What Keeps a Relationship Thriving: Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks in Conversation
Katie: I grew up as a very serious child, and I stayed serious well into my young adult years. Then Gay came along. Since knowing him I've laughed more than I did across all those earlier decades combined. To me that laughter points at something real. A relationship that's actually working is one where you take joy in each other, where you keep hunting for small ways to celebrate the other person and crack them up.
We've taught each other how to savor life and, more than that, how to savor the little pockets of time inside the relationship itself. Sometimes that means passing along a cartoon one of us loves. Sometimes it's a dumb body joke. Gay will break into a spontaneous little dance for me because he knows how much I love movement. And I collect articles I come across that I can tell will land with him. You end up adding to each other instead of elbowing each other for room, because each of you already shows up feeling like a complete person.
Underneath all of that is something Katie and I dug into very early on. At the root of almost any relationship problem sits a piece of yourself you haven't learned to love yet.
Gay: The first book I put out after Katie and I got together was called Learning to Love Yourself. I actually wrote it during our first summer together, because I kept noticing it in myself. Whenever I hit some communication snag with her, I could trace it back to a part of me I'd already fallen out of love with. Anger, maybe, or fear, or sadness. Some corner of myself I hadn't done much work on. Being willing to let those feelings come up slowly, and then to love and honor them, changes everything. If you walk into a relationship with one foot already out the back door, meaning you're holding part of yourself in reserve rather than offering all of it, you've basically built in the distance that eventually pulls the whole thing apart.
A lot of what went wrong for me in my twenties came down to exactly that. Looking back, I wasn't really present. I didn't have both feet on the floor, both feet inside the house. I didn't know myself well enough to understand what I was even agreeing to when I committed to someone.
Katie and I were lucky in our timing. By the point we met, we'd each done a little work on ourselves, enough to start putting words to things and, now and then, to float an actual positive thought. The one I formed went something like this: all that Sturm und Drang, all the negative charge I'd carried around relationships, what if I flipped it around and aimed at something I wanted to build instead of the thing I was trying to avoid? Maybe then I could make something good. That turn happened 35 years ago, and it's still going strong.