Success and failure are familiar structures that we experience in our everyday lives within modern society. Perhaps we don’t notice how necessary we find it to grade our successes and failures in some kind of comparative hierarchy where we fall in different areas of life. While our fascination with success and failure filters through most eveyr aspect of our lives, in my post I am again choosing to focus on relationships. This post leads on from previous posts in this series, Relationship Shapes, Spaces and Spacemaking, and On Relationships.

Once again I’d like to emphasise that I do not speak from any position of authority or expertise. I speak from my deep commitment and passion for the subject of love, intimacy and relationships. I’ve invested immense amounts of time, care, conversation, listening, reading and study into these concepts and spaces. It is from this space that I speak and create a space for conversation and consideration where we can explore further together.

The purpose of this post is to begin to reveal questions worth asking so that we may explore in relation to how we culturally construct our relationships according to success and failure markers. This post focuses on the concepts of success and failure as a meta-narrative for how we impose these ideas in our relationships and thinking. I hope to reveal the spaces where assumption underpins our actions and beliefs around relations and the perceptions or success and failure here. In examining how we construct and understand success and failure markers in relationships I hope to create an opportunity for us to take on new constructions, or embrace existing ones with conscious thought.

As a culture worker, I am constantly aware that no action we take, no word we speak, no thought we think is separate from, or occurs outside the influence of our individual surrounding cultural concerns. At which point, if the idea of escaping this seems attractive I would also note that this firmly implants the notion of being trapped by culture. We are not trapped… we are subject to culture in all the ways that culture is subject to us and we have immense influence over this if we choose to utilise it. This interconnectivity is as fascinating and awe inspiring as it is potentially terrifying – intent and what you choose to put into the world is in my experience, what it is important to count.

Arbitrary designations such as success and failure are other traps of culture that we buy into and perpetuate willingly. With relationships the loops of thinking can become particularly vicious and complexly layered in their shared reinforcement. So in order to examine the context for success and failure markers in relationships, first we need to address the existence of success and failure.

I have a fairly fundamental philosophical approach to this kind of thing, namely: success and failure exist only because we say they do, and collectively we agree on that existence. Once I began to operate with this assumption that things exist only through statement and agreement… it became easier for me to willingly re-examine and redefine how I wanted to mark my relationships and my approaches to relationships.

The other trap of how we conceive success and failure is that we set them up to oppose one another as a dichotomy. I’m not suggesting that this can’t be useful on occasion, but I find generally that especially in consideration of living life, that such simple good/bad designations through dichotomy are more harmful than beneficial. I find that it is useful to allow space for elements of success, failure – both and neither to exist as a spectrum for relating to our relationships.

The array of my relationships involves many lessons of success and of failure and how I’ve conceived of and refined my understanding and construction of these ideas. One particular failure comes to mind in that I was abandoned… the person I’d been in a relationship with for some years just stopped contacting me. There were issues at the time, but the last communication I’d received from them had emphasised their commitment to the connection and to being in contact. I don’t have any other way to frame the ending to that relationship except as failure. And it is failure I’m unwilling to take on as my own, and yet I don’t actually feel better about it for that, though by now I’ve mostly stopped asking myself how I could somehow have been better to not have been abandoned.

Thankfully, I have many more constructions for success in a variety of ways:

• My fiance and I realising that we were personally committed to each other getting to have the most amazing life possible, and that this transcended the need to cohabit in the same house/state/country if opportunity should knock. Knowing that he is always completely in my corner, and me in his is an incredible feeling whatever other difficulties we may face.
• My lover of over two years has recently entered into a new and very different relationship and I am delighted that they will get something they’ve been seeking for years so much that I find I have incredible space for our connection to shift and change to accommodate that, though both of us wish to preserve the ‘more than friends’ nature of our connection and the related emotional closeness we’ve developed.
• Someone incredibly special to me who is an interstate connection also shifted their relationship focuses this year and we shifted our connection to focus on our friendship and emotional closeness rather than our sexual connection because it worked better in context for where they were heading.
• Sharing an incredible trust with my interstate lover where one of her partners had become an ex-partner to me where we both trusted in the integrity of care and support for each other despite the dissonance of the other broken connection. Trusting her that she understood and validated my experience of things and her trusting me to be happy and supportive genuinely of her relationship with the person in common.

