Relationships
Life is relationships. Principles for all relationships, and then the deeper territory of romantic ones.
Life is relationships. When people are leaving this world, this is what most end up reflecting on, not accomplishments, not possessions, but whether they made the most of the people in their lives. Your relationships will be your greatest source of joy or your deepest source of pain. There is nothing more fundamental.
The Nature of Relationships
Due to our mortal nature, all relationships are impermanent. Even if you believe, as I do, that we are rooted in something deeper before and after this life, the human experience is one of change. People enter your life and leave it. This impermanence is what makes relationships so profound, they are happening now, and you don’t get the time back.
Through relationships we experience what I believe are God’s greatest gifts, love, joy, beauty, understanding, growth, connection, purpose, grace, creation (and more). Could you experience some of these alone, as a monk on a mountain in deep spiritual practice? Sure. But we were born because of a relationship, and relationships are just as powerful a vehicle for experiencing these things as any solitary discipline. A conversation, a shared silence, a conflict that leads to deeper understanding, raising a child, building something together, the richest parts of life happen between people.
If you take the view, as I do, that Earth is a kind of school, a place where consciousness learns through constraint and challenge, then relationships are the primary curriculum. They are where the real lessons land. You can read about patience, but it’s the difficult person in your life who actually teaches it to you. You can understand forgiveness intellectually, but it means nothing until someone you trusted betrays you and you have to decide what to do with that. Relationships are embodied knowledge. They force you out of theory and into practice.
These Principles Are Not Popular
To many, this kind of conversation becomes taboo, especially around romantic relationships. It’s a sensitive topic because of the dramatic social changes that have happened in the past hundred years, and because relationship views get tangled with political worldviews and the prevailing social order.
How you approach relationships is central to human behavior. It cuts right to the heart of your worldview. Someone who believes in God, or in a greater purpose for our lives, is likely to approach relationships differently than a strict materialist or atheist. A materialist view tends toward transactional thinking, what am I getting from this? A spiritual view asks a different question, what is this relationship teaching me, and who am I becoming through it?
My approach is grounded in a belief in God and a spiritual outlook on life. This is simply how I see relationships, and it reflects the kind of relationships I want to have and build.
The Mirror
Relationships are a mirror. You can go as deep with this concept as you want, but in practical terms: the people around you are a reflection of your world. There’s a common idea now that you are the synthesis of the five people you spend the most time with. Like is attracted to like. Being honest with yourself about where you are allows you to see this clearly.
The result of looking in that mirror is self-knowledge. When you pay attention to who you attract, who you repel, what patterns repeat, you learn about yourself. Not the version of yourself you’d like to project, but the version that actually shows up. If you keep ending up in the same kinds of conflicts, with the same kinds of people, that’s not bad luck. That’s data. The common denominator in all of your relationships is you.
This is where the Hawkins Map of Consciousness becomes useful. If you’re operating primarily from fear, anger, or desire, you’ll attract and be attracted to people who resonate at those frequencies. If you’re operating from courage, acceptance, or love, the landscape changes entirely. The mirror reflects your level of consciousness back at you. Growth means looking at that reflection honestly and doing the work to rise, not just hoping for better people to show up.
Not everyone is interested in this kind of growth. There are people whose core character is immature, selfish, materialistic, narcissistic, hostile, and they aren’t working on it. We all have flaws, the difference is whether you’re actively working on them or not. For these people, it’s not a phase they’re growing through. It’s where they live. Their relationships reflect that, and they’re fine with it. You have to be honest about that reality, because pretending otherwise will cost you. Not every person in your life is on a growth trajectory, and it’s not your job to drag anyone along who doesn’t want to move.
See People As They Are
Try your best to see other people and circumstances as they are, not any better, not any worse. We tend to project our own feelings and attitudes onto others. If you’re an honest person, you likely give people trust by default until they give you a reason not to. If you’re a dishonest person, you probably assume everyone else is untrustworthy too. Whatever is inside you colors the lens through which you see everyone else.
Strong attachments distort perception because of the powerful emotions they produce. This is where people get into trouble, they fall in love with a projection, a potential, an idea of someone, rather than seeing who is actually standing in front of them.
