the relationship. The “right” decision cannot come from me or any book. It can only come from within, after you take the time to truly understand what’s become dysfunctional in your relationship. You will need to align the information in your rational brain, the feelings in your heart, and the instinct in your gut to make the best decision about the relationship.
Even if you’re on the brink of walking out the door, I encourage you to take the time to pause, breathe, and try to understand what went wrong before you leave. Sometimes people are stuck in the power struggle, and once they work to get unstuck, they can restore their love. Even if this isn’t the case, spending time figuring out what happened will help to ensure you don’t end up in the same type of relationship in the future, repeating the same painful unworkable patterns.
Moreover, you can leave a relationship wholeheartedly — and all of us should strive for this when we’re heading toward a breakup. In the short term, it may feel more satisfying to sling blame, but ignoring your own culpability and hurting your partner on the way out will cost you your own well-being in the long run. Saying goodbye is always painful, but to be able to wish your ex-partner well and to acknowledge your own part in the breakup will free you from repeating many of the same patterns. (We’ll talk more about wholehearted breakups in Chapter 15.)
Here’s your Stage Four to-do list:
1.Prioritize self-care. You’re in a fragile place right now, so taking care of yourself — even more than usual — is your top priority. Eat well, exercise regularly (even if all you can manage is a short walk), meditate, pray, or take an art class. Reinvest in hobbies that make you feel good, such as music or reading, and dedicate time to being with your friends. Find a therapist, life coach, or support group. These activities will take you out of your negative context and help you to gradually reconnect with your essential aliveness.
2.Understand your role in your relationship’s deterioration. We’re all human, which means we all have unhealthy patterns and ways of protecting ourselves that aren’t mindful of others’ pain or the trouble we cause them. Sometimes a small change on your part can have an almost magically positive effect on the relationship. For example, try expressing a few words of appreciation for something positive your partner has done, even though you may be feeling disconnected most of the time.
3.Slow down. Don’t let impulses and knee-jerk reactions rule you. Before reacting, give yourself time to fully register your needs and desires. For example, you may think you want to leave your partner when what you really want is to escape the pain of a stagnant relationship or a seemingly never-ending power struggle over the same infuriating things. If you can give yourself enough “break time” to soothe yourself and regain some measure of calm, you can begin to assess whether there’s something to salvage from your troubled partnership. Stay aware and deliberate. Leave the room, call a friend, or do some yoga or other exercise.
Stretch
Trust the process. If you’re not sure what to do next, then practice patience. Let go of the outcome until it becomes clear. In the meantime, just keep doing the work — investigating your own feelings, acknowledging your contributions to the problems, and identifying your true desires. The answer will emerge.
Stage Five, Wholehearted Love: Keep Practicing
First off, congratulations! If you’ve arrived at this stage, you and your partner are in a deeply rewarding place of caring and connectedness. That isn’t to say Stage Five comes without challenges. Like deep meditative awareness or the perfect yoga session, wholeheartedness is a joyful experience but not a permanent one. It’s a place we can sometimes contact and live from, no question. But for every one of us, wholehearted love is an ongoing practice that demands daily intentions, daily actions, and daily choices.
Here’s your Stage Five to-do list:
1.Practice, practice, practice. All the skills you’ve developed as you’ve moved through the other stages — grounding yourself in reality, addressing conflicts directly, creating healthy boundaries, and investing in doing the work — are the same skills that will keep you on the path to wholeheartedness.
2.Nourish yourself. Wholehearted love requires both partners to continually sustain their own wholeness, in addition to meeting the needs of the relationship. In many ways, the relationship itself is a tool for cultivating each individual’s own personal growth. Remember to continue investing in your own passions, self-care rituals, self-exploration, and inner work, whatever that might mean for you. Gently encourage your partner to do the same. Help each other grow into better versions of yourselves in all sectors of your lives.
3.Relish the journey. Humor, playfulness, and spontaneity will be your friends in this stage. Use them freely as you continue to learn and expand with your partner. Be ready to laugh at yourselves, as Tim and I do when we suddenly realize we’re having the same ancient, ridiculous argument about how to do the dishes. For us, the difference is that it’s now about a 1 on the scale of annoyance rather than a 10. Chapter 16 explores the bridges toward wholehearted love, and I urge you to take some time to explore them.
4.Know that there will always be new challenges. Hurdles are not signs something is wrong. Living life, even from a place of wholeheartedness, is like walking through a labyrinth. You find detours, twists, and turns, and just when you think you’re near the center, you come across another detour you didn’t expect. Sometimes, though, when you think you are a long way from where you want to be, the obstacles disappear, and you are there.
As in a labyrinth, we can walk part of the way with another person, but we must also walk by ourselves. Sometimes, the path opens for two; other times, it is only wide enough for one. Wholehearted loving is as much a commitment to that path as an individual as a commitment to the relationship.
Centering the Self
Understanding the five stages of the Love Cycle and how to navigate through the painful and limiting ones can help you transform a good relationship into a great one. This framework can help everyone — from those starting a new relationship with the intention of avoiding some of the sinkholes of the past to those in a committed partnership with long-standing conflicts they haven’t been able to resolve as yet. It will help you re-create the trust, humor, and intimacy that first brought you together and teach you that conflicts — even the hardest ones — don’t need to take away love. In fact, you can use them to deepen your connection, heal your own historical wounds, and expand your empathy and insight.
Ultimately, the entire point of the Love Cycles philosophy — in a relationship and in all of life’s cycles — is to continually move ourselves toward a state of wholeheartedness. It involves developing deep, mindful self-awareness and self-compassion as well as a willingness to work on the parts of ourselves that are small-hearted, closed-hearted, or brokenhearted — behaviors that stop us from accessing generosity, vulnerability, trust, and joy in our lives.
In relationships, wholeheartedness also means practicing the art of differentiation: understanding your partner is not you and accepting that you have no control over the other person’s choices. As intimate as we may feel at times, we are not one another. Even so-called soulmates who spend decades in love will eventually part, if not through life’s challenges, then through death. That means true wholeness cannot come from another person. It must come from within.
In the chapters that follow, you will learn skills to help you realize your full potential and that of your intimate relationship. An important side benefit is that these skills will also help you better navigate other vital relationships in your life, including, most importantly, your relationship with yourself.
