Playing Through Issues Instead of Working On Them: Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on Conscious Loving

Kathlyn Hendricks has a point she wants to add to what Gay has been saying. Most people walk into a committed relationship carrying an assumption: that being close means meeting in the middle, giving things up, letting go of what you wanted. You hear it in the jokes people make. Enjoy yourself while you can, because marriage puts an end to all of it. She and Gay looked at that belief and decided to do the opposite. In their first book, Conscious Loving, they describe making an actual commitment to have fun with each other, to treat their relationship as a place for a good time rather than a slow surrender.

What surprised them was practical. When you stop pouring hours into power struggles and arguments, a surprising amount of time opens up. That freed-up time becomes room for creating things together. Underneath the fun, though, is something they consider the real reward: a close relationship lets you find out who you actually are. You keep discovering more of what they call your genius, the thing you came here to contribute, and you help each other grow it, both your own and the shared genius of the partnership.

Her larger claim is that a relationship can be somewhere you play through what comes up rather than labor over it. The more at home you become in your own body and feelings, the easier the fun gets, and the more of your attention goes toward two questions: what do we most want to do, and what can I do to help you build the thing you want. When something difficult surfaces, they lean on honesty, on owning their part, on saying what they feel, and that moves it along quickly. Then they drop back into enjoying each other, and some of that spills outward.

Gay adds the piece he considers hardest to pull off. Put yourself on what he calls a no-blame diet: no blame, no criticism, kept as clean as you can keep it. Do that well and strange good things start happening. Nobody manages it on the first try. The two of them had to recommit to it dozens of separate times over several years before it held. The return on that effort has been large. They can point to roughly 20 years without a critical word passing between them, and 15 years in their current house with nobody saying anything critical to anyone else in it, give or take whatever the cats might be muttering to each other at three in the morning.