Category: Gilead Yeffett

A thought about dedication

Close and meaningful relationships require some dedication. To me, the idea of dedication raises two questions: what we mean by dedication and dedication to what?

Dedication is not the same as staying. We can stay in a relationship through habit, fear, or the weight of years—sharing a home and routine without committing to anything beyond preservation. True dedication is different: it is an active and deliberate choosing, renewed across time, to something larger than convenience or comfort.

It is not just the

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Why we need rituals in our relationships

We often think of big gestures such as respect, care, attention, positive regard, friendship and when relevant, erotic connection as the most important ingredients of a good relationship and yes they are. Yet, I believe that it is everyday rituals that make these gestures meaningful.

What are rituals? Rituals can be defined as expected, repetitive, routined and reliable behaviors or activities – sometimes culturally transmitted – that go beyond habit or tradition. They provide a sense of stability

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Have We Become Obsessed with Fixing Our Relationships?

Here is a link to my article on the Welldoing website. Through therapy, you can learn to adopt a new and different approach to being together.

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Pressure valves – why some tension is inevitable in relationships

A relationship is a creative pursuit – creative because it demands that we look beyond who we are right now and dare to imagine what we might become together. It asks us to constantly recalibrate as we – and our partners – evolve, shift and grow.

But here’s the paradox: a relationship is also about stability, consistency, commitment and reliability. Trust doesn’t build itself on wish alone.

So a relationship needs to be elastic enough to accommodate new discoveries about the person we’ve chosen to share our life with, yet comprehensive enough to answer the question: why you and

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Friends

This post is about my belief that friendship in committed and romantic relationship is a sentiment that not only will enrich the partners in the relationship but also carry it well into the future.

What is friendship? I often think of the meaning of a friend and what makes their friendship meaningful to me. I know that different friends inspire and evoke different feelings and experiences; some provide warmth and happiness, others provide intellectual stimulation, with some I feel at home and others remind me to stay grounded and what it means to be a friend. Sometimes friends offer a

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Water

You can never truly know another

We mostly believe that life events influence and change us; we tend to also believe that to varying degrees we are flexible and adaptable; we adjust, try to solve problems in ways that require new skills – we change our views and beliefs of what was important to us in the past and is important to us in the present.

We also only share with others some of our views, doubts, hopes and concerns and as such, we are only partly known to others.

The same applies to all of us.

Although, we assume that we think objectively about ourselves,

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A thought for March

A relationship is not just an encounter between people; we shape others and others shape us, more so in a loving relationship.

Albert Camus phrased it beautifully when he wrote that “if those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them … they could perceive what they have made of us”.

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I am because we are

Ubuntu is a Zulu concept meaning humanity, it is often translated as I am because we are.

Although, a much broader idea than how I use it here, it made me think about what it means to be an individual in a meaningful relationship – by meaningful I mean a relationship that influences and shapes the idea of who I am as a person.

To me, this is how two (or more) separate ‘I’s make a ‘we’ and how in turn, a strong ‘we’ will nurture a person’s sense of who he or she is.

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Why seduction?

Because I find it a richer way to engage with the erotic and sexual in us and in our romantic relationships. Yes, we can ask someone to have sex with us and they may say yes or no but this to me is a narrow conversation; a request misses the liveliness, excitement and anticipation that are part of flirting, being curious, imaginative and express what we like or dislike and share fantasies.

Seduction goes beyond consent and refusal, it invites us to be playful, a deep emotion that is often neglected in adulthood.

Seduction invites both (or more) partners to

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Inspires me this month: December 2018

A quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be”.

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November inspiration

Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, writes in an essay on Great Love that “detached observers always ask what does she (or he) see in him (or her)? Such questions she writes “are best left in peace: great love is never justified. It’s like a little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on; what miracle produces those green leaves? But it does exist

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