There’s a concept in Jungian psychology, the shadow, that matters enormously here. The shadow is everything about yourself that you’ve repressed, denied, or refused to look at. The problem is that whatever you refuse to see in yourself, you’ll either project onto others or be blind to in others. A man who refuses to acknowledge his own anger will either see anger everywhere he looks or be completely blindsided by it in people close to him. Honest self-knowledge, shadow work, is not just a personal development exercise. It directly determines the quality of every relationship you have, because you cannot see others clearly until you’ve been honest about yourself.
Bottom line: when you have to choose between judging someone by their words or their behavior, choose their behavior. Words are easy. Behavior is where the truth lives. How someone chooses to act in the world is the most powerful indicator of who they actually are. It’s where rubber meets the road. People will tell you who they are, but they’ll show you even more clearly. Watch what someone does when they’re stressed, when they don’t get what they want, when they think no one is watching. That’s the real person. Everything else is presentation.
Levels of Relationship
Not all relationships are meant to be the same depth. One of the most important skills in life is learning to calibrate, to understand what level of investment a relationship warrants and not to force it deeper or shallower than it naturally is.
Some people are in your life for a season. Some are there for a reason, a lesson, a project, a specific phase of growth. A very few are there for a lifetime. Trying to make every relationship into a lifelong bond is exhausting and often dishonest. Letting people come and go with grace, appreciating what a relationship was rather than mourning what it wasn’t, is its own form of maturity.
The Stoics understood this. Marcus Aurelius wrote about accepting the transience of things, not with coldness, but with the understanding that nothing external is fully in your control. What is in your control is how you show up, how you treat people, and how you respond when relationships change. That’s where your character lives.
From Principles to Practice
Everything above, impermanence, the mirror, seeing clearly, behavior over words, levels of depth, applies to every relationship you’ll ever have. Friends, family, colleagues, strangers. Your relationships exist in concentric circles: family at the center (the people who shaped you before you had a say), then friends (the people you choose), then the broader world. Each circle has its own dynamics, but the principles don’t change.
Where it gets interesting, and where most people struggle the most, is romantic relationships. All of those universal principles still apply, but romance adds layers that nothing else does: polarity, attraction, sexuality, the merging of two lives, the weight of choosing one person above all others. It amplifies everything, the stakes, the emotions, the potential for self-deception.
So that’s where I want to spend the rest of this reflection. Not because friendships and family don’t matter, they absolutely do, but because romance is where most people are the most confused, the most hurt, and the least equipped.
Romantic Relationships
It’s interesting to notice how much the word romantic actually carries. We use it to describe relationships involving love and sex. And we use it as a synonym for idealized, a romantic vision, a romantic notion, something elevated beyond the ordinary. Both definitions live in the same word, and that’s not an accident. The romantic relationship is where love, sexuality, and our highest ideals converge, or at least where we hope they will. That convergence is what makes this territory so charged, and why getting it wrong hurts so much.
I’m writing this from a man’s perspective. I’ve tried to understand the feminine experience, and I’ve certainly studied it, but every honest man knows that women remain the greatest of all mysteries.
The Crisis of Modern Men
A lot of men seem utterly lost, both in their own identity and in how to relate to women. This isn’t entirely their fault. The confusion comes from cultural conditioning, fictional relationships in movies and TV, social institutions that no longer prepare men for reality, and a fundamental shift in the social order.
Masculine and feminine polarity used to be more clearly woven into social norms. Whatever you think about the old arrangements, they at least provided a structure that people could orient around. In modern society, much of that structure has been removed without being replaced by anything coherent. The result is that many men have no clear model for what mature masculinity looks like in relationships. They oscillate between extremes, either overly passive and agreeable (hoping that’s what women want) or overcompensating with dominance and a shallow machismo (confusing force with strength). Neither works. Neither is attractive. Neither is true.
Despite our “romantic” ideals, we’ve ended up with high divorce rates, hookup culture, strange levels of sexualization in media alongside increasing sexlessness for many people. Something isn’t working.
