How to Create a Conscious Relationship

Is your love relationship everything you ever dreamed of? 

Does your relationship provide you with all the passion, support, and love that you want? Is your partner your best friend as well as your lover? Would you rather spend time with your love than with anyone else?

If not, can you imagine having a love relationship like that? Where every day you experience all of the passion, support, and love that you could ever want from your best friend and lover…. a relationship so beautiful that it seems you couldn’t be happier!

It is possible to have an amazing, long-term love affair. It’s not always easy and it takes both effort and dedication, but it’s definitely worth the effort. With a willingness on both your parts to put in the work, you can create a conscious love relationship.

Table of Contents

• What is a Conscious Love Relationship?
• Why Would You Want a Conscious Love Relationship?
• Premises of a Conscious Love Relationship
• Create a Shared Vision
• Create a Plan
• Summary: Live your Dream!

What is a Conscious Love Relationship?

What exactly is consciousness, anyway? And what is a conscious relationship?

At its most basic level, consciousness is awareness. Awareness of yourself; both your inner world (your emotions and thoughts, needs, and desires) and your outer world (your environment, relationships, career, etc). When you bring your attention to something, you’re experiencing awareness.

Simply put, a conscious love relationship is one in which both partners (I’m assuming a 2-person relationship, but it applies across the board) are aware of what their relationship is and what they want it to be, and intentionally choose to create that relationship together. What, exactly, that relationship entails will vary between couples, but whatever it is, is deliberately discussed, decided, and acted on.

Now, at the beginning of any love affair there is a high level of awareness simply because of the intensity. The initial passion basically ensures that you’re constantly on high alert regarding your new love, but it’s more of an instinctual awareness and chemical/physical response rather than an intellectual awareness.

A conscious love relationship is one in which both the relationship and the romance are purposely chosen, planned, and created.

Why Would You Want a Conscious Love Relationship?

Of course, there’s much more to a relationship than romance, although it’s an important aspect. We tend to think of the romantic part because it’s what initially draws us together, and the loss of it is what we believe drives us apart. 

But being in a relationship fills other needs and desires than feeling cherished and loved. 

We all want companionship, someone to share our lives and experiences with, someone to grow old with. We need friendship and support, the safety and comfort of knowing someone is going to be behind us no matter what we do. We want connection and, of course, we want love and romance.

And when we’re in a conscious love relationship, we can find fulfilment in every single one of those areas. 

However, when we’re not in a conscious relationship, we don’t find the fulfilment we yearn for. When we can’t or don’t fill those needs and desires we think there’s something wrong in the relationship (and, let’s face it, we usually blame our lover). 

But why does it seem like we’re always seeking more? What’s the main problem?

There are two big issues with developing and maintaining an amazing love affair.

The first is that we “want it all” but we don’t actually know precisely what that “all” is. We can’t describe what we’re missing; we just feel a sense of loss or lack. We’re constantly looking for something but we don’t know what.

The second issue is we want this dream relationship to just happen, miraculously, without effort. After all, if it’s really love, shouldn’t it flow smoothly? We want our lover to be absolutely perfect for us (but we don’t even consider whether we’re perfect for them). We want the intense initial passion to last forever. We want the virgin/mother/whore or the gentleman/provider/bad-boy all in the same package, but we also want them to show up when *we *want them to show up (and we often don’t know when that is ourselves!)

It’s sort of funny in a sad way; we know we have to work and practice to become good at our hobbies or career, but we either just give up on love relationships or begrudgingly accept them as they are rather than work to build our skills.

A conscious love relationship automatically addresses both those issues. First, you learn to define exactly what you want and need in a relationship. Then you develop a plan with strategies to fulfill those needs, and you take action to achieve them.

Once you know what your “all” is, figure out how to get it, and actually work towards it, you can have it all!

Premises of a Conscious Love Relationship

Before you can actually create a conscious love relationship, there are some foundational premises you need to understand. They are: becoming self-aware, becoming self-responsible, and learning to communicate effectively.

• Self-Awareness

The first stage in being conscious is learning to be self-aware. To do this, you have to pay attention to what you’re thinking, feeling, saying and doing. You have to learn to put the puzzle pieces together by paying attention to the causes and effects in your life. 

It’s easiest to start with a basic emotion, like happiness. Set aside some time to journal and really contemplate it. What is happiness to you? What makes you happy? When are you happy? Why? Dive deeper: How do you feel when you’re happy? How do you react when you’re happy? 

Be careful not to just leave this as an intellectual exercise, as if it’s unrelated to your daily life. Try to recognize happiness as it happens to you, in the moment…what happened immediately before that caused you to feel happy? How did you recognize that you were happy? What did you do in response? What could you have done differently?

• Self-Responsiblity

The next premise is taking self-responsibility. Once you start recognizing the causes and effects of different emotions in your life, you’ll come to a weird realization. You’ll understand that you are responsible for what you are feeling. Not your neighbour, not your coworker…you. 

Most of us live our lives by automatically or instinctually reacting to the people around us and the circumstances we find ourselves in rather than consciously anticipating or planning our reactions and decisions. And this tends to lead us to blaming others (or the world in general) when things don’t go the way we’d like them to, or declaring it luck or chance when things work in our favor.

Once you start studying your emotions and reactions, you learn that you’re responsible for both your own emotions and your own reactions. You make decisions that create situations where you can predict your emotional response and your reaction. And you can change any part of that equation at any time.

But how does all of this relate to your love relationship? 

Simple. Learn what makes you happy, and then take responsibility for your own happiness! Don’t put it on your lover’s shoulders. No one else will ever make you happy because no one but you can ever know what you really want and need, because what you want and need will change. Learn what makes you happy, and then cause it.

So, what do you want out of your love relationship? This is where you need to get very specific.

