” Marriage and other intimate partnerships are the crucible in which your soul matures and allows you to be a creative, ethical, and thoughtful person in other areas. With this understanding of love, you don’t try to resolve love’s dark night by engineering a better relationship. Your focus is on the soul and its deepening and strengthening.

Thomas Moore in Dark Night of the Soul

All too often, we try to fix relationships by focusing on the “problem.” We then pour our energy into fixing it. Time and experience have confirmed to me that Moore is on to something. He advises us to focus on deepening and strengthening the individual soul, rather then perfecting the relationship. Relationships can only be as healthy as the people in them.

Letting Go of Trying to Change the Other Person

Maybe it was easier to do this because, by this time, I realized this is who Austin is. I was reconciling to the idea that these things were never going to go away. There was nothing I could do. As a woman, there was nothing I could do to compete with attractions to men. I couldn’t change his attractions, couldn’t fix his depression, could not make him happy. It caused me no small amount of pain. At the same time, it helped me to slowly let go and focus instead on the health of my own soul.

Finding the Gift in the Pain

Instead of being the greatest pain of my life, this became the greatest gift. My deepest fears, that he would leave me for a man, had more to do with my own emotional unhealthiness than the reality of what he was thinking and feeling. The codependency I had struggled with my whole life, finally showed up as being an absolute impossibility. There was nothing I could do to fix “us”. So I stopped trying.

I wish I could tell you that I immediately felt lighter. That it was like breathing clean air for the first time. It actually still sucked, quite a lot. The process wasn’t immediate or overnight, rather it was a slow process. I wasn’t always successful at letting go either. Yet, I had switched paths. Every time I found myself on the old path, it became easier to recognize and get back onto the right path again.

Needing Boundaries

One thing my soul needed was boundaries. I was not good at setting or keeping them. Journal in hand, I wrote down exactly what I could and could not live with in our marriage. I was aware that I did not want to leave him. Still, there were lines that could not be crossed if it was going to work.

Boundaries had to be set with other people too. For the first several years after we moved home, I said no to pretty much everything people asked me to do. It became easier with practice and I even learned to enter spaces where I received but did not give.

Relationships can only be as healthy as the people in them.

As a 2 on the Enneagram, who tends to be a giver, this went against everything in me. At first I was too burned out to care, but the practice became easier every time I said no. The guilt lessened, as well, once I could see that my drive to take care of people and fix things came from unhealthy beliefs and practices.

Becoming My Own Person

Instead of finding my identity in acts of service and caring for others, I began to find my identity in the things that gave me life. I carved out time and space to be alone and really think. Doing the things that filled me up became more and more important.

I also had to learn to see myself as my own person, rather than Austin’s wife or my sons’ mom. Growing up in a patriarchal subculture had preconditioned me to see women, including myself, as belonging to or an extension of their father or husband.

Only feet that dance well on their own, can dance beautifully with another.

It was as if I looked down and saw my own feet for the first time. I slowly began to realize I had two of them and I could stand perfectly fine on those two feet. Even if they were tired and the path unfamiliar, my two feet could hold me up.

The crazy thing was, as I leaned into my own identity and did my own soul work, our relationship slowly became stronger and better. Relationships can only be as healthy as the people in them. Only feet that dance well on their own, can dance beautifully with another.

Click on the button above to send me an email and I will let you know when new posts are up! If you or someone you love is in the closet, or if you are struggling with your own guttural grief and need someone to talk to, email me. I may not have time to answer you but I will read it and hold you in my heart.

Photography courtesy of Adrienne Gerber Photography.