The Three Relationships in Every One Relationship

The key to an ever-growing and deepening relationship is that both people are aware of, and understand, the principle of the three relationships in every one relationship.

One of the keys to the quality and longevity of any intimate relationship is being able to distinguish between the three relationships and understanding the interior or invisible infrastructure of the relationship.

The three relationships are: the relationship with your Self ("Me"), the Other's relationship with their Self ("You"), and the relationship that is between the two of them ("Us" or "We"). When you're able to discern between them, you'll know, be aware, or intuit who's who and which one's which all the time.

When both people have this awareness, they will have the ability to take responsibility for preserving the Us space when difficult, charged issues and conflicts arise — the moments they could easily get triggered and veer off course in reactivity.

The quality of their relationship and depth of their intimacy depend on their ability to identify whose problem is whose, and therefore, whose to deal with and resolve.

Both people must be mindful and responsible to make sure that their individual struggles do not play out or spill over into the Us space of co-creation.

So, when they identify a problem that is between them — for them to work through and resolve their issues as a couple, just the two of them — they preserve the womb space of co-creation and deepen their bond and connection over time. They do this consciously and intentionally, staying aligned in their commitment to uphold this constitutional schema.

Depth, resilience, and our capacity to navigate charged emotions all depend on your ability to discern, to take responsibility, and to assign responsibility accordingly.

A Year-End Reflection: 2025 Into 2026

During the transitional period between the ending of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, I wanted to shine a light on how the year went for myself, my wife of 40 years, Taye, and how we as life partners fared.

I assessed our relationship in terms of how far away or close we are to the optimal energetic balance. From the perspective of three relationships in every one relationship, ideally, we see the energetic pie of our relationship divided into virtually three equal parts: Me (33%), You (33%), Us (34%).

What I saw was that my life, health, creativity, and overall wellbeing were pretty good (the Me piece), guesstimating about 40%, and Taye's life, health, creativity, and wellbeing guesstimated the same way at about 40%.

However, that left our relationship — the Me-and-Her or Her-and-Me, the Us piece — lagging at about 20%, a far cry from the optimal 33%.

While 2025 turned out to be a pretty good year for me and for Taye, it wasn't a good year for our relationship relatively. We hadn't grown or deepened our connection — rather, we weren't deriving the nourishment we had come to expect and rely on from each other, and probably got more disconnected as the year wore on.

Since Taye and I were doing this year-end ritual together, we continued that conversation and focused on what we'd like to see for ourselves heading into 2026: what re-balancing those scales would look like, and how we are going to nurture our relationship, deepen our connection, and bring that number up to the optimal 33%.