Your Relationship Is Like a Broadway Play. A metaphor top keep relationships vibrant and alive. It’s great news for actors to get a role on Broadway and star in a play that lasts for years. But here’s the bad news: when they play a demanding role six times a week for several years, the part can get stale.When performers start sleep walking through the role, the end is near. The challenge is how to stay fresh and leave the audience interested after a thousand performances.
What do they do? They keep finding fresh ways of expressing themselves while maintaining the integrity of the character and the play. This requires creativity and the willingness to dig deep within themselves to develop the nuances to stay fresh for every performance. Screen actors only have to hit the perfect notes once and the performance is captured forever. Live actors don’t have that luxury.
Courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net and Stuart Miles
Your Relationship Is Like A Broadway Play
So what is this connection to your relationship? It seems to me in the beginning of a relationship, the Honeymoon Phase, most of the right notes are a hit. They are easy and effortless. Couples find it easy to be in the relationship. Over time, however, in the Conflict/Resolution Phase, routine sets in. The script becomes predictable. You stop digging deeper to keep things fresh. The play becomes stale. The finger pointing whether explicitly or implicitly begins. The show is in danger of shutting down.
But you do have advantages that the best actors on Broadway don’t have. You are not limited to the same script every day. You are both the actor and director in your relationship play. If you don’t like how a scene is being played out, you can change the dialogue, the intensity, the meaning of it, and even the timing of it. You can say….“Let’s finish this scene later when we both have more energy or “let’s do a redo” when we want to exercise more relational behavior.
Your Relationship Is Like A Broadway Play
Because you and your partner are both the writers and the main actors in your play, you have enormous latitude to energize specific scenes like, coming home after work, going to bed, sex, vacations, holidays, parenting, daily responsibilities, managing money, etc.
As a Marriage Counselor working with Couples for over 25 years I help them keep looking for ways to energize and keep their relationships fresh acquiring essential tools for communication and harmony. I say do the behavior and the feelings will eventually come. The phrase “fake it til you make it” helps keeps the effort going.
If you need help energizing your relationship and keeping it from becoming stale please do not hesitate to contact me at (858) 735-1139 or email me at [email protected]
