Navigating Love After Crisis: A New Perspective

"I feel like I am not the same person since the crisis. To this day, I don't really understand if it's better or worse...," Noga said. "I feel like something has changed, but I don't really know if it's changed for the better. How am I supposed to know?

"I feel like I used to be much happier. I could look at Avner differently. I feel like I've lost that, and I can no longer look at him the way I did before the crisis," Noga added sadly.

"It is really hard to walk around with a feeling like that, that you were once happy and now you are not. It’s important for me to mention that I have been observing your relationship for quite a while, and I highly recommend developing your perspective on your relationship from a broader viewpoint, as it will allow your emotional place to find its right position.

"I truly see how something new, good, and healthy is being built slowly and carefully between you. A stable and genuine relationship is being formed that is entirely different from what you had before the crisis," I replied.

"When I can manage to step back a bit from my emotional place and see it more clearly, I can really feel that our relationship today comes from a more authentic place. I see how Avner is becoming a better husband, a better father, and an overall better person..."

"But why did we have to go through such a tough crisis? Couldn't it have resolved naturally, leading to the same outcome?" Avner asked.

"Probably not," I answered.

"Naturally, each partner entering a romantic relationship comes with a fixed place that is imprinted on them. The nature of each partner consists of those survival patterns they adopted at a young age, and they brought those into the relationship. This is how partners can go through their entire lives, with each continuing to wear their survival armor, without creating a true romantic connection throughout their marriage."

"So what was created? What existed?" Avner asked.

"You had a partnership. Like a business partnership. But in Judaism, a romantic relationship is not just a partnership.

"Wait, don't think it’s easy. The difficulty of building a deeper connection arises because each partner positions themselves and steps accurately on the weak point of the other’s survival mechanism, and vice versa.

"The reason they settle on the weak point is so that each agrees to break their nature and manage to remove their defense mechanism, which hinders a true connection between partners. It stems from a genuine impulse and mental desire to connect, and that’s where the point of connection lies.

"Unfortunately, what usually happens is that each interprets the other's positioning on a psychological level as a threat. They even experience it as if it is being done intentionally."

"So why don’t most people just remove that armor?" Noga asked.

"Because this has a price they don't want to pay. Breaking down our survival mechanisms comes with a lot of overcoming fears and pains. We are so identified with our survival mechanisms that, for us, giving them up feels like amputating a part of our body.

That’s why the divorce rate reaches fifty percent in some Western countries, while the other forty-nine percent live in terrible suffering, just waiting for the effort called partnership to end, in one way or another. They prefer to live in imagined relationships that will eventually crumble, rot, or explode in their faces."

"So what makes you say that the relationship we are building is real and good?" Noga asked.

"The crisis you experienced was so severe that it shattered your entire previous relationship structure to its foundation. From nature, there was no chance of continuing with it. When you chose to fight and rebuild this relationship, it required each of you to break your nature, to overcome and access resources that can only come out when your defense mechanisms are completely dismantled.

"You embarked on a journey where each of you individually managed to break out of your limited and constricted self and began to allow truth to express itself within the relationship.

"I agree with you, Noga, that you will never look at Avner the same way you did before the crisis. But even today, you are starting to develop a different, new perspective on Avner. Today you are positioned in a feminine role towards Avner, one that allows and does not forgo all the abundance and masculine strengths that Avner brings into the relationship.

"This enables you to build a strong and stable connection here, a structure with much better and stronger foundations, allowing for true growth for each of you as individuals, and of the relationship itself. And this home, with God's help, will endure for generations."

Hanna Dayan[email protected]

For all columns and to contact, click here