Keeping the fire of Passion and Love alive – Risk and Trust

by Russ Hardesty, PhD

Take a breath; hold it and allow your lungs full opportunity to extract life’s essential oxygen. Imagine, becoming so attached to that breath that you refuse to let it go. In a similar way, we often hold on to the passion and experiences of our early romance thinking that it will sustain the relationship for ever – like in ‘happily ever after’.

Sleepwalking through life

Taking your relationship for granted, like holding your breath, can be one of the greatest challenges to keeping passion and love alive. When creativity and questioning diminish, it’s as if there is nothing more to discover about self or partner. Accepting the status quo is like failing to make deposits in the checking account while continuing to make withdrawals. Risks to explore new dimensions of a relationship are often frightening. ‘Status quo’ seekers live life with little risk-taking. They are living unconsciously or sleepwalking through life.

“Build your wings on the way down”

Pulitzer Prize winner, Anne Dillard remarked, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Building your wings on the way down is creating your relationship as you go. Rather than sleepwalking through life, you acknowledge to your partner that you want more in the relationship. You want change. You want a chance for it to be different and great! You jump off the cliff. The danger is losing your attachment to your idea that love is static and always remains the same, a euphoric fairy tale sort of love. The danger is losing your attachment to this person altogether.

When you and your partner jump off the cliff there is risk but there is also new opportunity to realize your capacities for love and attachment. If you are going to have a passionate relationship you need to be prepared to take risks. In the beginning of your former relationship you risked attachment to your partner without knowing the outcome. When you jump off the cliff and are free falling through space, you are saying goodbye to your old ways of attaching to your partner.

Saying goodbye is like letting go and may be accompanied by feelings of grief and loss. One cannot know what life or relationship can be without your old attachments until you let go of them. The goodbyes are a way of acknowledging change in the relationship. In letting go you are saying hello to new ways of relating to one another. Hellos invite new energy and passion into the relationship by acknowledging the undiscovered. On your free fall downwards you can begin to build the wings of a renewed and more satisfying relationship.

Failure is inherent in risk.

Our lives are filled with risk taking opportunities. The place we seem most unwilling to take risk is in that relationship with our life partner. Asking for something different or making a declaration of change often dies in the mortal fear of ending the relationship. Yet failure to take the risk and ask for something to change can quench the fire of passion. Willingness to risk failure requires trust, most importantly trusting oneself. Too often relationships are built on trusting one’s partner in place of trusting self. This pattern is a sure formula for ‘status quo’ and the demise of passion.

Trusting partners hold each other accountable for their potential and their agreements. Only lack of effort or half-hearted attempts should be up for scrutiny. Finger pointing and blame will destroy passion and desire in a relationship quickly. Partners that trust themselves as well as each other do not personalize failed attempts. Their reward is open communication and vital, passionate relationships.

Action Steps:

Goal: Identify things that you have wanted in your relationship but never asked!

(Use good judgment and don’t begin with areas that are known areas of conflict)

Note: if you aren’t currently in a relationship or have a partner not willing to participate – complete your part of the action step to assist your vision and intentions.

1. Identify 5 pleasing things you have wanted in your relationship that you have never asked for and rank in importance from 1 to 5 (1 most important).
2. Encourage your partner to do the same.
3. Exchange the list and put an “x” by those items on the list that you or your partner are not ready to do at this time.
4. Act on one unchecked item each day, regardless of how you feel about it.

Keeping the fire of Passion and Love alive!

“The movie that changed the face of entertainment. Toy Story, the first full-length computer animated feature film, is "a wonder to behold."” – People Magazine

‘Toy Story’
Most everyone has enjoyed this great animation at least once in the past 13 years. Toy Story is the result of the innovations of a small team of people bringing together existing elements into a new dynamic for the entertainment industry. Much can be learned from their endeavor that can be applied to maintaining and growing passion in your love relationship.

Play to Win
Growing passion and intimacy thrives in an environment of creativity and playfulness. It doesn’t occur from a lone idea or concept from a ‘love manual’, but from creating the environment for sustainable innovation. The creators of toy story surrounded themselves with toys and mastered the art of play as their imaginations worked towards the final result. This magical and “juicy” environment they worked in fostered shared attitudes, values and beliefs that became meaningful to them as group relating to one another. Each relationship has abundant resources within it to support and sustain growing and expanding passion.

There are five core values that support and sustain dynamic passion; questioning, risk taking, openness, patience and trust. Sustainability is the result of a harmonious balance of these values, as in the creation of Toy Story.

Values and Intimacy
At first look, the values of questioning and risk taking seem counter-intuitive for most popular definitions of love relationships. However, these values bring to the relationship the energy for growing passion. Openness, patience and trust are elements of intimacy which sustain passion. Growing passion is stifled when either of these values is over emphasized. Yet if the partners base their relationship on trust with out questioning, blindness or unawareness to energy draining habits and attitudes insidiously appear. Where one or both partners place great emphasis on patience, little change occurs and boredom and habituation dominates the relationship. Risk-taking isn’t reckless, but is undertaken consensually which requires openness and questioning.

In the example of the creation of Toy Story, the willingness to ask questions and take risks put the team over the top with their new film medium. Because this kind of film had never been done before, they were taking risks with their very idea. Trust is critical when a group fosters a new idea. Trust is also critical when partners begin to question their choices, options and possibilities. Lack of trust can turn questions into to judgments and promote an atmosphere of expectation . When partners are willing trust enough to take risks and ask questions they can create a new and more dynamic relationship.

Question – Energy of Passion
Curiosity underlies the kind of questioning that sustains passion. Natural curiosity seeks to explore and discover that which is unknown. It can take us into the hidden area of the personality – that part is hidden from self and/or the other. ‘Natural’ curiosity accesses that deeper part of our self which is closely related to our ‘inner child’. This is the kind of curiosity that fuels the passion of a child discovering how something works. Our intuition is allowed to imagine and create when our child-like natural questioning emerges. This great capacity for questioning also allows two individuals to explore and find resolution in difficult times. David Culler, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, described this kind of questioning as: “stubbing my toe on the same spot often enough that I say, ‘What is this?’ Then I look down and find that what I’m tripping on is just the tip of a very big rock below the surface.”

Play, not work
The rich juicy environment for sustained passion is play, not work. Truly innovative people play at what others call work. Though the Toy Story team faced many times of difficulty and seeming failure the energy sustained by their passionate playing at creating this film allowed them to continue through to their amazing success!

If a couple works at keeping passion alive, it will likely wither and die. Working at, or ‘having to’ keep passion alive turns questions into judgments. Asking the “Why” question communicates judgment, lack of trust, promotes defensiveness and triggers guilt and shame. Passion cannot co-exist with such elements of the past. “Why” questions in relationship are neither scientific nor questioning but veiled statements of dissatisfaction, judgment, or anger.

The questions of play are what keep passion alive. Questions of How? When? What? Each of these speaks to discovery and outcomes in the future. Open ended questions that suggest possibilities will stimulate imagination, which is a critical aspect of sustained passion.

The Challenge
A great challenge to sustained passion is habituation or status quo. A maturing relationship can easily fail to question patterns, rituals, and habits that once were new innovations. Couples that discover a sense of having “made it” can add new energy to their relationship by seeking to discover new and unknown possibilities.

Action Steps –
1. Reflect on the most passionate time in your relationship. Write or share your reflections with your partner.
2. What would you like to discover about yourself and your partner? Share these with your partner.
3. Encourage your partner to participate in 1 & 2

Risk and Trust next time!

Russ Hardesty Dec 29, 2008