You’ll notice that not all of these are elation based successes. Also, none of them focus on longevity and rather draw on flexibility and a willingness to trust and work together for needs to be met and happiness to be shared. My experience of success and of failure is different from even a year ago and my practises and thinking reflects this. Taking into account all of my own experiences, all of the conversations I’ve had, the study and reading I’ve done, I believe that how we conceive and engage with the idea of successful and failed relationships is a subjective and personal thing.

There are common elements where discussion is worthwhile, but ultimately it has to work for you and those you have relationships with. Mindfulness and thought here can mean that there is a progression where how well things work can improve that also allows for how we change throughout our lives with the passing of time and taking on new experiences.

So, now we understand that we’ve nominated and defined the existence of success and failure in our current understanding of where we fit in society. Time for questions! How do we mark success in relationships?  How do we mark failure? Do we use these notions to inform us of worthwhile relationships to enter into and exit from? Do we use it to justify those relationships we choose not to enter into? Can there be successful entry and exit from relationships? What constitutes failure of relationships, failure of entry into or exit from relationships? Does our questioning of success and failure in relationships fundamentally reinforce the notion that we *must* seek out relationships and connection? How do we choose markers for success or for failure consciously? Do we *have* to choose markers at all… can relationships form some kind of understanding like breathing: they simply are? How do our experiences in the past, or our fears about living in the world inform our relationship choices and how we understand success and failure?

How do we begin to make sense of all of this?

So here we have a very meta-heavy context for examining of success and failure as a fundamental idea about relationships. What is important now is drawing these questions and concepts down into the context where the personal is a critical defining context. The personal experience you wish for and seek is of vital importance here for definition of success and failure (or not). By creating and nurturing some mental and emotional space around your personal views and thinking around success and failure in relationships, it follows that there is an opportunity to balance this by allowing similar space for others to have their own construction of relationship success and failure. The final key to this personal spacemaking for relationships and how we conceive of success and failure is the need for non-judgement and non-imposition of other structures and standards to other people and their constructions of relationship success and failure.

This is a beginning discussion, there is a lot here that can be examined in more detail and I’d like to do that in future posts. However, I’m interested in your thoughts at this point and how you understand your own constructions of success and failure. How do they work or not-work for you? Have you been through experiences that have led you to examine and redefine how relationship success and failure looks like? Have you experienced this in different kinds of relationships? Talk to me about what success and failure look like to you now, about what experiences have contributed to your understanding. I’d also really love to hear about how you think relationship success and failure in our social understanding and practices could be improved?

Leading on from Spacemaking in relationships, I’ve been thinking on the shapes that relationships take, and how it’s another thing that we don’t notice specifically, but is something that happens subconsciously as part of our engaging in relationships. We tend only to use a particular few styles of relationship shapes and I was thinking about this because the dynamic of my own multiplicity of shapes has changed quite a lot recently as have the shapes of a number of people close to me.

For myself, the change has come about because for the first time in a couple of years, I’ve got another set of relationships that are more like partnerships and less like satellite relationships. Another difference is that the relationship set is a three-way dynamic which is a relationship entity itself, but also comprises three sets of relationships between each person involved.

Some of you may find that this post seems more related to polyamory than relationships generally, and while I personally find it relates outwards to all my relationships, I am not separate from my poly-ness and others’ experience may vary. I’d be interested to hear from any of you who do or don’t find it applicable being less polyamorously inclined.

So when I talk about relationship shapes, I probably need to define that a little for sensemaking.

When I am describing relationships shapes, the notion of shape refers to how you draw your bubble around the nature or meaning of the relationship for you – and that will be different person to person. Imagine it’s like joining dots – only you get to choose dots that are meaningful/useful to you and so it’s not like tracing lots of perfect conventional shapes – each relationship is going to be different. Relationship shapes refer to how you mark the relationship, like a boundary or in a certain frame of reference. Markers vary between people, but can include the following (and many others I’m sure I’ll forget to mention): couple, threesome/triad, group, fidelity, monogamous, polyamorous, single, long term relationship, dating, short term relationship, long distance relationship, friendship, romantic, sexual, sensual, asexual. There are markers that will appeal to you, that describe different relationships to you and they are how you mark out the shape of the relationship for yourself and with the other(s) involved.

