Belonging in Couple Relationships
Having a ‘we’ feeling is a characteristic of successful belonging regulation in couple relationships. “With you, I am at home!”. This expresses well the fulfilment of this need in couples. Conversely, some people, in their relationship, have (and this is sometimes hard to understand) a feeling of strangeness, of not being quite at home and of having the sense that they are not speaking the same language. This can have cultural reasons, it can be to do with temperament, with origins, with education, with values, with preferences and much more. If this ‘we’ is missing, feelings of failure and overload often develop, which make giving respect to yourself and the other increasingly difficult. At some point, the partner then seems like a stranger to you. Possibly you become close (bonding), you enhance each other (self-determination), but the feeling of sharing your life is missing.
In entrepreneurial marriages, for example, the element of being ‘cut from the same cloth’ and ‘pulling on the same string’ is particularly well-developed and sometimes compensates for other things, which may be missing on the bonding level.