A Celestial Model for Relationships

Trust and Virtue

Photo by Braňo on Unsplash

Context

I’m still pursuing a life-long relationship with my wife. This coming August will mark our 14th year anniversary and the ideas below best capture my explanation for the phases we’ve gone through together and something I think I’ve learned over the years. The reference point for this article is relationships best described as, ‘life-partner romantic relationships.’

Trust is No Substitute for Virtue

Trust is necessary but not sufficient for a well nourished relationship. If you look around at the relationships that have ended, they all end as trust erodes. What does that tell you? Trust alone is not sustaining, because it’s an exhaustible resource based on how you feel about someone else’s actions. In order to keep your trust reserves at healthy levels, then you must learn to act virtuously. Trust is most powerful when used intermittently as a tool of precision; virtue keeps the spear of trust sharp. 

It is up to the parties in the relationship to determine and define what virtue means within the context of their bond. 

A Celestial Model of Relationships

I’ve been imagining a relationship analogy over this last week. Our relationships are interactions between celestial bodies. Our lives are our galaxies, and in our heliocentric system  we are the sun. When we meet other suns everything still revolves around us, so we wrestle one another in an attempt to be the axis mundi, leaving both suns smaller, colder, and inadequate. These tiny stars are ill suited to foster and nurture environments of lasting love. 

I believe making a new mega sun the center of a shared solar system is necessary and sufficient  for vitality in a forever relationship. A relationship can hobble along with trust alone but it will only be a shell of what it otherwise could be.  

Now, I’ve introduced two ideas: trust is no substitute for virtue and competing suns make for inadequate balls of fire, so I’ll try to put them together. In the context of relationships, trust is required for the forming of a new sun, but it can’t nurture its growth. It takes virtue to nourish the growth of the third sun, but you can’t determine what will be virtuous to the relationship without conversing deeply about what that means for your relationship. Once the third sun has grown into the largest star, then everything else in your shared space will gravitate towards it, and be nurtured by it. 

If we break down this idea into parts, here’s what each step might entail:

• Coupling: This first step requires trust. Each sun goes under mitosis, the cleaved parts bond to each other creating a third sun. This step isn’t possible without trust, but we aren’t just interested in the creation of an infantile sun, this new sun represents the relationship and in order for it to fulfill its place as the center of a couples shared cosmos, then it needs to grow, and it only grows through virtue.

• Confessing: I’m using this word because this is what it takes to learn what types of behaviors will be virtuous in a partnership for life. This word is often associated with repentance, but what it really is, at its essence, is unadulterated sharing of all things. Without this step you’ll have no idea how to nurture this new sun, this is the ‘know how’ step.

• Nurturing: Virtuous acts as defined by the partners in the relationship are the fuel for the growth of this new planet. As you develop a habit of virtuous acts the sun grows. When the sun is larger than each of the preexisting suns you start to know and feel the difference in your bond.

• Basking: The new larger and healthier sun is a perpetual source of benevolence and virtue. It will sustain, inspire, motivate, and inform your partnership. Furthermore, all other planets in your solar system will benefit from this beacon as well, they too will bask in its rays and grow and learn from its light.

Closing

This isn’t a call for one person to sacrifice everything for another. This is a call for both people to learn to make decisions in defense and in support of the relationship. Treat the relationship as if it is an entity all its own and see how you feel. This may lead you to discover some counter-intuitive truths, this may fly in the face of some of our social conventions, but I feel it's an understated path to a partnership of a lifetime.