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MAINTAINING DIALECTICAL TENSIONS

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Yin-Yang

“Build bridges and walls to include as well as exclude”

Dialectic what?

A dialectic tension is the perceived contradiction in personal relationships between two desirable goals or values that appear to be opposing tendencies, desires and needs…but are in fact both desirable to various degrees.  In light of this, dialectic tensions shouldn’t be viewed as ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’ when it comes to maintaining these coupled tensions and their integration within a relationship.  The importance of balancing of emotional values in a relationship is to recognize that these values are always in motion and as importantly, that the seed of the opposing value lies within the first and vise versa.  These tensions have been symbolically recognized for centuries by the ancient symbol of ‘Yin and Yang’; where fluid and dynamic elements circle each other and each carrying an element of the other within them.  The most common tensions found within relationships are questions of;

Companionship vs Independence

These are the push-pull desires of wanting to connect with your partner and wanting to preserve your personal independence, or how dependent the romantic partners are with each other.  The degree of comfort within the relationship is the degree to which both parties understand the boundaries of the other, the emotional and physical space each is either giving or taking and to the degree of happiness to this agreement is.  In most relationships, these boundaries are negotiated reactively rather than actively and are initial points of friction within an emerging relationship.   

Candor vs Privacy

These are the tensions at arise between desiring to engage in self-disclosure, as opposed to maintaining a degree of privacy.  In most relationships this involves to what degree that you share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and past with your partner.  Two central themes that are great sources for tension within a relationship are the degree of self-revelations regarding past relationships and the fears and anxieties currently driving your state of mind being expressed by insecurities, negativity and pessimism.  While revelations in either are fine in moderation, it is when we hit our partners boundaries that we wear out our welcome of candor. 

Predictability vs Novelty

These tensions represent the seeking of behavior patterns between stability and the desire for spontaneity.  Frequently we lapse into a sense security and a behavior routine that is comfortable and easy for us which becomes boring.  The challenge here is to provide the consistency we trust upon, but not so much that it becomes mundane by balancing between the expected and the unexpected.  More critically though, is recognizing a contextual shift with our partners, especially those times in which they are worn, tired and ego-depleted.  It is at these times we are better served by reaching for the familiar and trusted to help in assuaging a sense of exhaustion within our partner’s lives.

Maintenance Strategies

By far the most common strategies for maintaining relational tensions within a stabilized relationship is a selection and emphasis of a dominant poles, such as placing a high value on levels of connection, openness and predictability, followed with a temporary cycling of independence, privacy and novelty.  When incorporated intentionally, the emotional desyncing and resyncing are renown for fostering deep feelings of arousal, attraction and connection within a partner, as witness by the literary work of the world’s various Casanovas’s  and  the center pieces of dime-store romance novels.  This intentional emotional cycling is often considered the bulwark against a woman’s initial hypergamous reflex of feeling ‘unhappy’ within the confines of an all too stable relationship.  Other strategies include segmenting or compartmentalizing access to and from various value elements.  A common example would be having  the ritual of ‘a night out with the boys’.  A particular one to be on the lookout for is reframing, where a partner states that they are ‘just going through a phase’.   This is typical of individuals who do not fully understand the flux of relational tensions coupled with inadequate communication skills and relational trust and respect to investigate these emotional needs appropriately and therefore are unlikely to cope or manage these tensions effectively or appropriately.  The most sinister of these ‘phases’ is an unchecked woman’s hypergamous nature.  A woman ignorant or unwilling to face her terribly destructive nature is not maintaining tensions by harmonically alternating the back and forth between them, but dumping her partner and her children on the teeter-totter of life in the name of naked sexual self-interest.

