The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved (10 page)

And finally, if you believe that your partner is helping you to become the-best-version-of-yourself, in what ways is he or she doing that? Or, if you don’t believe that your significant other is helping you become the-best-version-of-yourself, what are the things that he or she does that pull you away from your best self?

It is unlikely that you could both trust and not trust a person, but it is certainly possible that at some times your significant other has your best interests at heart and at other times he or she doesn’t; similarly, it is certainly within the realm of probability that in some ways your significant other helps you to become the-best-version-of-yourself and in other ways he or she does not. It may be helpful to take time to write down your answers to these questions and reflect upon both the positive and negative aspects.

The next question really needs to be answered, first on your own, and then with your partner:

Is your relationship your top priority?

For some people, it isn’t. For some people, work and career are the top priority. At some times in a person’s life, depending on their chosen career, that may be necessary. Other people place their parents and siblings ahead of their primary relationship. This may be a valid approach at the beginning of a relationship, but at some point it would be unhealthy not to give priority to our primary relationship.

People put other things ahead of their primary relationship for all sorts of reasons, healthy and unhealthy. The important thing is that all those involved know where everyone stands. Sometimes the most fundamental assumptions are the cause of constant and ongoing friction in relationships. So, if your primary relationship is not your top priority, the next question is, Does your significant other know that?

Now that we know where our primary relationship ranks in our priorities, it is important to address the question of our significant other. Keeping in mind that you cannot simply ask this question in passing; you need to have a conversation. If you just ask the question in passing, chances are your partner will just say yes, because somewhere deep inside we all know that is the answer our partners want to hear. Rather than coming straight out and asking, Is our relationship your top priority? You might ask: What are the priorities in your life? This will help both of you to understand your relationship in relation to your other priorities.

Having discussed the general priorities in your lives, you can then move on to discuss the specific priority of your relationship. Within the context of your other priorities, you can then consider whether the way you live your day-to-day lives reflects the priority you claim to give to your relationship.

For example, if your husband says your relationship is his top priority, but he works eighty-five hours a week and is always tired and uninterested when he is home or with you, then the way he spends his days and weeks doesn’t reflect that priority. Similarly, if you have been dating a woman for a long time and she claims that your relationship is top priority, but you see her only once a week and she is slow to return your calls, the reality is different.

In some of my seminars for business executives, I ask them to list the priorities in their lives. The most common priority order is: God, family, friends, work, other. We then make photocopies of one week from their day planners, give them five different color markers, and ask them to highlight the whole week according to how they spent their time. There is an enormous gap between what we claim are our priorities and how we spend our time.

Most parents would say that their children are a top priority, and yet recent studies show that on average parents spend less than sixteen minutes in conversation each week with their teenage children.

For most of us, there is an enormous gap between what we say is important and how we actually spend our lives. People who are living with passion and purpose have closed the gap between what they consider to be their priorities and how they spend their time. If you are going to have extraordinary relationships, then you have to decide to make them a priority by allocating significant time and energy to them.

Life is priority driven.

Whatever you place your attention on will increase in your life.

If you are constantly thinking and talking about everything you are grateful for in your life, the number of things you have to be grateful for will increase. If you are constantly preoccupied with all the things you don’t have, the number of things you wish you had will increase. Human thought is creative. What we think becomes. Everything begins first as a thought in our minds.

If we are serious about giving priority to our relationship, we must first give it priority in our minds. Before all else, you must know what a great relationship looks like to you. You must begin by clearly identifying the qualities necessary to build and sustain extraordinary relationships.

That’s what this book is about, building and sustaining extraordinary relationships. Anyone can have an ordinary relationship. Nobody wants an ordinary relationship, but that is what most people have.

Our primary relationship is the inner sanctum of our emotional lives. It is our first source of emotional support and our primary opportunity to develop and experience a deep level of intimacy. For most of us, our primary relationship will be the one chance we have in this lifetime to truly know a person, and in turn, to be deeply known by another human being.

We spend our days surrounded by trivialities and superficialities, constantly overloaded with information. With every passing day, to deeply know a person becomes more and more of a miracle.

B
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REAK
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s I write, a fear keeps popping into my mind. In my sometimes overactive imagination, I can see people coming up to me after one of my seminars and saying to me, “I read your book
The Seven Levels of Intimacy
and broke up with my boyfriend the very next day.”

The reason I have this fear is because, as in all my writing, I am trying to illumine the ideal path. The truth, of course, is that few of us will attain this ideal path, but striving toward it animates us. The word “animate” means “breathe life into.” Ideals breathe life into us. They challenge us to reach beyond previously self-imposed boundaries and to become a-better-version-of-ourselves.

If your husband doesn’t always have your best interests at heart, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you, only that we can all be a little selfish from time to time. And if your girlfriend doesn’t always help you achieve your essential purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is not the one for you. It just means she doesn’t understand that the more she helps you become your best self, the more you will be able to love her.