Regardless of your opinion on the pros and cons of today’s social order, the main point is this: we need to be more conscious of what relationship dynamics actually are and how they work. Unconsciousness is not a defense. “Nobody taught me” is an explanation, not an excuse. If you’re an adult, the responsibility to understand these dynamics is yours.
There’s also a dimension to this that many men never confront: your relationship with your father, or the absence of one, shapes your romantic patterns more than almost anything else. A man who grew up without a strong masculine example will often struggle to embody one. He may unconsciously repeat his father’s failures or overcorrect in the opposite direction, becoming rigidly controlling because his father was absent, or becoming passive because his father was domineering. Either way, the pattern runs until you make it conscious. Reckoning honestly with how your father shaped you, what he gave you, what he didn’t, where his shadows became yours, is some of the most important work a man can do. It’s not about blame. It’s about awareness, so you can choose who you want to be rather than blindly repeating what was modeled for you.
And here’s the deeper issue: most women want a man who can lead. That means they don’t want to have to tell you how to show up and be that man, and in many senses, they couldn’t even if they wanted to. A woman can tell you what she needs in a given moment, but she cannot hand you a blueprint for masculine leadership. That’s not her job, and frankly it’s not something the feminine can teach the masculine. It has to come from within, from other men, from mentors, from the hard process of figuring it out yourself. A man who waits for a woman to tell him how to be a man has already disqualified himself in her eyes. She wants someone who has already done that work, or is clearly, visibly in the process of doing it.
If you’re going to get advice about women from women, it’s going to come from the women who aren’t your dating prospects, your mother, your sister, your close female friends. The cute girl you want to ask out at a bar or a yoga class isn’t going to sit you down and coach you on how to win her over. That’s not how it works. And even then, be discerning. Generally speaking, you should follow relationship advice from people who actually have the kinds of relationships you want to emulate. Someone with a string of failed relationships giving you dating advice is like getting financial advice from someone who’s broke, their confidence doesn’t make up for their track record.
Beyond that, what people describe as what they want often doesn’t match how they actually behave and what they respond to. A lot of people don’t have the full self-awareness to articulate the real dynamics at play. A woman might genuinely believe she wants a “nice, sensitive guy” and then consistently be drawn to men with edge, confidence, and direction. That’s not dishonesty, it’s the gap between conscious preference and deeper wiring. Again, how people behave is far more telling than what they say. Watch the pattern, not the narration.
Masculine and Feminine Polarity
There is a polarity between masculine and feminine energy, a set of complementary qualities that, when they meet, create something greater than either alone.
The masculine, at its best, provides structure, direction, protection, and purpose. The feminine, at its best, provides openness, flow, nurturing, and life. Every person carries both energies, but in men the masculine is the core essence, and in women the feminine is the core essence. Whatever the exact makeup of your essence is, you can resist it or you can lean into it and develop it. The people who lean in tend to be the most alive, the most attractive, and the most at peace with themselves. In romantic relationships, polarity creates attraction. The tension between these complementary forces is what generates the spark. Reduce the polarity and you reduce the charge.
In a spiritual sense, this is as sacred as it gets. The coming together of masculine and feminine is the source of life itself. It is absolutely fundamental to existence, and it deserves to be treated that way. Every major spiritual tradition recognizes this, the yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, the Hermetic principle of gender. It’s not a social construct. It’s built into the architecture of reality.
This maps directly onto the archetype framework I’ve written about elsewhere. The mature masculine, the integrated King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, is naturally attractive because it embodies what polarity asks of men: ordered strength (King), purposeful action (Warrior), deep understanding (Magician), and genuine presence and passion (Lover). A man who has done this integration work doesn’t have to perform his masculinity. It’s who he is.
Attraction Is Not a Choice
Attraction operates at a level deeper than conscious decision-making. You don’t decide to be attracted to someone, it happens to you. It’s biological, psychological, and in many ways spiritual. It lives in the nervous system, in body language, in energy, in something that registers before words have a chance to intervene. You can feel it in seconds, sometimes before a single word is spoken. This is why you can meet someone who checks every box on paper and feel nothing, or meet someone who makes no logical sense and feel everything. Attraction doesn’t care about your checklist.
