The Third Entity
In my work and in my personal life, I see intimate relationships as a meeting of 2 entities which then goes on to create a 3rd entity – the relationship itself.
The 3rd entity is an intelligent conscious being in its own right. It has its own desires, needs and wants, its own life force and its own evolutionary trajectory. It requires the right environment in which to grow and thrive and it is our responsibility to nurture it.
The mistake we all make is believing its just the two of us and that we have all the control. We get stuck in a duality of me and you, and become focussed only on our own personal agenda, hopefully with some interest in our patrtner’s. We forget to stop, get out of our own way for a moment, and ask “what does the relationship need?”. How can I/we best serve the relationship? What is being called from me/us to help this relationship grow and develop best?
It is a vulnerable question to ask, believe me I know! Sometimes, if we really listen, we may hear an answer we don’t want to, that doesn’t fit within the neat and tidy picture that we have created for ourselves, our idea of how our relationship “should” look. Of course we can choose to stick our fingers in our ears and ignore it, turn the other way and continue to try and force the relationship to fit, but we may always be trying to squeeze that square peg into that round hole. It wont feel good, and we will be doing all three entities a disservice.
Like any of us, a relationship does not thrive well in a cage, it requires the freedom to breathe and stretch and grow under its own steam. And it is our job to listen and provide it that space, accepting that the needs of the relationship will change over time.
This has very much been a HUGE part of the journey for Stephanie and I recently. We have had and still do have the most beautiful relationship, there is such a deep love that exists between us which goes way beyond what the mind can truly comprehend. And we have known for a while now that something is out of alignment.
Over the last several months we have been challenged to strip back all of our ideas of how our relationship should look. It’s been painful, its been heartbreaking, its been traumatic. AND its been a beautiful experience of deep deep listening – to ourselves, each other AND to the 3rd entity. We have consistently been slapped out of our own agendas to be brought back to the fundamental resounding question “How does Love want to be expressed through us?” How can we best serve this relationship?
The answer has been hard to hear, really fucking hard!
What we know, for now at least, is that our paths are to be seperate. That we can best serve our love and our relationship by coming back fully to ourselves and following our individual life current. We don’t know what comes from here but are keeping our hearts and our ears open, listening to it all. Of course we each have our desires, hopes and dreams but we are releasing our attachment to any of it.
We have been immersed in a raw and gritty process of untangling our relationship, releasing eachother from any expectations we have had, the ideas of who the other “should” be for us. And then quite randomly last week we had the absolute honour to have our love witnessed in the company of dear friends on the beautiful river in Noosa. It was not the wedding we had imagined when I proposed last year but it was a beautiful, divine and heart wrenching way to celebrate our love and meaningfully ritualise our parting as we follow our individual current. A deeply humbling experience.
I am so utterly grateful to have both experienced and to have paid witness to this experience and the love that we share. I know and trust the depth of connection we have and I know that will always be there. And I trust most of all that Love knows best.
So for now I follow my current which is taking me on my solo pilgrimage adventure around Australia, and Stephanie follows hers, and the rest is up to the mystery.
So to bring this back and conclude. If you’re in relationship, I encourage you all to take a moment and ask yourself a few important questions:
- Where are you trying to force your relationship to be a certain way? To suit your own agenda, soothe your own anxieties, provide security? Etc.
- How are you placing expectations on your partner to be someone or something for you?
- How are you placing your relationship in a cage and limiting its growth and expansion?
- And how is that then creating a cage around you and your beloved?
- What would happen if you let it all go? Collapsed it all? Allowed love to express itself freely and without limitation?
I’d love to read your thoughts, questions and comments