Questions for a sustainable relationship

Sustainability hinges on questions, not answers.

My suspicion is that many relationships become difficult to sustain because we demand answers rather than create space for questions that take time to respond to.

Even questions that don’t have any answers. Or those whose answers change with time and circumstance.

Here are some questions to ponder on our own as we think about sustaining the relationships that we care about:

• What do I want right now, and how will I get it?

• Where am I requiring myself to know what I cannot know right now?

• How will I exercise grace for myself in the face of uncertainty?

• Is what I want right now something that is available in this relationship?

• If what I want right now is not something that is available in this relationship, do I want to request availability, or do I want to seek elsewhere?

• How will I hold myself in the face of rejection?

• What feels scary, and how do I honor that fear?

• How am I taking responsibility for my own feelings? Where am I requiring my partner(s) make changes for the sake of my feelings?

• Where am I forbidding myself to make requests for the sake of taking responsibility for my feelings?

• Where am I making myself wrong for feeling certain feelings?

• In the midst of a storm, what am I building capacity for?

• Where do I seek shelter in the face of exhaustion, and do I like my answer?

• What capacity do I have to hold space for my partner(s)’ humanity?

• How will I exercise grace for myself as I sharpen my words to communicate what I am really thinking and feeling?

• How much of the story in my head in mine, and how much of it is theirs?

Here are some questions to ask one another to partner in building sustainability:

• Are you willing to walk with me, show up with me, and relate to me even when I do not have capacity for what you want from me?

• How will we exercise grace for one another when we are both unavailable for one another?

• How will we have each other’s back in a way that feels sustainable to each of us?

• What does it look like to fill our own cups, and where will we need help from the other?

• How can we build even greater safety in our relationship to practice communicating our truth?

• How do we want to show up for one another in ways that we have been absent in the past?

• Are you willing to partner with me in unpacking the vague, uncertain, and unfamiliar parts of each of us if it means that we get to see more of one another, even if it means that we may trigger some past hurt?

• How will we nurture our own selves in the face of hurt so that we may show up for one another?

• What does it look like to have generative conversations?

• In the scenario where we are no longer available for each other, how do we want to show love and honor one another’s sovereignty and agency?

These are questions I ask myself every single day when I am interacting with the people in my life.

The result is that I end up making fewer and fewer requirements from others because I practice communicating my own truth to myself and knowing what it is that I need exactly.

When we have no requirements, we become a safe space for the other to let down their hair. There is no power dynamic. There is no oppressor. There is only humanity.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t feelings. We feel deeply. We even feel alone. We feel frustrated. We feel anger.

And yet we always come back home to ourselves. We come back home to our relationships. We always reassess where we feel safety and where we don’t. We make adjustments, just like anything else we build as human beings.

We ask ourselves what sustainability looks like, and we allow ourselves to change our answers.

For me, love is saying yes to the hard things for what we care about.

What do you care about, and how do you want to say yes, even if it feels hard?

Here’s to connecting more deeply with your own humanity and your relationships.

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If you are feeling endlessly frustrating in your relationships and feel like pulling your hair every time you think about how to rectify the relationships that affect your life, welcome to the majority of the population.

We never talk about this because we think that love is a very simple decision and that we’re just supposed to feel and exercise love the same way over and over again in a perfect way.

Even though we know this is a myth, we end up avoiding our suppressed feelings altogether because it feels like too much work and shame to deal with.

I don’t advocate for this.

I advocate for easier conversations and seamless partnerships. Especially when you want to build something with your partner.

What you want to build matters. How you want to love and be loved matters.

Because without what you getting what you want, where are you, exactly?

I want to know what you really want. And I want to go after it with you.

Partner with me as your relationship coach: angela-han.com/offer.