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life & relationship coach

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    It takes much more than love to make a relationship work. A relationship requires patience, commitment, the courage to be honest, strength to be vulnerable, willingness to forgive, trust to walk into the unknown and a passion which never dies. While love likes to fly high and desires freedom, a relationship demands grounding. While love is universal, a relationship is personal. While love is intangible, a relationship brings tangibility.
    If you expect your partner to fulfill those needs which were not met in your childhood, it will complicate the relationship and make it difficult to nurture a relationship free of blame and complaints. While your partner may support you in your journey, it's not their job to do your work or parent you. The more you learn to take responsibility for your emotional needs, you could invite your partner to support you, without making it their responsibility.
    Intimacy demands honesty. It demands vulnerability. It demands one to let go of control. Over the course of a relationship, many couples get too comfortable in their patterns, assumptions, and beliefs that they get scared to express something that would rock the boat. This lack of expression due to the fear of consequences keep a part of you hidden from your partner, denying you and your partner the intimacy you could have had if you took the risk to be vulnerable.
    Love and desire are paradoxical in nature. When love is about giving, desire is about getting. When love prefers familiarity, desire prefers mystery. When love sets you free, desire makes you feel possessive. Both love and desire are equally needed to nurture an intimate relationship. If a relationship without love is meaningless, then a relationship without desire is passionless.
    Will you take it as an opportunity to enter into those abandoned parts of your self, or will you scare your partner with the immensity of your emotions? Your partner could only provide the key. The choice to unlock will always be left with you. It is the rare ones who show the courage to own those vulnerable parts of one's self who enjoy the fire and passion of intimacy in their relationship.
    Each time you blame your partner, it is not about your partner's action as much as it is about your needs unmet. There is pain beneath your blame, and beneath the pain is an unmet need. Instead of expecting your partner to solve the riddle and understand your needs, express it with as much clarity as you can. Share what is it that you need, and how it makes you feel to not have your needs met. You don't have to feel shy or apologetic about your needs. There is no couple who grew closer through blaming.
    The only way we could honour our conflicting needs for unity and autonomy in an intimate relationship is by being aware of our comfort zones and trigger points. Observe what thoughts and feelings get triggered when our comfort gets challenged. Take responsibility for them and make a commitment to not blame our partner for our discomfort. Learn to allow our thoughts and feelings to pass through us, without tricking us to believe in our mind's interpretation of them.
    Many modern-day couples lean towards a no string attached relationship for the fear of their freedom getting restricted. If your idea of freedom is the absence of boundaries, make sure that you are not creating them in your head. Also, remember that a river's flow is not restricted by its banks but enabled.
    If the fear of hurting your partner is stopping you from being transparent with them, you should learn to face your fear than expecting your partner to not feel hurt. The more you allow yourself to feel the difficult feelings, you will set yourself free and naturally be kind to your partner.
    Relationship is the last place where you could hide your insecurities. It is not an escape from meeting your inner void. Often, what you try to avoid gets surfaced the most in an intimate relationship. It will chase you till you have no option but to stop and realize its only purpose is to point you to the freedom you have been seeking elsewhere.
    There is no secret to building intimacy in a relationship than being open to seeing and be seen. Only a person who feels comfortable within himself can allow himself to be seen. And, he is the one who could embrace the flaws in his partner, without making them wrong.
    If you confuse a space for learning with a space for teaching you will create chaos, and that's what you get to witness in most relationships these days. The lessons you wish to teach your partner always has something for you to learn. And, the irony is that your partner won't learn the lesson until you learn yours. Treat your relationship as a space for learning and watch how it transforms your partner and the relationship.
    Learn to wrap your partner in a comfortable hug, at the same time forget not to give them the space to explore life on their own. We need both love and desire to nurture a healthy intimate relationship. If a relationship without love is meaningless, a relationship without desire is passionless.
    If you think the key to building a beautiful relationship is finding the right partner, you are forgetting your own significance in the relationship. Your role in the relationship goes far more than choosing the right partner. If you could focus on being the right one rather than finding the right one, you have a greater chance of having a beautiful relationship.
    Your partner doesn't belong to you, they are just willingly offering themselves to you. The day you start demanding them to be who they are not, you will start losing their willingness. This doesn't mean you shouldn't communicate your needs or set boundaries, but just that you have no rights to take them for granted.
    You can't get someone's listening by raising your voice but only by listening to them deeply. If you think your partner doesn't listen to you, ask them how well they feel listened to. And you will unveil a secret only a few people could digest.
    Trading passion for stability or stability for passion can't keep you happy for long in a relationship. While familiarity and proximity could help you build stability in the relationship, the same things could challenge the passion and enthusiasm in a relationship. The real challenge would be to nurture them both hand in hand.
    It's in our nature to desire the forbidden. What makes one an adult is the ability to choose which desires to pursue and which ones not to. If we don't learn to bring harmony between our desires and values, we will be forced to lead a fragmented life. The only way out is the way within - be honest, be vulnerable and live life on the edge of truth.
    Relationship opens up a gateway to self-discovery for the ones who choose to learn over blaming. It would mirror the imperfections within you and your partner, and play them in front of you until you learn to deal with them gracefully. The more you make peace with your flaws, the better you will be able to deal with your partner's imperfections and host them all under the roof of love.
    Learn to love yourself for who you are and don't settle for a partner who can't embrace you with all your flaws. This isn't an escape from looking at your flaws but creating a space where you could feel comfortable to take your partner's support in bringing out the best in you.
    Let love not be an excuse to overlook the significance of your independent journey. As much as we need closeness in a relationship we also need distance to not get blinded. We need space to accommodate each other's differences and view each other as independent individuals.
    If you assume it's your partner's responsibility to take care of you, you will live your life at the mercy of your partner's kindness. While your partner may support you, it's not their job to parent you. The more you learn to take care of yourself, the more generously you could offer yourself to others and the less you will perceive yourself as a victim of situations.
    Trying to make a relationship work by compromising on being who you are, is like, locking yourself in a cage and trying to fly. A relationship will naturally demand some compromises on the practical aspects of life. However, a relationship that demands you to comprise on your values and beliefs will gradually take you away from yourself.
    It is the difference between you and your partner that makes you desire each other. The only way you could sustain the passion and vigour in your relationship is by creating a space where these differences could co-exist in harmony.
    If you feel your partner treats you better or worse than you deserve you will feel discomfort in your relationship. The only way to invite love into your relationship is by loving yourself deeper, and knowing that no amount of love can be more than what you deserve.
    The ability to have difficult conversations with grace is a vital skill in nurturing an intimate relationship. You suppressing your concerns in a relationship for the fear of hurting your partner will kill your relationship in invisible ways. When your relationship throws a challenge at you, you need to stand up and face it rather than shrink in and avoid it.
    Intimacy is the willingness to see and be seen without having to manipulate the beauty and rawness of truth. Intimacy demands vulnerability. Assumptions save us from being vulnerable, yet takes us away from reality; from our partner.
    Every relationship has some unsaid boundaries, the more you and your partner are on the same page about it, the better it will serve your relationship. There is hardly anything that could complicate your relationship more than, unexpressed thoughts, beliefs, and expectations. And how could you express with clarity unless you are clear within?
    Your partner can't feel attracted to you unless he/she can see you as an equal. If you fail to acknowledge the power within you, you will end up behaving like a victim and demand your partner to treat you like a child.
    There is nothing that would help you nurture a healthy intimate relationship than listening to your partner beyond their words and understanding their feelings, needs and intention. Your presence is the best gift you could offer to your partner.