What are extraordinary relationships? It’s a question I have attempted to answer in my new book How To Have Extraordinary Relationships (Quadrille £16.99).
While I was writing it, I was focussed on the relationships we have with ourselves and others from friends, partners and family to work colleagues. But I also came to realise that we don’t just have relationships with people. We also have relationships with things – such as nature or fame – that can have a huge impact on our lives.
What are extraordinary relationships?
What I mean by extraordinary is generally a relationship that feels important, vital, interesting. It is a relationship we engage with and are curious about.
Some of us have extraordinary relationships with specific feelings (yes, really). For example, love.
Some people have extraordinary relationships with their own self.
Some have extraordinary relationships with the past, some with the future.
There are even people who have extraordinary relationships with the cosmos or the universe or even ghosts.
The relationships we focus on the most
We almost entirely focus on the relationships that we have with other people, because this is where humans mainly struggle. This is understandable. Our relationship with others is important to us. It’s how we define our sense of self in our world. We see ourselves through the lens of other people.
- I was childless and heartbroken. Nature healed me
- Saying goodbye to the family home
- My unexpected love affair – with my husband
It starts with our parents – they tell us A LOT about ourselves (which isn’t necessarily always that brilliant). Then that definition goes through many other myriads of interpretations from teachers to friends, lovers etc.
As a therapist, clients tell me that they are finding their relationships incredibly difficult. I work with them on how they can make life better – that generally comes from improving our relationships with ourselves and those around us. We do this by enhancing empathy, by actively listening to those we care about, by changing our narrative so we are not stuck and the endless cyclical story that we tell ourselves about who we are on the planet.
My strong relationship: With my home
As I started to get a sense of my own extraordinary relationships whilst engaged in deep thought about my book, I also realised that I have very strong relationships with many things that aren’t actually people.
For example, I have strong relationships with the houses that I have lived in. Some have left me relatively unmoved. They’ve literally been a roof over my head, rooms in which to shower or bath and a place to sleep. Others have had real meaning to me.
When I left my family home two years ago – the home I had lived in for 25 years and had given birth to my children in – I felt the most appalling wrench in my gut. It was absolutely heartbreaking to leave that house for the last time. It was as if the house and I were being forcibly separated unwittingly. I haven’t been able to go back to the house or even drive past it or go anywhere near it. I’m convinced that if I do, the house will shudder and I will shudder and we will burst into tears and say to each other, “Where the hell of you been?” It feels as if my world will collapse but, more importantly, somehow the house would too.
This is what makes our relationships extraordinary: It is this sense of gratitude and honouring of something that we love and has meaning to us
Yet I also know it’s important to recognise how grateful I am of that special place. It gave me such warmth and shelter for such a long time – this is what makes our relationships extraordinary. It is this sense of gratitude and honouring of something that we love and has meaning to us. It is what got me through 25 years that involved so many ups and downs. The strength and fidelity of that house gave ballast to me in an emotional way.
A relationship with fame
During my time as a journalist I interviewed many well-known people, some of them actually very famous and I often asked them about their relationship with fame. Most of them talked about fame as if it were a real thing, a throbbing energy, something to be treated with great respect.
It was also something that they couldn’t do without – the oxygen that they breathed. If you get someone who’s very honest about it, they will talk about fame as if it has a body and a soul, a real being in the way they have a relationship with it. They wake up and think about it and do the same when they go to bed. The relationship is as real to them as the ones they have with the people in their lives.
This is all pretty extraordinary, but few of us really consider the fact that we might well have extraordinary relationships with things and feelings and objects and not just people. These things get us through life. It is active rather than passive.
Ideally our extraordinary relationships are nourishing and nurturing. I felt nurtured by my house.
Many people feel nourished by feelings. A lot of people find their relationship with nature and animals as a vital part of their life.
Why we need to recognise all extraordinary relationships
In Shamanic rituals we are asked to go to a place that makes us happy and imagine ourselves there. These places can be real or imaginary. They may exist solely in our psyche. But it has a meaning for us. We have relationships with places that have meaning to us, that hold something of the essence of ourselves in them, whether it is somewhere from our childhood or somewhere we simply long to be. Many people have very connected relationships with their pets – dogs, cats, guinea pigs. We don’t just care about them, we love them. We nurture these relationships and they become part of our wellbeing and important to us in the sense of that we feel connected to something.
This is why it is important to recognise the quality of our relationships across the board.
Just because you might have a meaningful relationship with something rather than someone doesn’t make it less important.
I do believe that if we nurture, invest in and promote our capacity to love and be more loving across the board, we are creating happier, more connected lives. It’ not just about people – it is about everything.
Lucy Cavendish’s book Extraordinary Relationships is published on 25 April 2024 (£16.99 hardback)
