At the beginning of a relationship, when you don’t really know each other, it’s easy to project your dream man-woman qualities onto your partner. But honeymoons inevitably come to an end. If the goal is to create something deep and lasting, the beginning of a relationship is the best time to start moving towards a conscious relationship.
The starting point is to map out your values – what are the important reference points and principles for both of you? Knowing your core values is an essential step in getting to know your partner.
Each of you should start by looking honestly inside yourself, and then write down on paper the 5-7 core values that you have lived by and want to continue to live by.
It’s important to really take time for this – you can both spend a week living your daily lives and observing yourselves, your thinking and acting patterns. When you get hurt or mad at someone or something – what is the underlying value issue here? When you are missing something or dreaming of something to happen – what is the value underneath that you are craving to meet? What are the everyday living principles that you hold dear and what values do they represent? During this time it might be tempting to share your thoughts and insights, but I would encourage you to really keep them to yourself and surrender to your personal process. That helps to ensure that the result of this work is truly authentic and not influenced by one another.
Do you have trouble defining your important values?
One way is to come up and look at the seemingly opposing pairs of values (for example: freedom and security, spontaneity and responsibility, dignity and playfulness, family and self-fulfilment) and think about what they mean to you in your daily life and more generally. How do you relate to them? What would be the most important ones that you need to have present in your life to be fulfilled and happy? What are the values that feel important but that you could let slide from time to time.
When both of you feel clear about your own values, it’s time to share and listen to each other. Give as many examples as you can, so that your partner can really get the idea of what you mean by each value and how it can be represented in your everyday life. Also, be sure to listen, judgment-free. This is not the time to take things personally – your partner is sharing about themselves and it has nothing to do with you. Being honest about your needs in this way with your partner is a vulnerable act and requires a great deal of respect and gentleness from the other. Be sure to give this grace to each other.
Values don’t have equal significance – we have a few that are crucially important and then some that are important but which can be compromised to an extent or sometimes. When putting both of your value lists side by side, you can immediately see what values are in sync, values that are common or very similar. Also, you can clearly see values that are important to one partner but not important to another. And then the third and more tricky ground is the part where the values contradict each other – this is the area for potential conflict, where you need to reach some kind of compromise or agreement so that you both can respect and give space to each other.
Knowing and respecting the core values of both ourselves and our partner will help us to navigate life’s bigger and smaller choices much better, and to consciously build a way of life that works for both of us. This means providing both ourselves and our partner with what we need to thrive, and understanding why our partner sometimes chooses differently from us.
For a happy relationship, therefore, partners do not need to be twins, but they do need to know what is most important to each other in life and try to live by that. Every day.