This matters because it means attraction can’t be faked, and it can’t be negotiated. You can’t convince someone to be attracted to you. You can’t argue your way into it, nice your way into it, or buy your way into it. You either generate it or you don’t, and it’s largely a function of who you actually are, not who you’re trying to appear to be. Attraction reads authenticity at a level below language.
That said, attraction is not random. There are things that are universally attractive, and understanding them is important:
- Physical health and fitness, a body that’s taken care of signals discipline, vitality, and self-respect
- Looks and grooming, presenting yourself well, whatever you’re working with
- Confidence, not arrogance, but genuine comfort in your own skin
- Status and competence, being good at something, having a place in the world
- Resources and ambition, the ability to provide and the drive to build
- Humor and wit, intelligence expressed through play
- Presence and emotional depth, actually being there, not checked out or performing
- Direction and purpose, knowing where you’re going and moving toward it
- Character and integrity, doing the right thing even when it costs you
Some people look at a list like this and get cynical, “so women just want a tall guy with money and abs.” That’s a shallow reading that conveniently becomes an excuse to not work on yourself. Yes, genetics play a role, and no, you can’t control your height. But you can control almost everything else on that list. You can get in shape. You can develop competence. You can build resources. You can cultivate depth, humor, presence, and integrity. These things are attractive because they are rooted in real value, they signal a person who takes life seriously and has something to offer. There’s nothing shallow about recognizing that.
The shallow move is using the things you can’t control as a reason to ignore the things you can. A mature person understands that these markers of attractiveness aren’t arbitrary, they reflect health, capability, character, and investment in life. Working on them isn’t performative. It’s what a serious person does.
Attraction is also deeply tied to respect, and respect starts with self-respect. Before anyone else can respect you, you have to respect yourself. In principle, self-respect is about honor and dignity, carrying yourself in a way that reflects who you actually want to be. It means having standards for how you live, how you treat people, and how you allow yourself to be treated. People will treat you how you allow them to treat you. If you accept disrespect, you’ll get more of it. If you carry yourself with dignity and make it clear, through your actions, not your words, that certain behavior is unacceptable, people calibrate accordingly.
In practice, self-respect looks like taking care of your body, keeping your word, following through on what you say you’ll do, walking away from situations that degrade you, and refusing to tolerate behavior from others that you wouldn’t tolerate from yourself. It’s the discipline of living in alignment with your own values even when no one is watching. A man without self-respect will bend himself into whatever shape he thinks someone else wants, and that lack of spine is visible from a mile away. It repels the people worth having and attracts the ones who are looking for someone they can control.
A woman’s attraction to a man is deeply tied to her respect for him. Considering polarity, a woman wants someone she can look up to. This isn’t about domination or superiority. It’s about a man who has done the work to become someone worthy of admiration, someone with integrity, direction, capability, and depth. And that admiration is only possible when it’s built on a foundation of genuine self-respect. You can’t fake it. Either you hold yourself to a standard, or you don’t. She’ll know the difference.
Be with someone who really wants to be with you. There is no replacement for real, genuine attraction. Be especially careful about this as you accumulate more resources. Money and status can simulate attraction, but they don’t create it. A woman who is with you for your resources is not with you. She’s with what you provide. The moment those resources disappear, or someone with more of them appears, the foundation collapses, because there never was one.
And here, more than anywhere, watch what people do, not what they say. Romantic feelings make us especially vulnerable to hearing what we want to hear. Someone can say they love you, say they’re committed, say you’re the one, but their actions tell the real story. Do they show up? Do they choose you when it’s inconvenient? Do they act with integrity when no one is watching? In romance, the gap between words and behavior is where most of the heartbreak lives. A person who truly wants to be with you will make it unmistakable through their actions. If you have to constantly wonder, you already have your answer.
