03/06/2026
The Three Relationships in Every One Relationship
The key to an ever-growing and deepening relationship is both people are aware of and understand the principle of the three relationships in every one relationship.
One of the keys to the quality and longevity of any intimate relationship is being able to distinguish between the three relationships in every one relationship. In other words, to understand the interior or invisible infrastructure of the relationship. The three relationships are: the relationship with my Self (‘Me’), the relationship with your Self (‘You') and the relationship between me and you (Us). You must know who’s who and which one’s which all the time.
When both people have this awareness, they will have the ability to take responsibility for preserving the Us space when difficult charged issues and conflicts arise.
The quality of their relationship and depth of their intimacy depend on their ability to identify whose problem is whose and therefore whose to deal with and resolve. Both people must make a conscious and concerted effort to make sure that their individual struggles do not play out, spill over into the Us space.
So, when they identify a problem as a relationship (between me and you) issue, they can resolve it within the space of cocreation, which will ultimately strengthen and deepen their bond. The goal is always to stay mindful, intentional, and aligned in upholding this constitutional schema.
Depth, resilience, and our capacity to navigate charged emotions all depend on distinguishing these three and assigning responsibility accordingly.
During the transitional period between the ending of year 2025 and the beginning of 2026, I wanted to shine a light on how the year went for myself, my wife of 40 years, Taye and how we as life partners faired. I assessed our relationship in terms of how far away or close we are to the optimal energetic balance. Ideally, the energetic pie of our relationship would be divided into virtually three equal parts: Me (33%), You (33%), Us (34%).
What I saw was that my life, health, creativity and overall wellbeing was pretty good (the Me piece)- guesstimating (40%), and Taye’s life, health, creativity and wellbeing (the You or Taye piece) guesstimated the same way (40%).
However, that left our relationship (between Me and You – the Us piece) lagging at about (20%), a far cry from the optimal (33%). While 2025 turned out to be a pretty good year for me and for Taye, it wasn’t a good year for our relationship. We hadn’t grown or deepened our connection, rather, we weren’t deriving the nourishment we had come to expect and rely on and were probably got more disconnected for each other as the year wore on.
Since Taye and I were doing this year end ritual together, we continued that conversation that focused on what we’d like to see for ourselves heading into 2026, i.e. what re-balancing those scales would look like, how are we going to nurture our relationship, deepen our connection and bring that number up to the optimal 33%.
