SOTE Article: Maintaining Relationships

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BY CLIVE DUFFY

The importance of the couple relationship is to connect the person inside you with the person inside your partner. That personal connection is the important part of maintaining your relationship and being together and supporting each other. It is nice to know that somebody knows more about you inside than anybody else.

Some people may not be in a couple and they need to think about maintaining an adult network. If you are a parent on your own, you need adult company, because if you don’t and you start sharing adult things with your kids, they can’t cope with that. Think about ‘Who can I ring up when I need to talk?’, ‘Who can I socialize with?’ and ‘How can I build a network?’ That network is important. Also, it is important to remember that if you are a couple and you know someone who is single, to include them in your invitations.

One of the important issues to couples is to make sure that your partner feels special. It’s a really important thing to feel special to someone. Part of that is to try and understand your partner because we don’t marry people who are the same as us. We marry people who are different and putting those differences together, we make up a good team. We often talk about equality. Equality doesn’t mean ‘the same’ and you find that generally females are good at some things and males are good at other things. So equality might be just each putting in your own commitment in your own way, but it being appreciated by each other and not taking each other for granted.

There are four types of relationships. Imagine two circles representing two individuals. The first relationship is two people being individuals so the circles are totally separate from each other—it’s not personal. In the next relationship the circles start touching each other just briefly, like friendships. Then there is a stronger relationship in which half of the circles overlap. The section overlapping represents the relationship and the other part is the individual—a more intimate relationship. In the fourth relationship, the two circles are almost imposing on each other so there is hardly any individuality. This concept we call ‘two become one’ where the relationship is totally dominant. As counsellors, we began to realize that to survive in the modern world, the third relationship is probably the one that works the best. Here, a significant part of your life is a relationship but you don’t lose your identity. However, on a day-to-day basis, we experience each of the four relationship types with our partner on some level.

The next generation of people will have more individuality than our generation because individuality is important in society today. That makes relationships more difficult because they learn to be more closed than open. The next generation will have more difficulty with relationships than maybe we have. As parents, the model you can show your children is how you put energy in maintaining relationships, including the family. What happens eventually of course is the kids leave and you’re a couple again and you have to maintain that couple relationship.

Even though parenting is the dominant part when the kids growing up, if you put energy into showing kids how relationships and families can be fun and enjoyable, then that’s what they’ll learn. By spending time with them and getting involved with them you are actually teaching them how to relate to each other and maintain relationships.



		Clive Duffy is a family counsellor based in Rainworth, Brisbane. He visits the School of Total Education twice a term to see parents, teachers and students, and contributes regularly to the Parents Program.

Family Counsellor, Clive Duffy, shared his thoughts on this subject at a Parents’ Program in August 2002. This article is based on notes taken by Gordana Sloss and was originally published in the September 2002 edition of the SOTE Newsletter. (Published on web site: October 2002)