The Modern Dating Marketplace
The reality is that men and women have asymmetrical options in the dating market. Studies have shown that men tend to rate the majority of women as attractive, whereas women collectively find a much smaller percentage of men attractive. The result is straightforward: the average woman has more romantic options than the average man. The concept of hypergamy, the tendency for women to seek partners of equal or higher status, is not new, but the digital world has amplified the asymmetry dramatically.
This dynamic is only intensified by our connected world. You’re no longer limited to the people in your small town. A woman in any mid-sized city has access, through dating apps alone, to thousands of potential partners. This creates an illusion of infinite choice, which paradoxically makes it harder for anyone to choose.
This is simply the landscape. Understanding it clearly is better than pretending it doesn’t exist. And the practical implication for men is clear: complaining about the dynamics is useless. The only productive response is to become genuinely excellent, not as a performance for women, but because it’s what a man should do anyway. Build your body, your mind, your character, your skills, your purpose. Do it for yourself. The right people will notice.
What a Man Owes Himself First
Before you can be good for someone else, you have to be good on your own. This is not selfish, it’s prerequisite. A man without purpose, without discipline, without a relationship to something higher than his own comfort, will bring that emptiness into every relationship he enters. He’ll look to a woman to fill it, and that never works. It creates dependency, not partnership. It creates pressure, not attraction.
The archetype framework is useful here. The King energy asks: do you have order in your own life? Do you have standards? Are you building something worth building? The Warrior asks: do you have discipline? Can you endure discomfort? Do you protect what matters? The Magician asks: do you understand yourself? Have you done the inner work? Can you see clearly? The Lover asks: are you alive? Are you present? Can you actually feel, and can you be moved by beauty and connection?
A man who hasn’t developed these capacities will struggle in relationship regardless of who he’s with. And a man who has developed them will find that the quality of his relationships transforms, not because he found the right person, but because he became the right person.
The Profound Nature of Choice
Romantic relationships teach us very deep lessons about choices. Most people want monogamous, stable relationships. It’s the obvious pattern that works, creates sustainable families, and gives the relationship a stable container for growth.
In terms of the romantic ideal, you can have many friends, but there can only be one true lover, at least at a time. Being with someone, or choosing not to be, is a direct physical manifestation of your choices. By its nature, each path precludes the other. You can’t be in two places, with two different lovers, at once.
And these choices don’t just affect you. Every choice in a relationship has consequences that ripple outward, not just for you, but for the other person, for potential children, for families, for communities. The decision to commit, to leave, to cheat, to forgive, to have children, to stay patient, these are not private decisions with private consequences. They shape the world around you in ways you may not see for years.
This concept, that romance teaches us about the nature of choices, is represented in the Lovers card in the tarot. The card is not primarily about romance. It’s about the moment of choosing, and the understanding that every meaningful choice means letting go of the alternative. Love asks you to choose, fully, knowing what you’re giving up. That is what makes it real. Keeping your options open indefinitely, refusing to choose, is itself a choice, and usually a destructive one. It signals to the other person that they aren’t worth the risk of commitment. It prevents the relationship from deepening into what it could become. And it keeps you stuck in the shallow end, where nothing of real consequence ever happens.
Attracting Someone Is Just the Beginning
Everything up to this point, the self-work, understanding polarity, developing your attractiveness, becoming a man worth choosing, that’s all just getting you to the starting line. The real work begins once you’re actually in a relationship. Attraction gets someone in the door. What keeps them there, and what keeps the relationship alive over years and decades, is an entirely different skill set.
Most men think the hard part is getting the girl. It’s not. The hard part is keeping the relationship healthy, the attraction alive, and the connection deepening over time. This is where most relationships quietly die, not in dramatic blowups, but in the slow drift of complacency, over-familiarity, and neglect.
Choose Wisely
Before we get into how to maintain a relationship, it has to be said: who you choose matters more than anything you do after. The best relationship skills in the world can’t compensate for choosing the wrong person. Character, values, life direction, emotional maturity, how they treat people when nothing is at stake, these things need to be vetted clearly before you’re deep in. Too many people commit based on chemistry alone and then spend years trying to fix fundamental incompatibilities that were visible from the beginning.
