Transforming Relationships

At Relationship By Design, our work is based on the premise that transformation occurs when you confront reality exactly as it is. Once you stop resisting reality and attempting to fix or improve it, you experience peace, freedom and an opening for creativity in your life.

It is inevitable that people will look at relationships from the perspective of one person added to another person, of 1 + 1 = 2 individuals. Given this perspective, whenever you are dissatisfied with a relationship, you assign the cause of your dissatisfaction to one of the individuals in the relationship and seek out a strategy to change that individual’s behavior.

Sometimes you’re satisfied with the result of the strategy, but many times you’re not. The cumulative effect of failed strategies in your relationships over the years is likely to produce a sort of fog of resignation that colors your attitude toward all relationships.

Blaming, fixing and improving is our default human reaction to upsets in relationships. If you doubt this, simply go to Amazon.com, plug in the keyword “relationship,” and notice that what you find in the thousands of books and videos are tips, instructions and strategies for fixing and improving your relationships.

At Relationship By Design, we have no interest in fixing and improving relationships: we are interested in transforming relationships. The first step in transforming relationships, is to accept that relationships always look like “one plus one.” From time to time, inevitably, you will be upset or dissatisfied in your relationships; and inside that 1 + 1 perspective, you will inevitably attempt to assign cause or blame to one or the other.

Ironically, and wonderfully, confronting this inevitable design of relationships provides an opening to transform relationships simply by seeing the way relationships really are, and asking, “Now what?”

Perhaps, if you see that the impulse to fix and improve relationships is built into relationship itself, you can remove your attention from fixing. You might gain some time and freedom to be creative.

Perhaps, when you see that you’ll never escape from the 1 + 1 = 2 mathematics of relationship, you might enjoy inventing and exploring another mathematics of relationship in which 1 + 1 = 1.

If you choose to explore this new math of relationship, let us know what you find. Or join us in one of our workshops, where people consistently find freedom and peace of mind in allowing relationships to be exactly what they are.