The Vital Role of Conflict in Love

The use of the word “vital” in the title is consciously chosen, for it is the acceptance of conflict within intimate partner relationships what brings them life and deepens love.

There is one specific book that when it comes to healing intimate sexual and/or romantic relationships just hit the nail on the head for me. It was a complete Ah-Ha! moment of clarity that's stayed with me ever since and completely opened up and profoundly changed my way of seeing intimate partner relationships. 

I thought of paraphrasing, but to be honest, there is no need. The following insightful excerpt from Anne Geraghty’s (very simple and cringy sounding) book How to make your relationship work: Learn how to love and be loved in my opinion says it all. It is complete as is: 

“Love brings to the surface our buried hurts so they can be healed:

We learn more constructive and mature ways of protecting ourselves only through the challenge of relationships. As always, love has designed it so that we get exactly the partners we need to teach us what we most need to learn. In the symmetry of loving relationships, we are drawn to those who will wound us in ways similar to our first experiences of being hurt by others. 

This is partly because we are attracted to our opposites energetically, and this includes those with opposing defence mechanisms, and partly because to have our childhood needs met, we need someone who can reach into where we most need their love, which is the same spot where we have been hurt. So to get the love we long for, we have to risk being vulnerable where we are most afraid of being hurt.

There is usually deep disappointment that the original promise of the relationship, to save each from pain and loss, is not fulfilled. Or at least, that is how it appears to begin with. Love always keeps its deeper promise though - to make enough love to heal all the wounds in both. This is why old wounds from childhood are brought to the surface in intimate sexual love. The difficulty is that old hurts tend to emerge during fights and it feels exactly as if our partners are causing the pain, rather than merely triggering it.

When this happens, as it usually does, there is the potential for deep healing. But first the wounds have to come to light. In homeopathy, naturopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and other healing traditions that work to heal the whole body rather than just suppress the symptoms, cures usually involve the disease worsening for a period before the body begins to heal itself in a new way. It is the same for the body of love in a relationship.”