This goes back to seeing people as they are. In the early stages of attraction, the temptation to project, to see potential instead of reality, to fill in the gaps with what you hope is there, is overwhelming. Resist it. Pay attention to who this person actually is, not who they could be if everything went perfectly. Do their values align with yours? Do they take responsibility for their own life? Are they growing? Do they treat you with genuine respect, or is it conditional? Is the attraction mutual and real, or are you convincing yourself it’s there?
Choosing well upfront is not unromantic. It’s the most important decision you’ll make. A great relationship is two people who were right for each other choosing to keep being right for each other. It starts with the choice.
Give First
You go into a relationship to give, first and foremost. Not to keep score. Not to calculate what you’re getting back. The orientation should be: what can I bring to this person’s life?
Yes, you should pay attention to reciprocity, and we’ve already covered why. But reciprocity is something you observe, not something you lead with. If your primary question walking into a relationship is “what am I getting out of this?” you’ve already set the wrong foundation. That’s a transaction, not a relationship.
The beautiful thing is that when both people are oriented toward giving, the relationship sustains itself naturally. Neither person feels depleted because both are pouring in. Neither person feels taken for granted because both are paying attention. It becomes a cycle of generosity rather than a negotiation of needs. The problems start when one person is giving and the other is only taking, and that’s when the behavior-over-words principle becomes critical. But between two people who genuinely want to give to each other, something remarkable happens. The relationship becomes a source of energy rather than a drain on it.
The key is learning how your partner receives love. Gary Chapman’s five love languages are useful here. The idea is simple, people give and receive love differently, and mismatches cause friction even when both people have good intentions. The five are:
- Words of Affirmation, verbal praise, encouragement, “I love you,” “I’m proud of you”
- Acts of Service, doing things for your partner, taking something off their plate
- Receiving Gifts, thoughtful tokens that say “I was thinking about you”
- Quality Time, undivided attention, being fully present together
- Physical Touch, holding hands, hugs, physical closeness, intimacy
Most people have one or two that resonate most deeply. The practical value is learning your partner’s language and speaking it, even if it’s not your natural one. You might show love through acts of service while your partner is starving for words of affirmation. Both people are loving, but neither feels loved. Knowing this saves a lot of unnecessary hurt.
Never Stop Courting
One of the most important principles I’ve internalized is this: the courtship never ends. The behaviors that attracted your partner in the first place, confidence, mystery, purpose, challenge, presence, are the same behaviors that keep the relationship alive. Most men win a woman over and then slowly stop doing everything that made her fall for them. They get comfortable. They stop planning dates. They stop pursuing their own purpose. They stop being the man she was attracted to, and then they’re confused when the attraction fades.
Attraction is not a one-time event. It’s something you maintain. The moment you take it for granted is the moment it starts eroding.
The Many Faces of Love in One Relationship
I’ve written elsewhere about the Greek framework for love, and it’s especially relevant here. The Greeks had six words for what we cram into one. A mature romantic relationship isn’t just one kind of love, it’s a blend of several, and the health of the relationship depends on all of them being present in some measure.
Eros, the spark, the charge, the sexual and romantic pull. This is what most people think of when they think of love. It’s essential, but it’s not enough on its own. Eros without depth becomes obsession or infatuation.
Philia, genuine friendship. Mutual respect, shared values, the ability to enjoy each other’s company beyond the bedroom. If you don’t actually like each other as people, if the only thing holding you together is chemistry, the relationship has no foundation. Here’s a simple test: do you enjoy talking to this person? So much of a long-term relationship lives in conversation, over coffee, in the car, late at night, about nothing in particular. Choose to be with someone whose mind you genuinely enjoy.
Pragma, enduring love as practice. The willingness to keep showing up through difficulty, negotiation, compromise, and the long stretches where nothing is exciting. Pragma is unsexy and absolutely essential. It’s the love that pays the bills, raises the children, and survives the years.
Ludus, playfulness, flirtation, lightness. This is the one most long-term couples lose first, and it matters more than people realize. Ludus is the inside jokes, the teasing, the spontaneity, the refusal to let the relationship become a purely serious enterprise. When ludus disappears, the relationship becomes heavy, all obligation and no joy. Keeping play alive is not childish. It’s what prevents love from becoming a chore.
