How is it that something so intrinsic to our basic nature—loving another person—should be so difficult, so challenging? Given the fact that the sustainability and perpetuation of the species is dependent upon our willingness and ability to love and provide care for one another, it seems reasonable to expect that this process should be effortless and easy.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

For many, if not most of us, relationships are anything but effortless and easy.

Intimate relationships require two seemingly mutually exclusive ways of being in order for things to work out for both partners—autonomy and connectivity—or to put it another way, togetherness and separateness.