If you had the perfect love relationship, what would it look like?

What kind of a relationship is it? Intimate? Passionate? Friendly? Comfortable? How do you show your love, and how do you receive it? How do you resolve conflict? What’s your ideal sex life like? How often do you have sex? When? Who initiates? 

Apply the 5 W’s to everything. Study your needs and desires. How important is each one to you? Where do you set your boundaries? What, if any, are your non-negotiables?

Also, just as you have to take responsibility for your own happiness, you have to take responsibility for your own problems. Don’t put your negativity on your lover’s shoulders. 

None of us are perfect. We all have something that we know sets us off, buttons we let people push. You need to learn to recognize yours and take responsibility for yourself. What are the past issues that you need to overcome? Do you know your triggers? How will you choose to react to them in the future? 

What are you bringing to the table in this relationship? If the tables were turned in your ideal relationship, would you pick yourself as the ideal lover, deserving of all that love and passion? Become the best version of yourself.

• Conscious Communication

By now, hopefully you’ve learned exactly what you want and why you want it, but all of this means nothing if you can’t communicate effectively. You need to know how to express your needs and desires in a way that they are understood if you have a chance of having them met. Similarly, you need to learn how to listen to your lover’s needs and desires so that you understand them, and can help bring them to fruition.

Watch yourself. Become aware of how you communicate in different situations: with your friends, coworkers, family, the clerk in the grocery store, and with your lover. How do you express what you want, need, and feel both verbally and physically? How can you improve? Study different techniques. Learn how to communicate with your partner. The Gottman Institute blog is an excellent source of information on communication skills.

Create a Shared Vision

Once you both understand self-awareness and self-responsibility and can communicate clearly, you need to develop a shared vision of your ideal love relationship.

Because without a clear vision of where want to go, you’re just aimlessly wandering. 

And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never recognize it when you find it.

In the above exercise, you answered the question: If you had the perfect love relationship, what would it look like?

Now is the time to share your perfect visions with each other. Celebrate the similarities. And where there are differences, neither of you should compromise! Rather, work together to find solutions that are better for both of you than the original, individual visions. See how your vision can change to meet that of your lover’s, how the two can combine to create an incredible love affair. This is your future you are creating together: make it amazing!

Discover who both you and your partner need to be in order to become the best lovers you can be, for each other and for yourselves.

Who you need to be? Does that mean you’ll need to change?

Yes; unequivocally, yes. You’ll both be changing, continuously, as you grow together.

A conscious love relationship is all about growth and becoming the best person you can be, for and with each other.

You, your partner, and your relationship are going to change anyway. And if you’re not putting positive energy into something it’s going to start breaking down; that’s the nature of the beast. By constantly working on moving forward towards your shared vision, you are putting positive energy into your love relationship, which feeds it and keeps it improving, inspiring you to keep going. It’s a beautiful cycle.

But how to move towards that dream?

Create a Plan

To actually develop your ideal love relationship, you’ll need a plan. You’ll need to think of strategies, things you can do that will move you towards that vision.

But how, exactly, do you do that? Don’t worry… you’ve already done a lot of the thinking process around this; now you just need to spend some time organizing your thoughts into a series of step-by-step strategies.

Start the process with your shared vision of an ideal relationship. Write down exactly what that vision looks like, in minute detail. Include both the qualities of the relationship and the qualities you and your partner need to change in order to be able to have that relationship (character, conflict-resolving abilities, etc etc).

Next, write down where you and your partner currently are in relation to that vision, in all aspects. Don’t be hard on yourself (or your partner!); there’s no right or wrong, there’s just where you are and where you want to be. There’s a gap between the two; you just need to make a path.

As a few examples: You may choose to institute a date night once a week to help increase intimacy. You may want to book an “appointment” twice a month to discuss how your communication strategies are coming along; or you may decide that you need couple’s therapy to help you through something you just can’t seem to break through.

That path you need to make…that’s your step-by-step strategies. Start with the obvious changes, breaking down what will need to happen in order for those changes to occur. Then break down those steps into smaller steps, until you can actually see a do-able path to achievement. Do this for every aspect of your vision.

Start taking daily actions on moving forwards; try do something, even if it’s small, every day. Don’t overload yourself by asking the impossible, but do stretch yourself…your perfect love relationship is worth the work!

Summary: Live your Dream!

It is absolutely possible to have the love relationship of your dreams, by co-creating a conscious love relationship with your partner!

You have to be willing to examine yourself and your habits and take responsibility for both your own happiness and your own problems. You have to be willing to change and grow into a person deserving of that relationship. You must be committed to learning to communicate effectively, and to constant growth and progress, and you have to be willing to take steps every day to reach your dream.

If you don’t, the vision of that perfect love relationship that fulfils all your needs and desires will remain exactly that…a vision or dream that always remains just out of your grasp. Worse, it will stay in your mind as an ideal that no other relationship can ever rival, something you’ll hold every lover against, only to find them wanting.

On the other hand, if you know exactly what you want in a love relationship; 

… if you know how you want your lover to act towards you; 

… if you know how *you* want to show up for your lover; 

… if you know how you want to communicate with each other whenever there’s a problem;

… if you know how you want to feel most of the time in this relationship;

… and if you both decide on a crystal-clear plan with clearly defined steps on how to achieve this amazing relationship, and you work Every. Single. Day. on moving towards this vision…

Then one day you’ll look at the amazing life you’re living and realize you’ve achieved it! You’re in the perfect love relationship, with your perfect lover; you created it together.

You are in a love relationship that is everything you dreamed of, and more.

I’d love to know if you found this article helpful! If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know in the comments below. And if you’d like assistance on creating a conscious relationship, please contact us….as certified Lifebook Leaders, we love helping others move forward in creating a life they love!