Agape, love that doesn’t keep score. Goodwill that extends even when your partner doesn’t deserve it in the moment. This is the closest thing to unconditional love that shows up in adult relationships, the willingness to extend grace, to see the best in someone even when they’re not at their best.
The insight is that when any one of these disappears entirely, the relationship starts to feel off. All eros and no philia is unstable. All pragma and no ludus is suffocating. All agape and no eros is a friendship. The couples who thrive over decades are the ones who keep all of these alive, not perfectly, not equally at all times, but present.
Don’t Lose Yourself
A critical mistake men make in relationships is abandoning their own identity to please their partner. They drop their friends, their hobbies, their purpose, and they restructure their entire life around the relationship. This feels like devotion, but it’s actually the death of polarity. A woman doesn’t want to be your entire world. She wants to be with a man who has a world of his own, one she’s excited to be part of, not responsible for holding together.
Maintaining your own life, your friendships, your fitness, your ambitions, your interests, is not selfish. It’s necessary. It’s what keeps you interesting, keeps the polarity alive, and gives the relationship room to breathe. Two whole people choosing to be together is fundamentally different from two half-people clinging to each other out of need.
Don’t Over-Pursue
Many men make the mistake of way over-pursuing, over-texting, over-planning, over-accommodating, especially early on. It comes from a good place, but it collapses the tension that keeps attraction alive. When you’re always the one reaching out, always available, always bending, you signal that your time and attention have no value.
Attachment styles play a role here, and people’s natural tendencies vary wildly. Some people lean anxious and want constant contact. Some lean avoidant and need distance. Understanding your own wiring helps you catch yourself when you’re acting out of anxiety rather than genuine desire to connect. But beyond thinking about space as a technique or a tactic, the real solution is simpler: actually be engaged with your own life. If you have purpose, friendships, fitness, projects, interests that genuinely matter to you, you won’t have to manufacture distance. You’ll naturally have a full life that she wants to be part of, rather than an empty one that revolves around her.
Set Standards and Hold Them
A man who tolerates anything will eventually be respected for nothing. Setting clear standards for how you expect to be treated, and being willing to walk away when those standards aren’t met, is one of the most attractive things a man can do. It communicates self-respect, and it creates safety paradoxically through firmness, not through permissiveness.
This is the King archetype in practice. The King blesses what deserves blessing and withdraws blessing from what doesn’t. He doesn’t rage, he doesn’t beg, he doesn’t negotiate his basic standards. He holds the line with calm certainty. A woman who respects you will rise to meet your standards. A woman who doesn’t was never the right fit.
Handle Conflict Like an Adult
Every relationship has conflict. The question is not whether you’ll disagree, but how you handle it when you do. Most people are terrible at this. They avoid difficult conversations until resentment builds up, or they explode and say things they can’t take back, or they shut down and stonewall. None of these work.
Healthy conflict means being direct about what’s bothering you without being cruel. It means listening to understand, not just to respond. It means being willing to be wrong, and being willing to say so. It means never using vulnerability as a weapon, if your partner opens up to you about something difficult and you throw it back at them during an argument, you’ve just taught them to never be honest with you again.
The ability to repair after conflict, to come back, own your part, and reconnect, is arguably the single most important relationship skill. It’s not about never fighting. It’s about fighting well and rebuilding trust afterward.
Practice Gratitude
It’s easy to focus on what’s missing, what your partner isn’t doing, what the relationship lacks, where things fall short of the ideal in your head. That focus will destroy a relationship faster than almost anything else. The antidote is gratitude, and it has to be practiced deliberately.
Gratitude means actively noticing and appreciating what your partner does, who they are, and what they bring to your life. Not as a one-time thought, but as a habit. The small things, how they show up for you, the effort they put in, the ways they make your life better that you’ve stopped noticing because you got used to them. On the Hawkins scale, gratitude lives well above 200, it’s an expansive, life-affirming state. People operating from lower levels, fear, anger, desire, tend to fixate on what they’re not getting. People operating from gratitude tend to see abundance, and that perception shapes the entire dynamic of the relationship.