As you read this book, you may sometimes feel that I am encouraging you to break from your primary relationship, and sometimes that I am saying that staying with your partner is the only way. Both are legitimate reactions; we tend to process new information through the lens of our own experiences, past and present. But the purpose of this book is not to sway you one way or the other, it is simply to help and encourage you in the journey that is your life.

The first truth of relationships is that they all have problems. Your partner is not perfect and neither are you. Your children will never be perfect children and you will never be a perfect parent. If you cannot accept this elementary truth, you will spend your whole life chasing a figment of your imagination.

I see it all the time in certain friends, whom I call serial daters. One of them will start dating someone; everything is wonderful, until one day he actually gets to know the person a little, and perhaps she expresses an opinion that is a little “out there” (meaning that it is different from his). Before you know it, he has broken up with her. You want to shake him and say, “No, she wasn’t perfect. But guess what? Neither are you.”

All relationships have problems, so don’t react by breaking off your relationship because of something you read in a book, mine or anyone else’s.

If you’re not happy, there is no point in just jumping into the next relationship. You have to try to work out why this one isn’t working, or why the last one didn’t work. You also have to give some serious thought to why you ended up in this relationship that isn’t working. You are not completely responsible, but neither is your partner. It also may help to look at other past relationships. Is a pattern emerging? Why do you end up in relationships like this?

It may very well be that what you need to do is end your relationship, and if this book is what brought you to that realization and it is the right thing for you to do—wonderful! But make sure you are doing it for all the right reasons, not just chasing another illusion.

S
ECONDARY
R
ELATIONSHIPS

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eyond our primary relationship we are all involved in literally hundreds of secondary relationships. Some are very important to us, like the relationship between parents and children; others may be relatively insignificant, like your relationship with the security guard where you work. That the relationship is not significant doesn’t mean you are not friendly and courteous; it simply means the relationship doesn’t have a high priority.

Higher-level secondary relationships could include those with parents, children, siblings, in-laws, friends, colleagues at work, your employer or employees, or perhaps a business partner.

Our primary relationship tends to have a tremendous impact on our secondary relationships, and vice versa. If your husband has just told you he wants a divorce, you can be sure this is going to affect the way you relate to just about everyone else in your life. If your girlfriend has just been told she has a brain tumor, that situation is a part of your relationship, and it will affect the way you go about your daily activities and relate with others. If your wedding is six weeks away and you’re not sure you can trust your fiancé, that’s going to affect the way you relate to people.

These things affect our relationships with others by influencing what we talk about with them, how we filter and process what they say to us; and they significantly affect the level of energy we have to help others deal with their emotional struggles.

Many years ago, I was dating a young woman while at the time I had a particularly bothersome employee. The employee was unreliable, untrustworthy, and didn’t take instruction well, but overnight reallocation of her role and responsibilities was not possible. I didn’t realize how frustrated I was, nor did I realize how much it was affecting the other areas of my life. I certainly didn’t realize how much I had been discussing it with my girlfriend. One night we were out to dinner and as I was talking about my employee, a look came across my girlfriend’s face. “You know we spend more time talking about her than we spend talking about us!” she said. So the negative relationship with my employee was damaging my relationship with my girlfriend.

Primary and secondary relationships have a way of influencing each other. Pleasant and unpleasant things happen to us every single day of our lives. Great relationships magnify the good things that happen to us and make the unpleasant things bearable.

When something wonderful happens to you, who are the first people you want to tell?

When tragedy strikes, which people do you want to be with?

Whom do you want at your bedside keeping you company when you are sick?

Who encourages you when you fail?

Who challenges you gently to succeed?

Whose life do you want to significantly impact with your life?

Life is a limited experience, and yet, there is an unlimited number of people, places, and things to experience in your limited time.

In the arena of relationships, we also have a limited amount of time and unlimited opportunities. There are almost six billion people on the planet; you cannot have a personal relationship with each of them. You must choose.

Each day I receive hundreds of e-mails. I could sit at my computer all day for the rest of my life replying to e-mail, or I can write this book. I choose the book. The reason is that I believe the book is a more significant contribution than the thousands of e-mails I could send in the time it takes to write. I choose to write the book because it is a deeper communication, and in a mysterious way it is a chance for you and me, reader and author, to be intimate with each other even though we may never have met.

Every day we make choices, and in those choices we assign priority ranking to the different activities and relationships in our lives. We can try to do everything, and perhaps we can even end up doing many things, but we will excel at nothing. The colloquial label for this human tragedy is “jack of all trades, master of none.” We see this all the time with children who want to be involved with every activity. They play soccer and baseball, take piano and karate lessons, participate in the school play, write articles for the school paper, and take art lessons. They do many things, but they never learn the discipline of any one thing. They float along with talent instead of refining that talent with discipline. They do many things, but excel at nothing. To a certain extent such experimentation is a part of childhood, but only to a certain extent. At some point, we should all bring an order to our lives that allows us to celebrate what makes us unique. Alternatively, we can bring our focus to one great task, to one passion, to one pursuit, and if we have chosen our one pursuit with an understanding of our talents and abilities and pursue it with discipline we will only do one thing, but we will excel at that one thing. The pursuit of excellence breeds character. The pursuit of variety does not.