Turinys
We are all different, but, living next to a partner, we adapt and give in to each other. How best to feel what a loved one needs and find harmony in a relationship? We offer four game tasks that will help you find your measure of intimacy with a partner and live together happily ever after.
Relationships are work. But you can make it easy and enjoyable. Psychoanalysts Anne Sauzed-Lagarde and Jean-Paul Sauzed offer psychological exercises to help you get to know and understand each other better.
Exercise number 1. The correct distance
The task is to feel the distance that is most suitable for each of the partners and the couple as a whole.
- Stand back to back with a partner. Relax and give in to the desire to move freely. What «dance» will take place between you? How does one continue this movement with their partner? Where are the points of support, and what, on the contrary, threatens to fall?
- Stand face to face ten paces apart. Take turns silently approaching your partner. Move slowly to get the right distance when you are very close to each other. Sometimes one, very small step forward or backward is enough to feel the distance at which closeness already becomes burdensome, and vice versa: the moment when the distance allows you to feel your separateness.
- Do the same exercise, but this time both move towards each other, trying to feel the right distance in your pair and remembering that this distance reflects your state exactly “here and now”.
Exercise number 2. Life line of two
On a large sheet of paper, draw, one by one, the life line of your couple. Think about the shape you are giving this line.
Where does it start and where does it end?
Write above this line the events that happened in the history of your couple. You can also use a picture, a word, a spot of color to represent the various points that you feel have guided (or disorientated) your life together.
Then take time to compare the life lines of your couple that you drew separately, and now try to draw this line together.
Exercise number 3. The perfect couple
What is your ideal couple? Who for you in your close circle or in society serves as a model of a successful couple? What couple would you like to be like?
For each of these pairs, write down on a piece of paper five things you like or five things you don’t like. Take the time to talk with a partner to implement this model (or counter-model). And see how you manage to match it.
Exercise number 4. Walking blindly
One of the partners is blindfolded. He allows the second to take him for a walk in the garden or around the house. The leading partner can offer the follower tasks for sensory perception (to touch plants, things) or for movement (climbing stairs, running, jumping, freezing in place). Allocate the same time for everyone in the role of facilitator, 20 minutes is best. It is advisable to do this exercise outdoors.
At the end of this exercise, be sure to talk about what each of you has experienced and felt. This is work on trust in a partner, but also on our idea of what the other expects from us or what he likes. And finally, this is an occasion to become aware of the ideas that you have about your partner: “My husband is strong, which means I will make him run or wade through the bushes.” Although in reality the husband is scared, and he suffers …
These exercises are offered by the psychoanalysts Anne Sauzed-Lagarde and Jean-Paul Sauzed in the book «Creating a Lasting Couple» (A. Sauzède-Lagarde, J.-P. Sauzède «Créer un couple durable», InterÉditions, 2011).