Teba & Jennifer
Rediscovering Love after Life Falls Apart

The truth was the relationship had fundamentally changed, and though they both felt it, they were scared to face it…scared to face what the change was asking of them.

Teba & Jennifer had been together for years, enjoying a relationship that was solidly rooted in love, authentic connection, and mutual respect. They had their challenges–their ups and downs–but fundamentally their’s was a healthy relationship. They were proud of the strong foundation that they worked hard to build in their early years together, and they shared a sense of confidence that their connection could weather the trials of life. Then came the change.

I have seen this change show up in many forms: a move, a career shift, the illness or death of a parent, infidelity, menopause, a new baby. For Teba & Jennifer, it was the unwelcomed arrival of a chronic disease. The disease disrupted their daily rhythms, their priorities, their resources, and their overall quality of life. The dependable foundation of natural connection & shared ease that they had come to rely on was suddenly ripped away by this unexpected change, leaving them in a confusing and distressing tumble.

Like most people, their initial instinct was to try to hold onto the relationship as they knew it…to recreate familiar conditions through habitual responses. But the fundamental landscape of their life had changed, and so their old maps were now inaccurate and ineffective. Met with failures at their attempts to reestablish harmony and balance, Teba & Jennifer experienced a rising reality of pain, frustration, helplessness, and fear. In their own ways, they both started to harden off, shut down, and disconnect–and even in spite of their long history of love, to blame (typically a ‘relationship-killer’).

When Teba & Jennifer came to our work, one of my first focuses was to guide them into a shared experience of grief: grief for the loss of the relationship they had, and grief for the loss of the future relationship they had imagined and anticipated. I knew that it would only be through a genuine shared experience of softening and opening to the reality of this loss that a new life of love and connection would be possible for them.

Their process of grieving included confusion, anger, rejection, and sadness; it involved some 1-1 work around Teba’s chronic condition and the loss of her wellness & trust in her body. It took time, and persistent dedication. But the process also contained the seeds of authentic availability, fresh intimacy, and shared discovery–the very qualities that nurture healthy relationship in the first place. Though initially scary and acutely uncomfortable, Teba & Jennifer eventually learned to keep their Hearts open in the face of life-shaking transformation. They learned how to lean in to their new reality of living with chronic illness as a way of deepening & strengthening their connection & commitment. And they learned how to allow a radically new possibility of ‘us’ beyond anything they had previously experienced or imagined.

At the end of our work together, Teba & Jennifer told me that–while they would never have asked for it–the illness had turned out to be the catalyst their relationship had secretly needed to produce the intimacy and togetherness they had both longed for but didn’t know how to access.

Love is confrontational. It challenges our secret smallness, our protective self-poverty. Love coaxes us to admit that we are more–much more–than our wounds & coping patterns would have us believe.

What is Love attempting to show you, ask from you, open in you? What growing is Love inviting you to do, as individuals and as a couple?

Choose Love addresses your relationship with loving and being loved, with your ability to become genuinely available, and with your willingness to let your shared experience guide you into the verdant, undiscovered lands of your own Heart.