Nurturing Your Relationship
by Michelle Cantrell, LPCC
My husband and I recently marked 31 years since our first date. Thirty one years that have included for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, and through sickness and in health. I was lucky enough to marry my best friend, a great co-parent, and someone with whom I’m highly compatible day to day. But I’ve learned in 31 years of being in a long-term relationship, as well as in my work as a couple therapist, that these things are not enough to sustain a healthy marriage or committed partnership. And although I’m a hopeless romantic at heart, I believe that even love itself is not enough to sustain a relationship — not when love can get buried under hurt and pain.
As I watch my husband tend to his beloved orchids, I’m struck by how long-term relationships are much like those beautiful, mesmerizing plants that are amazingly resilient but simultaneously fragile in the face of changes in the environment. When you buy an orchid from the grocery store, where most orchids seem to come from these days, the care instructions usually say “just add an ice cube to the pot once a week”. Sounds simple enough! And if you do that, you will get the illusion that you are actually taking good care of your orchid for a few months while the energy already stored in the leaves will continue to yield blooms on your beautiful plant. But eventually this superficial care tactic will fall short of what the orchid actually needs, and it will start to die. In the absence of the right information, the plant owner will just assume either the plant was not intended to live very long in the first place and/or they just have a “brown thumb”. Either way, the plant ends up in the trash when really, all along, it just needed more care.
When my husband first got his orchids, he followed the instructions and added one ice cube weekly to his plants’ pots. But over time, he realized they weren’t thriving. Eventually, he recognized that the orchids need tending to every day — some days requiring more care, and other days requiring less. Their needs change from time to time, and because my husband is attuned to both the big and the small changes, he adapts to their needs when necessary. Sometimes circumstances require him to set aside their needs (like when we go on vacation), and during those times, they suffer. But when we return, he gives them extra attention to set things right again. Yes, they are a lot of work, but when taken care of, they thrive and reveal so much beauty.
We as a society are given the equivalent of the “just add ice” instructions for our love relationships. Very few of us enter into long-term partnerships having any idea of how to tend to this beautiful thing called love that two people have between them. Some of us are lucky enough to eventually find better care instructions while others are left feeling helpless, wondering if they’ll ever be any good at it.
Long-term relationships are a lot of work. Sure, for a time, you may be able to subsist on the stored energy developed from the intensity that often fuels a relationship in its early stages. But for a relationship to survive for the long haul, it takes time and tending to every day. Some days, a relationship needs more attention, while other days, the needs are less. But the need to be tended to never goes away. In most long-term partnerships, there are times when other priorities get in the way, and the blooms of even an otherwise healthy relationship can start to wither. Like a $20 orchid bought in the grocery store, one or both partners can choose to see the decline as a sign that a relationship is dying and should be tossed away — that the best part is over and can never be brought back. Or they can see the signs as an opportunity to take actions to revive it. Of course, it’s not a given that even with some effort a wilting relationship will survive. If it’s been starved long enough, it can be hard to bring love back alive. But when when two people decide to recommit and give their love the tending to that it deserves, the blooms it yields can be more incredible than ever before.
Michelle Cantrell, LPCC is the Founder and Clinical Director for the Center for Growth and Connection where we specialize in helping clients develop healthier, more satisfying relationships with others and with themselves. We offer telehealth and in-person appointments in Pasadena, CA.