How to Make a Relationship a Priority While Maintaining Autonomy

Any healthy relationship balances itself around three basic needs: Autonomy, Security, & Intimacy. When a relationship focuses on one of these and neglects the others, conflict arises.

It is easy to get caught in the idea that making your relationship a priority means abandoning your autonomy. This usually isn't a conscious view, but rather a vague sense of having to sacrifice for the sake of the relationship. Thinking this, you will also have an impulse to protect yourself from being lost in the intensity of intimacy or the perceived bonds of security.

When you have a tenuous sense of being loyal to your own needs and choosing what is authentic for you, it's a scary thing to consider someone else as you make decisions. You fear you might get sidetracked by ideas of what you should or shouldn't do to "make" the other person happy. To avoid getting lost here, you might also swing to the other pole and make decisions on your own without considering the impact on your relationship.

Part of making your relationship a priority while maintaining your autonomy means you are willing to consider the impact your actions may have on your relationship and enter into a dialogue and negotiate ways in which all needs can be honored.

The challenging part here is that negotiation all too often moves into familiar strategies and compromise before you really connect to needs. You find yourself stuck in conflict about the way you think it should be and the way the other person thinks it should be.

It requires emotional security and confidence in your own resilience to let go of habits and preferences and try something new. As you learn to hold your preferences lightly and give more attention to the present moment needs, creativity flows. With creativity you can find new ways to honor needs while supporting individual autonomy and authenticity as well as intimacy and security in the relationship.

To begin to make your relationship a priority while not losing yourself, create the practice of writing down the needs alive for you (using the needs list) before every major dialogue. Look through the needs list and circle the needs you guess might be up for the other person in a given dialogue. Make a request at the beginning of the dialogue to first create a shared understanding about what’s most important, before discussing strategies or decisions. Affirm that you would like to come with ways in which both of you could get your needs met.  

When you are ready to begin negotiation of strategies and decisions, it’s easy to slip into tried and true strategies to meet needs and get tense around them. This is the moment where either of you could be tempted to engage in old patterns of demanding, convincing, going along with, giving up, or shutting down. Let yourself be a beginner. Ask for more time, an hour, a day, whatever it takes for creativity to arise in response to connection with both your needs. Bring more curiosity about your own desires and those of your partner. Examine whether or not you have attached a need to a particular time, place, or other strategy. Loosen these fixed views.

In asking yourself to engage this process, you are learning to trust a new way of taking care of yourself and your relationships. It's okay for it to feel scary, awkward, formulaic, or "not normal."  When something “feels normal" it often means you are functioning within a set of habits of thinking, believing, and behaving. While "normal" may be in your comfort zone, it isn’t necessarily what’s most authentic.

Your needs and deepest values are a gift to your relationships. When you are firmly grounded there, you will experience a sense of creative spaciousness in which caring for your relationships is a joyful adventure.

Practice

Take a moment now to revisit a collaborative dialogue with another in which you fully maintained a sense of autonomy while caring for the relationship. What were the key supports that allowed you to do this?