Turning Points

When there is a shift in value of a given dialectic from one polarized end towards another without an oscillation back, this is known as a turning point.  In early relationships we see this primarily when a dating couple decides to become exclusive and committed to each other.  The dialectic of independence moves and resides more fully with companionship.  Later it may again intensify, when both partners in conjunction decide to advance their relationship civilly and socially in the form of marriage and family development.  The major concern of turning points is not when we emphasize a  pole mutually, but when it is sudden and the sentiment is anything but mutual.  These turning points can be so acute that we change our interpretation of the relationship, what it means to us and what place it has in our lives. Navigating these turning points without astute relational maintenance and management skills and open and honest communication all too frequently turn into open conflicts.  If left unattended to, the conflicts and tensions will not only do irrefutable harm to the relationship, but also to the individual parties, ultimately leading to the relationships destruction.  At this stage relationship repair is needed, not simple maintenance.  If relationship repair and re-negotiation cannot be achieved, then a dissolution of the relationship is in order at that point, before any unnecessary further harm is done.

External Tensions

Interestingly enough the same tensions that exist between two relationship partners also exist between the ‘couple’ and their relationships with their greater social networks, most notably between friends and family members.  While the dialectic tensions between conventionality and uniqueness of a relationship occurs with some couples, more often than not the degree of inclusion and privacy is one that has to be negotiated, or more aptly put, renegotiated.  Where one pair of the partnership had poor or weak personal boundaries with friends and family, those poor boundaries will surely be passed into the new relationship if left unchecked.  In instances such as this, it is far better to identify it and regulate it early before the behavior in question becomes codified and fully established within the relationship (deal with her Mother, before she’s your Mother-in-Law).

MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIP QUALITY

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Relationship Quality

 

 

 

 

 

“Quality is never achieved by dropping standards…”

If you don’t have the ability to interact with, entice and compel your partner to invest herself with your time, presence and service (what you bring to the table), you’re not in the business of maintaining the quality of that relationship. You’re simply running on borrowed time and built up relationship equity to pay the emotional bills, for your relational insolvency (liabilities that exceed your value). Partnerships at their core are about mutual exchange of value to advance individual interest. If we become complacent, negligent, or destructive about maintaining value or care regarding our partners interests, we should take full accountability for the initiation of that relationship’s deterioration. As a strategic matter people should learn to avoid those people who are unwilling or incapable of providing for our needs prior to a relationship and that goes as well for relationship once they are already initiated. If your needs are not being met, seek to resolve those internally, but be prepared to walk away.

Frame control

Frame or the underlying structural support that makes up a physical composition of a subject, in this case a relationship, was negotiated and accepted early, even long prior to any formal commitment or recognition thereof a relationship. In particular, you being a man, having the social expectation to lead, to be its steward and to have it molded by you. When men relinquish control of the relationship frame devastation occurs. Nowhere is this better reflected and recorded than when viewing divorce statistics… over half of all marriages fail, with women doing 70% of the filings, the primary reason for which was ‘a lack of martial satisfaction’… They simply were ‘unhappy’. This begs an important series of questions; if they were unhappy, who’s responsibility were they expecting to fulfill their needs of satisfaction? Obviously their partner, from whom they are divorcing, but what lead to this? While there will be a myriad of individual responses, a disproportionate number of them will center around the man abdicating his masculine role and responsibilities within the relationship. Because of this we should rid ourselves of any preconception that women want, need, care to share or should have control of the relationship frame if we want our relationships and families survive and thrive. Sorry ladies, your actions speak louder than your words…

Attraction isn’t negotiable

Repeated social studies have demonstrated and reaffirmed the common observation of the consistent erotic appeal of male dominance as sexual cues of attraction and desire for women, whether those are the hypergamous triggers of physical being, social behaviors or status display cues of dominance or ‘alpha’ traits. Please keep in mind that these base traits of desire do not diminish over time. In fact they are terribly consistent. At a woman’s base biological need is a desire to be with an unapologetic masculine male- a Man. Social dominance plays such an important role in feminine attraction that manipulating this single variable socially has repeatedly shown and proven dramatic improvements in a man’s sexual market value- the degree to which he is sexually valued by women. This social dominance begins and ends with a man’s perceived self-worth and is nowhere more clearly reflected in action than by his command of the word ‘No!’. A man of worth has standards and his behaviors and actions reflect those, especially in the face of perceived opposition. It is human nature to value that which is earned, which makes giving women a pass, is a sure way to sell yourself short and display low value. Beyond that it is bad practice as it is a form of rewarding bad behavior, and that which we subsidize we get more of, much to many a men’s ultimate regret.

