I am almost through the book "Attached" by Amire Levine, on 'advise' from HN last week. It talks about the spectrum "fear/insecure - safe - avoiding" in relationships. It is very systematic in its approach and it opened my eyes to this way of looking. It is about the interactions between people on that spectrum inside a relationship.
I look at my past 2 relationships now quite differently. I am mostly safe attached, and tend a bit to avoiding as well. My first relationship was with a fear/insecure someone, which ended with a lot of drama. My second relationship, I wanted to avoid drama, and ended up with someone who was avoiding. That pushed me more in the direction of fear/insecure, but since I am more on the side of avoiding than fear/insecure, there wasn't enough glue to make it last. Now I am with someone who is mostly safe, but has some fear/insecure tendencies. We do manage quite well I think :)
I tend to look at it like this; people are individual and always unique. When you bring together 2 unique persons, you end up with a unique relationship. But there are still systems that you can discover there.
Agreed - good examples. I've never been into the arts much, but I loved a class I took on Shakespeare once, because I found there was a lot of value in those stories for forming these models of relationships. You could identify similar patterns and identify with certain characters and it was very useful for helping articulate otherwise abstract thoughts and feelings. Not only for communication, but for my own thinking as well.
I look at my past 2 relationships now quite differently. I am mostly safe attached, and tend a bit to avoiding as well. My first relationship was with a fear/insecure someone, which ended with a lot of drama. My second relationship, I wanted to avoid drama, and ended up with someone who was avoiding. That pushed me more in the direction of fear/insecure, but since I am more on the side of avoiding than fear/insecure, there wasn't enough glue to make it last. Now I am with someone who is mostly safe, but has some fear/insecure tendencies. We do manage quite well I think :)
I tend to look at it like this; people are individual and always unique. When you bring together 2 unique persons, you end up with a unique relationship. But there are still systems that you can discover there.