Express it. Say it out loud. Don’t assume your partner knows you appreciate them. One of the quietest killers of long-term relationships is the slow withdrawal of acknowledgment, where both people are doing things for each other but neither one says thank you anymore. That silence breeds resentment, and resentment is poison.
Forgiveness and Letting Go
In any relationship that lasts long enough, someone will hurt you. Not in small ways, in real ways. Betrayal, dishonesty, negligence, cruelty in a moment of anger. The question is not whether it will happen, but what you do with it when it does.
Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick. It doesn’t punish them, it imprisons you. Forgiveness is not about condoning what happened or pretending it was acceptable. It’s about releasing the grip that the injury has on your inner life so you can move forward, either with that person or without them.
This connects directly to Hawkins’ work on letting go. Resistance to what happened, the replaying, the bitterness, the refusal to accept, keeps you locked at a low level of consciousness. Surrender doesn’t mean weakness. It means accepting reality as it is, processing the emotion fully rather than suppressing it, and then consciously choosing to release it. In a relationship, this looks like being honest about what hurt, having the hard conversation, and then making a real decision: either you forgive and rebuild, or you leave. What doesn’t work is staying while refusing to forgive, that’s a slow death for both people.
Keep the Polarity Alive
Long-term relationships have a gravitational pull toward neutrality. You become roommates. Best friends. Co-managers of a household. All of those things are fine, necessary, even, but if that’s all the relationship becomes, the spark dies. Polarity requires difference, tension, mystery, desire. Those things need to be actively maintained.
This means continuing to date your partner. Creating novelty. Maintaining some degree of mystery, you don’t need to share every thought, every insecurity, every mundane detail of your day. It means staying physically attractive for each other, not because it’s shallow, but because physical attraction is part of the polarity that keeps romance alive. It means keeping the sexual energy active, not just as a physical act, but as an undercurrent in the relationship, a charge that reminds both of you that this is not just a friendship.
Durability Is a Choice
There’s a spark at the beginning of every romantic relationship, that initial intensity, the electricity of discovery, the feeling that everything is charged. For many people, that fades over time, and they accept it as inevitable. “The honeymoon phase ends.” But I don’t think it has to. There are people who maintain real passion, real intensity, real desire for each other well into old age. That’s not luck. That’s the result of how they choose to live.
Durability is not about accepting a dull, passionless compromise and calling it mature. It’s about making the choices, day after day, year after year, that keep the fire alive. Staying in shape. Staying interesting. Staying present. Continuing to pursue your purpose. Continuing to grow as a person. Continuing to court your partner instead of coasting. Every one of these is a choice, and the cumulative effect of those choices over time is what separates the couples who still look at each other with desire at sixty from the ones who became roommates at forty.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be seasons. There will be stretches where things run hot and stretches where they cool. There will be periods of deep connection and periods of distance. There will be conflict, repair, misunderstanding, and the grinding friction of two imperfect people trying to build a life together. All of that is normal and expected. The key is not interpreting a difficult stretch as evidence that something is fundamentally broken. It’s understanding that love has rhythms, and your job is to keep showing up through the full cycle, not just the easy parts.
This is where Krishnamurti’s insight resonates most: “Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love.” Real love is not transactional. It’s a sustained act of will, attention, and presence. It’s choosing, freely, not out of obligation, to keep building something with someone even when it’s hard. That freedom is what makes the choice meaningful. You stay because you want to, because the life you’re building together is worth the effort, not because you’re trapped.
The relationships people look back on with gratitude at the end of their lives are the ones where both people kept choosing each other and kept choosing to be their best. Not perfect, best. The ones who stayed alive, stayed growing, stayed passionate, and refused to let the relationship become something they merely tolerate. That kind of love is earned through a lifetime of daily choices. And that’s what makes it real.
This reflects my personal views on relationships, grounded in my own experience, study, and spiritual outlook. It’s an ongoing exploration, these ideas will continue to develop as I do.