When I guide a couple, we begin by talking about their dreams and aspirations. We then distinguish between the dance of survival and the dance of life in connection. and we establish the bridge between them.
Then, in my notebook, I draw two circles.
One circle represents one partner. The other circle represents the other partner.
Inside the circles I draw a couple of dots to represent neighborhoods that exist now. And the arrows extending from the circles represent the ever expanding inner worlds of each partner.
There is also a bridge connecting the two.
It is a drawing I have made countless times.
One day, something unexpected happened.
As I looked at those two circles, I found myself asking a question that had never occurred to me before.
What is inside those circles?
The answer came immediately.
Neighborhoods.
It was one of those beautiful moments when an idea arrives all at once, and you know it has something important to teach you.
At first, I simply began placing into those circles the things couples had already shared with me.
The neighborhood of work.
The neighborhood of family.
The neighborhood of illness.
The neighborhood of childhood.
The neighborhood of raising children.
Each one belonged to the unique world of that person.
And suddenly, I realized that when we are in relationship, we are constantly being invited to cross a bridge and visit one another’s neighborhoods.
The metaphor immediately changed the way I understood connection.
We are not simply talking to one another, we are visiting worlds.
Each of us carries a rich inner landscape, shaped by our experiences, our memories, our joys, our disappointments, our longings, and our dreams.
Some neighborhoods are well known to us, others we visit only occasionally, some have become places we avoid, and still others are waiting quietly to be discovered.
The more I worked with this metaphor, the more alive it became.
It gave couples a gentle, respectful way to become curious about one another.
Instead of trying to change the other person, they could simply become a visitor.
Instead of assuming they already understood, they could ask, “What is it like to live here?”
That question changes everything because relationships deepen not when we become experts on one another, but when we remain curious.
Curiosity allows us to cross the bridge, to encounter one another, and it reminds us that there is always more to discover in the person we connect with.
As this metaphor continued to unfold, I made another discovery.
Not all neighborhoods are alike.
Some are places of deep pain and challenge, but there are also places where we feel most alive, most inspired, and most fully ourselves.
Those became what I came to call Precious Neighborhoods.
And it is there that I almost always choose to begin with a couple because experiencing the joy of visiting a precious neighborhood is one of the ways we get the resources needed to visit neighborhoods of challenge later in the journey.