a meaningful, significant, relationship...

if you never confront anyone, you’re never going to be close to anyone. because closeness only comes through conflict and confrontation.

in life, there are two kinds of relationships. on one side you have shallow, superficial relationships. that’s what most of the people in the world are – shallow, superficial relationships.

on the other side, you have meaningful, deep, significant, intimate relationships. soul-to-soul bonding and connection.

how do you get from superficial relationship to intimacy whether in a friendship, a marriage, a partnership, whatever? how do you get from superficial to deep, close, intimate connection with another person?

there’s only one way. that is to go down through the tunnel of truth. in the tunnel of truth, you deal with all the issues of the relationship you really don’t want to deal with. “let’s push that aside... let’s not talk about that... let’s have happy smiles…” you push it down. but in the tunnel of truth, you have chaos, you have conflict and you have confrontation. and it’s not fun.

when you leave a shallow relationship and say, “we’re going to take this relationship to a new level,” and you go into that tunnel of truth, it’s going to scare you to death. it’s dark, it’s dank, it’s scary. sometimes it’s painful. sometimes it can get a little loud. everything in your body in the middle of the conversation says, “let’s just back out to the shallow side and smooth over it and stay out. it’s a whole lot easier. let’s just preserve the status quo, and don’t rock the boat.”

but if you will stay in that tunnel of truth and deal with those issues and come to some compromise, deal with some issues in a person’s life that need to be confronted, you will eventually come up on the other side into genuine intimacy.

you only confront people you want to be close to.

just a thought from the front porch…