Read the full blog here Wise Mind, Wise Life: Love in the Intervals

Turning Toward and Togetherness

Thanks to the work of Doctors John and Julie Gottman, we have decades of consistent evidence that shows togetherness and turning toward patterns are key to mutual appreciation, love, and respect. And even where there are patterns of conflict and turning away, couples can learn to do otherwise by learning skills for making effective emotional bids as well as skills in reciprocating emotional bids, with turning toward behaviors. With mindfulness training, couples can further cultivate shared relationship awareness and intentionally cultivate relationship awareness. Relationship mindfulness can help us to increase the frequency of our intentional turning toward our partners to better make and reciprocate emotional bids. And these daily little habits, seemingly so mundane that some of us risk seeing them as irrelevant, are what actually build lasting intimacy.

These practices in turning toward and making/reciprocating emotional bids help to prevent marital drift into parallel lives or mend ruptures in our together-ness, our proximity, to continue to share inexperienced emotional nurture that can only occur in proximity to one another. Proximity and togetherness open our shared presence to one another so that we continue to learn and know, together, our internal worlds, our shifting dreams, desires, and experiences.

Proximity and Intervals
And yet, there is a kind of togetherness that is stifling, smothering, which levels us down into indistinct sameness. Such togetherness, called enmeshment by some, impedes fresh and novel experiences for each person, with each becoming a copy of the other, and both become essentially crippled by such sameness, unable to be spontaneous and vivacious. On a larger scale, such toxic togetherness misses authentic common life, even levels a community down to a crowd. As Thomas Merton wrote about community: “The common life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending on whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd.” And he goes on to distinguish the crowd as togetherness that shares only common distractions and noise, which ultimately separates us from reality.

On the other hand, Merton, as might Dan Siegel, might say that community provides a togetherness that honors our distinctiveness that makes real relationships with others possible, and where our distinctiveness is honored, and where we can find our truest humanity, over the course of our lives. If marriage is anything, it is a community of two or more if we live with extended family and children. We have a common life with our spouses.