(If any of my geeky artistic readers can think of an artistic diagrammatic way of representing that concept I’m really interested in collaborating!)

I think of the shapes in my own universe (or network) of relationships as constellations and they are specific and sovereign to themselves, but also interrelate and enrich one another. . My array of significant relationships is quite considerable, and I have a mindmap that I use to convey to people a little of how my universe of relationships looks and the different ways in which I have conceived and created relationships, the  shapes within that map vary quite considerably.

You can see a public copy of the mindmap below where I’ve omitted names:

In the universe of my relationships, there are more relationships that are non-sexual than sexual, there are more relationships designated as chosen family or ‘some kind of life partnership/companionship thing’ than there are sensual, sexual, or romantic platonic relationships. There are more singular satellite relationships than group relationships or couple relationships (by which I mean where the coupleness is noteworthy for those relationships). What is also useful to note here is that some of these relationships have shifted over time to become one shape from another shape. Fixedness is a false absolute, it’s a decision point that we commonly enforce upon ourselves, but unnecessarily so. Relationships can change their nature if there is an allowance for the possibility and this can occur through outside stimulus to relationships, or be part of an intentional decision between parties.

For example, a job opportunity may send Alex overseas indefinitely and they may choose to shift their relationship with their partner to being a friendship having no idea when or if they will return. Alex may also choose to continue the relationship long distance and that may be open or closed. Or, in another scenario Robin could notice that they feel their relationship with Jean is becoming less romantic for them and seek to shift it into a shape marked by friendship rather than romance or sexuality. There are many possibilities and permutations; this is just an example to give you some practical context for what I mean.

Ultimately, what I am drawing attention to is that, even being aware that relationships are all different and can happen in many different ways we still hang onto other societal conditions that we may not be aware of, that may be worth questioning. Consider that you get to choose your relationships – you get to influence the shape of your relationships in conjunction with the other people involved. You may think on this and still end up in the same place you started out and not change anything about how you construct and conduct your relationships – and the purpose of my talking about this is not to create shift or change. My purpose is to promote awareness and conscious thinking about how we draw mark and define the shapes of our relationships, extending from my previous discussion on spacemaking. Shapes are a way of creating space or marking out space.

I’d love to hear about relationship shapes that you’ve experienced that you found unusual for you. Or, tell me about how this idea of shape and relationships relates to you and your universe of relationships – not just romantic/sexual relationships, but friendships and family and others as well. Talk to me about the different shapes you find challenging or that don’t work for you – there’s so much to look at here and I’m curious how it looks for others.

This post leads on from the beginning I made with my post On Relationships…

Space is an abstract concept, but I find it is an important and useful one when considering how I negotiate the universe of my relationships. (All space metaphors, all the time, except when the metaphors are about buckets…) I thought I’d start by creating an understanding of what I mean by space, and then I can talk about spacemaking and how it’s relevant as a relationship skill.

Space…

Space is a many faceted thing. We use it in a variety of contexts. Personal space, for ourselves, for others, as an example. It’s a tangible thing that we recognise as the distance between one thing and another thing. It’s also a sense of energy and comfort – not standing on top of someone. Your home is a space, your bedroom, your computer, this blog… anything that you can draw a boundary like a bubble around, is a space.

Spaces can be used to communicate respect, care or comfort. Space can also be used to protect yourself and as a retreat. Space can be used for confrontation, for challenging, for competition and argument. Anything you can draw a boundary around it and designate it as ‘this place/time where I/we do/say/feel xyz’.

Relationships are spaces… 

Relationships are spaces and just as we put energy and effort into building and maintaining relationships, part of that goes toward spacemaking. We don’t think of it separately, usually. But I find that as a specific concept and strategy that it is something I continually refer to. Making space for, making space away from, making space where, which is to say: spacemaking.

Spacemaking…

If you’re engaging in spacemaking, you’re consciously and intentionally creating a space for something to happen, or to prevent something happening. Generally I find that a positive directive is more useful – creating a space that invites what you’re seeking rather than shutting out what you’re avoiding. Even though you can go about it both ways, consider that you’re putting conscious effort into this and that you may find that it makes more sense to add good things to your life and experiences instead of focusing on the negative.

