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Most of us in relationships play all sorts of mind games. No matter how great the beginnings of the relationship might be, most of us end up in a power struggle with the one we claim to love.

Many of us fall into this trap - and events in the past couple of weeks has led me to believe that I have too.

But unlike most modern (’cool’) metropolitan types, I did not choose the path to exit the relationship gracefully.

It is apparent to me that something critical is missing from the relationship. And today, I happen to chance on Tom Kenyon’s article “Alchemy of Relationships” that has provided me a hint to the missing puzzle piece.

Before I get into the answer, let’s talk about how we forge our individual personalities.

Your Hardened Personalities

If you think about everything new that you do - say a new roller-coaster ride or the first time you visit Tokyo - the entire experience seem to be covered in a new light. Your senses are heightened and we become ultra receptive to the new environment.

This then forms the basis of our experience. Thereafter, the same encounter will simply add slight modifications to the original. That’s why people stress on the importance of ‘first impressions’.

Now, imagine your childhood - where most encounters are the first. How did we learn how to react to all kinds of situations? Remember the first time you got back a test paper and you didn’t like the score? The first time someone challenge you to a basketball game? The first time an older boy bullied you?

Tom Kenyon used the analogy of the heat and pressure of a furnace used to forge steel to describe the same intensity of our childhood experiences that forged our personalities.

The other interesting quality of steel is its tendency to retain its form, unless you subject it to another furnace.

Back to the relationships

While most or all relationships start out with a bang, the months and years that follow on will push us against our hardened personalities.

I’m a neat freak and my partner the opposite - I’ve observed the over the years, the mean time before my going crazy with messiness starts to get shorter and shorter.

And if you’ve been in a relationship long enough, I bet you can easily come up with 10 things where both of you exist on different ends of the stick.

Numbing Yourself Doesn’t Work

I’ve often heard this phrase “you take the entire package” from well-meaning friends who advises me I should accept my partner for the entirety of who she is.

Buried in this message is “why don’t you just ignore everything that you don’t want.” I think to achieve this, I will have to numb my perception to these things.

The problem with numbing is that you cannot compartmentalize it - other ‘good’ things will have to go.

Take the above example of a messy apartment, while I can train myself to ignore the eyesore, I can never hope to meditate properly in the room again.

Reforge Your Relationship

This is why you want to reforge a relationship - a red-hot binding experience to reset your stubborn selves to better complement each other.

That’s it - partners should grow to complement each other, not cringe to each other’s idiosyncrasies.

Tom frames this as an alchemical process:

1. Knowing that the form in the relationship that needs to be changed is the form of habitual interactions between two partners;
2. Provide a container of absolute safety, honesty and appreciation for the transformation;
3. Energy to drive the change.

I believe I am only scratching the surface of Tom Kenyon’s wisdom here. Paulo Coelho mentioned that Wisdom = Knowledge + Transformation. The obvious next steps for me is to take action and change. Only then, I guess, will I be able to share this better with you.