No Conflict
When I describe being in a relationship for 2 years with no conflict or compromise, others seem surprised and confused.
It is deeply ingrained in us to imagine that change arrives through conflict, that we fight to win or achieve change when something isn't going right.
This is a threat-based modality, applicable to situations of scarcity, enmity, competition, applicable to a life where problems arise regularly.
In short, nothing *I* intend to have in my definition of a healthy partnership.
It is true that change *may* arrive through conflict, through fight, through seeing what is unacceptable and fighting against it to win and achieve the result we want.
More often than not, however, those changes are limited in their application to behavior, while they tend to increasingly change the feelings of intimacy, respect, and bonding between two people.
The truth is that meeting conflict together and never meeting each other in conflict brings and keeps two people close.
This means that we are in a partnership where we both understand that things can't NOT change, that what is between us is ever-evolving, and we experience that according to the focus of our own attention.
We are so far away from emergencies, crises, and problems, so distant from the idea that we have some project to address between us, some right or wrong way of doing things or being together or feeling, that conflict simply doesn't occur as a first, or second, or third response to any event in the partnership.
The relationship emerges to the delight of our witnessing. It always has, it always will. We attend to ourselves in the heat of the others' desire, we meet ONLY in mutual desire. We commit to grieving the insatiable within us, and to responsibly feeding any and all hunger within ourselves.
