Relationships

The following is from A Conscious Person's Guide to
Relationships by Ken Keyes, Jr. (ISBN 0-915972-00-X),
Chapter 8:

8

Involvement, Yes;
Addiction, No.

To get the most from your relationship, you'll find it helpful
to distinguish between involvement with a person and addiction
to being with the person. Let's define these two kky terms.
Involvement means "l share my life with you." Addiction means "l
create the experience that I am lost without you. I need you to
be happy."

Involvement means spending a lot of time together. Addiction
means creating emotion-backed demands in my head that dictate
what my partner should say and do -- it means "ownership."
Involvement means that I choose to share a large part of my life
with my beloved and build a mutual reality together. Addiction
means that I feel insecure without someone -- l want him or her
to save me. My involvement gives me the opportunity to
experience all of the beautiful, loving things that a
relationship can bring into my life. It also lets us shoulder
together the responsibilities and problems of life and develop a
mutual trust. Addiction opens a can of worms that makes me
tarnish the beauty of my relationship. It makes me impose a lot
of emotion-backed models of how my partner should be for me to
let myself be happy.

Since involvement offers us the deeper enjoyments of a
relationship, and addiction leads to misery in a relationship,
let's look more closely at how involvement and addiction
interact. It's possible to have a relationship in which there
is:
1. Maximum involvement and maximum addiction.
2. Minimum involvement and maximum addiction.
3. Minimum involvement and minimum addiction.
4. Maximum involvement and minimum addiction.

Since these four possibilities create varying degrees of heaven
or hell in a relationship, let's find out how you can set up
your relationship so that it can be as heavenly as possible.
But first, remember that I am talking about your own involvement
and your own addictions. It does not refer to what your partner
says or does. Instead it puts the spotlight on how you are
operating your head. And this is good news. Any approach to
getting the most out of life that depends on manipulating or
changing another person is ultimately doomed to fail. But when
you know how to succeed within yourself, you have all the aces
in your hand. Actually it's only your mental habits that stand
between you and your continuous enjoyment of the melodrama of
your life.

Let's look at setup number one -- maximum involvement with
maximum addiction. In this state you have deeply involved your
life with the life of another person. You are living with your
partner, and are usually with him or her many hours each day.
You are addicted to being with this person. You have
"territorial" feelings toward your beloved; you have many
emotion-backed demands of how this person should act to fit your
models. We often call this situation "romantic love." Once the
romance is killed by addictions, what's left is just "possessive
love."

Romantic or possessive love is unstable and tends to be
emotionally explosive. Frequently heard are such statements as
"lf you really loved me you would . . . ." (fill in your
addictive demand). This romantic-possessive aspect of the
maximum involvement and maximum addiction phase keeps you yo-
yoing up and down. You're very happy when things are fitting
your addictions; you're very unhappy when they aren't. And in
this phase, love is highly conditional. I love you when you
meet my addictive models, and I'm rejecting you when you don't.
Romantic or possessive love can create beautiful feelings at
times. But it is a bumpy road-often with a washout at the end.

Now let's look at what happens when you have minimum involvement
and maximum addiction. This is when the tears get to flow in
your soap opera. It's usually called "broken heart." Minimum
involvement means that you do not spend much time (or any time)
with the other person, but you're still creating the experience
that your happiness depends on being with him or her. Minimum
involvement and maximum addiction sets you up for triggering
disillusionment, cynicism, anger, resentment and the whole
Pandora's box of separating emotions. Although you're not
involved in living together, your mind can still produce an
intense experience of jealousy.

A third type of situation occurs when there is minimum
involvement and minimum addiction. It's often called "good
friends." Since minimum involvement means that you're not
spending much time together, you're not tuning in to the richer
veins of human experience that more involvement offers.
However, you're not creating a lot of stuff either, since your
mind is not playing out heavy addictions about how the
relationship should be. With minimum involvement and minimum
addiction, your relationship is generally a light and pleasant
one.

It's the fourth state that gives you all of the goodies of a
deep relationship and none of the unhappiness. This is
characterized by maximum involvement and minimum addiction. In
this state, you consciously enjoy the relationship and
realistically play the relationship game. By living together
and having the opportunity to more deeply participate in each
other's thoughts and feelings, you have the greatest opportunity
to create all of the beautiful sharings that the relationship
can bring you. And yet by minimizing your addiction, you do not
keep the here-and-now muddied up with emotion-backed demands
that your partner say and do things differently.

In this ideal state, your love is less and less conditional.
You can communicate with your partner and tell him or her what
you prefer in the relationship. But you quickly work on
yourself to handle any addictions you are creating that can chip
away at your feelings of love. You get to cooperate in the
great adventure of life together and to contribute to each
other's well-being. Here's a chart that can be helpful in
sorting out how involvement and addiction interact to determine
the quality and quantity of your relationship.


INVOLVEMENT ADDICTION WHAT'S HAPPENING

Romantic or
Maximum Maximum Possessive Love

Minimum Maximum Broken Heart

Minimum Minimum Friends

All the Goodies
Maximum Minimum No Unhappiness

The importance of working on your addictions is spotlighted by
what I'm going to call the "law" governing relationships: IF YOU
DON'T HANDLE YOUR ADDICTIONS, YOU'LL AUTOMATICALLY DECREASE YOUR
INVOLVEMENT. From this it follows that to maintain a high level
of involvement or to increase your involvement, you must handle
your addictions. Now you've got the key to living "happily ever
after" -- or at least knowing what the problem is!

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