More practically…

Think about when you host a party or a dinner or even just a meeting. Anything doesn’t matter what it is. Think about how you setup the location. Think about what planning you do beforehand. Think about how you make sure that the space is conducive to the aim of the event. As an example, for a party you might make sure there are tasty snacks and plastic cups. What you’re doing when you do these things is spacemaking. You’re consciously creating space with an intention that it will contribute to the purpose for an event.

The same principle works for relationships.

Generally speaking, you may wonder what the purpose for relationships would be such that this strategy would work. The purpose for a relationship is to relate, though the shape of relationships varies from person to person and style to style. A friendship I have with someone is different to your friendship with someone. The way I have a romantic relationship is also different to you, we have different parental relationships. You get the idea.

Spacemaking as relating… 

Thinking about that purpose: to relate gives you the chance to appreciate the shape of the relationships in your life. This is useful as background knowledge for all relationship skills – and I should probably talk about it specifically at some stage. But it is useful for spacemaking because it has you think about how you relate and to relate is also to create space.

If you’re hosting a party, you’re creating a space where people feel comfortable to step into it, have a good time and socialise together.

If you’re building a relationship, you’re creating a space where you can connect with the other person, a space where there is communication and honesty, an openness, respect and listening. It’s a subtle communication that happens as a function of tiny bits of all styles of communication. You contribute to spacemaking where someone feels comfortable, happy, safe and appreciated using your body language, using your speech and your mannerisms. It all counts and contributes.

This is a good time to mention that genuineness is critical for spacemaking. You can’t say ‘the right words’ and have it work without it being in alignment with the rest of your body language and non verbal communication cues.

Spacemaking in relationships is a function of a genuine desire to engage, to relate and to build something.

Spacemaking is a multiplicity… 

You can use spacemaking in a multiplicity of ways in a relationship, there’s the space of the overall relationship. But, if there’s an issue that needs addressing, you can also make space where that can be worked through gently, with respect and care. Any kind of space you take a conscious approach to engaging with, is spacemaking. There’s no one right way to do it, but being conscious is the beginning. So, as a start… just notice the space around the things in your life and where you can recognise specific spaces both tangible and intangible. Then think about how you want to facilitate and nurture them. Try things. Refine them.

Spacemaking isn’t an exact recipe, it’s a strategy that draws on things we do naturally but makes them a conscious consideration where we actively engage with making space that works for us and for others a priority.

An example in employing spacemaking…

I thought an example would be useful to see in some small way what I’ve been talking about in action. I have a wonderful friend Flyingblogspot, we are close and beloved to one another but also very different people, with very different needs. We use spacemaking consciously and openly with eachother and it means that we both get what we need and get to feel amazing about that. One of the ways in which I create space for her, is through invitations to spend time and spacemaking around that. We love spending time and catching up, we’re both busy and sometimes quite stressed. As an extrovert I tend to seek out pockets of company to alleviate this and recharge, and as an introvert she finds she needs lots of alone recharge time.

I’ve created space around invitations to catch up, because sometimes invitations can feel loaded, you can want to say yes to things where it’s more out of a sense of obligation than genuine desire. It can be stressful and unpleasant. At the same time, inclusiveness is lovely and being invited it part of that. The space I’ve created for Flyingblogspot is basically my unequivocal reassurance that she could refuse one invitation, every other invitation, every invitation for six months and I wouldn’t take it to mean anything else except that she wasn’t available for the occasion of that invitation. I would not make assumptions that it was something about our friendship or that she didn’t care, didn’t want to spend time. Her trusting in this promise I’ve made is part of the spacemaking.

The result is I can make invitations whenever it occurs to me to do so, and she feels safe to say yes when she’s up for things and to decline when she’s not, she doesn’t ever need to worry that I am quietly resentful or upset because she’s declined one/three/ten invitations over a period of time. It clears out dross that can create misunderstanding and instead we just get to enjoy the relationship together.

Talk to me about spacemaking… 

I’d love to hear how the rest of you consider the idea of spacemaking. How do you do it? What do you think is important in employing it as a strategy? I can only speak to my experiences and how I create space, so I’m interested in what the rest of you have to contribute here too.