to do instead of going out, you can do that. That does not mean you do not love someone enough. It doesn’t mean you’re selfish. It means you respect yourself.

It means you’re building a healthy relationship.

10. Take time to “do you”

“He rises every morning at 5:30 am, leaves my warm body, and walks for 2 hours. He has been doing this for the past 25 years. He likes hearing birds chirping, the leaves blowing, the babbling of the creek, and the crackle of the earth under his feet.” She told me with a smile on her face.

What is your thing? What is your loved one’s thing?

Whether it is exercising before the sun rises over the horizon or you want to be left alone with your favorite book or you want to pamper yourself at the local salon, you do you.

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The commitment to cultivate your relationship is important for maintaining a healthy relationship.

The commitment to treat your partner with kindness, respect, and dignity.

The commitment to do the right thing regardless of your changing mood and flickering passion for the person.

This commitment looks like: not suppressing your emotions, making decisions based on love, kindness, delight in your loved one’s success, not using the word “power” in your relationship, loving lightly, doing some things with your spouse together, not taking what your loved one does for granted, not confining yourself for the sake of your relationship, taking time to “do you”.

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