Branding

It’s the job of the seller to sell the value of a product or service by making a connection with their customer base and extolling the virtues of it… This is called branding. In many ways it’s simply identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors and then hammering those in a visible way. One of the things that attracts people to a certain brand is the power of presence they project known as the halo-effect, which is identified by the strength of the initial idealization, as the greater the initial idealization the greater the reports of satisfaction over the following year. This held true for products, services and amazingly enough relationships too! Another way of looking at this is that people we interact with tell themselves a story of who they perceive us to be. We feed that story by making a series of statements by our presence, actions and words that tell people who we are and what they can expect from us. These studies in short tell us that it is far better to be the Lone Ranger, than it is to be the actor who portrays him. Your story needs to be robust enough to attract their attention and keep it. You need to be prepared to live that story out loud (by actions, as it build credibility), because soft-spoken stories rarely give rise to rapt audiences.

Meeting their emotional needs

The leading indicator for relationship quality is best measured by the degree of relational satisfaction- the degree to which our needs, desires and appetite are being fulfilled within the relationship. When we meet our partner’s needs, it creates the greatest degree of happiness, acceptance and validation in turn, which is emotionally transferred into the context of what we describe as love. Unfortunately not all needs are created equally, nor equally valued by each individual, which make it particularly important to respond to our partner’s needs if we want satisfaction to remain high. Your job is to find out what those are, to what degree are they valued and how to best meet or achieve those. Affection and intimacy are two critical emotional needs that are often seen as the cement of a relationship. With it we’re bonded to each other, without it we are totally alienated by its absence. This is where the value of rituals comes into play. By having consciously established patterns of behaviors focused on intimacy and affection helps safeguards the relationship because they are simply lost in hard times when we need them the most.

Positivity as an essential

One of the most important characteristics of relationship satisfaction is the ability of couples to accentuate the positive in life more than those that choose to revel in the negatives of life. While shit happens to everyone, we command the choice to be miserable or not. It should come as no surprise then that miserable people have miserable relationships…which usually end miserably. The point here is that it pays handsome dividends to have a healthy masculine male leadership who is able to sort out emotional trivialities, to define interpret what is important, by taking issues into perspective, accepting accountability for one’s emotional state and being emotionally secure in the face of adversity (especially her disapproval) to cease negativity where it serves no positive function within the relationship (all these are renown masculine traits not feminine). Simply put that may mean calling your partner out on her negativity and setting the relationship cultural tone for promoting positivity over adversity. Please bear in mind the law of emotional contagion (the unconscious tendency to mimic the emotions of others) that the strongest frame will win out.

Nature of commitment

An inherent feature to relationship satisfaction is powerfully linked to the qualitative nature of commitment. The degree to which our partners identify with and actively reduce our cautionary reactions to fears and insecurity regarding our vulnerabilities of relationship future projection, actively mitigates the degree of distrust we feel based on those natural occurring anxieties. Until we can alleviate our partner’s predominant concerns for self-protection, emotional safety and security they will be reluctant to develop a deep and abiding faith in us or our relationship with them. We need to recognize the importance of promoting trust by clarifying our intentions, validating our partners and highlighting the value we hold of our relationship, through regular assurances which are reinforced by gestures and behavior as demonstrations of commitment and loyalty.

Engaging Social Networks

As social creatures we have a deep need for social approval and acceptance. It is not surprising then to know that studies on depression have routinely placed positive social events on par with the effects gained through medication to remediate the state of low personal mood associated with sadness, emptiness, worthlessness and hurt. In fact, many doctors will actually prescribe social events with friends, family and loved-ones as a course of action to take to limit or reduce the effects of depression. As such social events make incredible tools for improving the quality of relationships. Integrating our relationship within greater social circles has the effect of expanding the degree of affirmation, validation and support we receive, which greatly offsets life’s challenges. Care must be taken though, when our social circles come into conflict with our relationships, because they can be as detrimental as positive. Boundaries in these cases need to be clearly articulated socially, if not physically, depending upon the nature and intensity of the conflicts, as history and literature are replete with examples where relationships are made or broken by the acceptance of a given pair in a social construct.