Eighteen months ago, while trying to reconstruct my personal future, I wrote a vision board for my future romantic partner. If you follow this blog, you’ll have read that post already.It was a beautiful vision, and I am still compelled by it.
But as I come into a new season of understanding myself and my own deep needs, I have realized that the most important things were missing from that list, namely the things about me. The entire list was a vision of someone else, someone that I would desire and respect, someone in whom I would finally find my security. Not one word of that vision was about my own partnership, how I wanted to show up, how I wanted to feel in the midst of that relationship.
In perhaps my least visionary moment of visioning ever, I completely left myself out of the picture, making it all about the one I would love instead. I am nothing if not true to my patterns!
When I mentioned this in my closing session with the therapist who has witnessed my internal transformation, she laughed alongside me. Then in her typical gentle way, she wondered whether it might time for a revision, suggesting that a new board might include not only what I want from another, but also the kind of relationship I want to have with myself going forward.
The original list was long, but this one is simple:
1. I want honesty, with myself and all those close to me, but I want it grounded in compassion. That compassion has always flowed naturally from me to others, but rarely from me to myself. Not surprisingly, the same has often been true for my partners, who have been deep feeling, compassionate people who have had little grace for themselves. Compassion must be for all of us, extended to others and turned in on ourselves, if it is to work its magic.
2. I want consistency, especially emotionally, both from myself and others. I am tired of wild swings of feeling, from the elation of early attraction to the despairing disappointment in myself and my partner when the dream turns in a direction other than I hoped. I want to respond to my feelings and those of others, rather than reacting from my most primitive instincts. I want space to pause when I notice the early warning signs of dysregulation, and I want the first voice to speak into that space to be my own, validating my own body and emotions before seeking reassurance from outside.
3. I want a commitment from everyone I love, including myself, to stay connected when things get hard, avoiding either extreme of the anxious rush in to fix or the absenteeism of emotional withdrawal.
Compassion, consistency and commitment, that’s it. Simple, but not easy, especially because I have historically been none of those things to myself. But I am ready now, as Prentis Hemphill says, “to first know what love feels like in my own tissues, to know what I am seeking and inviting, then nothing short of that will suffice in relationship to another”.
Collette Broady Grund 
2 responses to “Unromantic Partner Vision Board”
A friend in women’s group shared an earlier piece of your writing and it held true to many of us. It was so nice to be able to read some of your posts as your words are beautiful and a form of therapy and guidance. Thank you! As a sisterhood one thing that stood out and surprised me was that your unromantic board didn’t include trust or trusting yourself. I hope you don’t mind me sharing some of my own story in an attempt to share my experience with trust. I know that our past experiences in life guide us even when we don’t realize it. They create a footprint and memory that does serve us. Often when we feel or are made to feel that our feelings and reactions are too big or irritational we end up focusing on those and fixing them versus what caused them.
In my first couple of relationships after my husband, I would often feel “crazy” or that my gut told me something was not right. I was made to feel that the need for clarity or validation was too much and that I was ruining or pushing the other person away.
What time revealed to me was that with the right partner the “crazy” didn’t happen and my big passionate emotions were met and embraced with love and consistency. There were no highs and lows or break ups and make ups and I didn’t need go hunting for answers to prove what I already knew.
Sadly, after many tears and in hindsight bad decisions for myself and children, I realized that I needed to change my mindset not make a life change. I didn’t need to fix myself. I needed to embrace and celebrate myself. I needed to trust myself and my feelings and what was guiding me. I stopped calling it “crazy” and recognized it as the divine intuition steering me away and making me question what was not intended for me. It was protecting me from a life that I didn’t need to relive and repeat. This divine guidance set off alarms that I didn’t trust it. I went to the person causing them versus trusting myself and my inner being. I had to learn to trust and love myself, seek answers from within no matter how much I really wanted the void in my life to be filled.
Trust didn’t make the list, I guess because it’s assumed for me, and the other three items are what build and maintain that trust, maybe? Thanks for sharing your story, I’m glad you have learned to listen well to your own intuition. It’s such a mysterious but helpful thing when you can tune into it!