“The happiest people on the planet are the men and women who have dynamic relationships. They give focus and priority to their relationships, and as a result have a richer experience of relationship and of life.
John Wooden, the college basketball coach of note, once said in an interview with Sports Illustrated : “Why is it so hard hard for so many to realize that winners are usually the ones who work harder, work longer, and , as a result, perform better?” It is in true in sports, it is true in business, and yes, it is true in relationships.
There are winners and losers in relationships. I am not talking about the games that have become a seemingly intrinsic part of the modern dating scene. In a relationship, one person doesn’t win while the other loses. It is absurd even to speak in such terms. Either both win, or both loose. That’s why so much is at stake. That’s why we feel so powerless and helpless at times in relationships. That’s why it is so important to choose the right people to spend our limited time and energy in relationships with. When I speak of winners and losers in relationships, I speak of the reality that some couples win and other couples loose.
The state of our relationships has an impact on every aspect of our lives. You don’t leave a struggling relationship at home when you go work or school, and you don’t check a tumultuous relationship at the door of your other relationships. If you have a relationship that is struggling, there’s a good chance it is affecting many areas of your life. The troubled relationship may be with a spouse or significant other, or you may have a relationship with a colleague, friend, child, parent, or sibling that has fallen on rough times. Relationships affect us deeply, and a failing or struggling relationship can have a negative impact on the way we perform at work, the hope we hold for the future, the way we feel about ourselves, what we eat or don’t eat, the way we spend our time, and every other aspect of our daily life. On the other hand, when we are thriving in our relationships, especially our primary relationships, we tend to carry a very positive atmosphere wherever we go.
A dynamic primary relationship doesn’t just change the social aspect of our lives, it changes our whole lives by changing the way we see ourselves and the world.
This book is about giving you the tools necessary to create a dynamic primary relationship. The Seven Levels of Intimacy provide a simple model – the strength of any good model is simplicity – but the the process is not easy. Sometimes the biggest mistake we make is believing, at the outset, that the journey ahead is going to be easy. Such a traveler almost always comes unprepared and under-supplied.
You may be well into your journey and have discovered that you need to stop to get resupplied; you may be just beginning your journey; or you may be trying to decide whether you want to set out at all. Whatever the case may be, I am delighted that our paths have crossed and I hope the ideas that fill the pages of this book will prove useful to you in your quest for intimacy.
It takes a lifetime to build great relationships and to learn how to sustain them. Along the way, there will be great moments of triumph and ecstasy and other moments of trial and heartache. This book is no quick fix and it doesn’t contain all the answers. It is simply a tool to help you reconnect with your deep desire to be involved in great relationships.
Connecting with people in a powerful way is a skill that must be developed, nurtured, and practiced. Our primary relationship is the inner sanctum of our emotional lives. It is our first source of emotional support and our primary opportunity to develop and experience a deep level of intimacy. For most of us, our primary relationship will be the one chance we have in this lifetime to truly know a person, and in turn, to be deeply known by another human being.
Too often we spend our days surrounded by trivia and superficial, constantly overloaded with information and quite literally, to deeply know a person becomes more and more of a miracle. Most of what we do every day we do simply to survive. Relationships are what drive us to survive!”
I trust the above as taken from Matthew Kelly’s book “The Seven Levels of Intimacy” will stimulate and encourage you to read further as you strive to better transition in your relationships from merely surviving to expansively thriving. Perhaps the last sentence in the paragraph above would be enhanced if it were to read “Positive intimate relationships are what drive us to survive.” If so, perhaps we may consider the inverse. Negative intimate relationships when taken to the extreme, may cause people to withdraw from society, possibly to resurface later in tragic random shootings such as occurred to Dean Beachy and his son Steven January 24th in State College PA.
I simply ask, Am I my brother’s keeper? Am I an example and encouraging others to be? Am I keeping short accounts? God is love. Seriously now, how do we love without being in relationship? Is love driving my relationships?
Blessings as YOU GO FORTH>>>> Merlin