An invitation to the "intimacy" dance...

At its core, a healthy intimate relationship is fluid. Its fluidity is what makes it stable. This works a bit like riding a bicycle. If you keep pedaling forward, staying upright is easy. Once you stop pedaling, you’re almost sure to fall over.

In relationships, finding stability through fluidity is called co-regulation. Emily Butler and Ashley Randall define co-regulation as a "continuous unfolding of individual action that is susceptible to being continuously modified by the continuously changing actions of the partner.”[1] 

That’s a mouthful!  

Basically, co-regulation says that a couple’s interactions can’t be reduced to the behavior or experience of either of them because each is repeatedly regulating the behavior of the other. Their behaviors and experiences are intertwined.

This means that what happens between the two people is more important to the relationship than what happens within either of them. Said another way, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

Let’s take something as simple as holding hands.

One partner reaches for the other’s hand. The other responds. That response can be positive and enthusiastic, or neutral and noncommittal, or rejecting and hostile. Whichever it is, how the first partner receives that response will influence what he or she does next, setting off a series of reciprocating responses. That series can flavor, if not determine, what happens over the next few hours.

Most couples have a strong need to identify the meaning behind the reciprocating responses.

For instance, one partner, or both, might “edit” the sequence. Like a film editor, he or she can frame the series as starting and ending with certain actions to support his or her perspective or prove a point. Editing offers a partial and biased picture of the interaction. It tends to foster conflict.  

Or one partner might focus only on what the other did or said, even diagnosing the other (“He/She is a narcissist”), overlooking his or her own contribution to the situation.

Trying to understand what happens between two people by editing out parts of their interaction, or by describing the behavior of just one, will always fall short.It misses the intricacy and complexity of the “dance” between them that is moving the relationship from point A to point B. By attending to what happens between you and your partner, you open the door to the information essential to creating the kind of relationship you desire.

[1] Butler, E. A., and Randall, A. K. (2013). Emotional Coregulation in Close Relationships. Emotional Review, 5(2), 202-210).  http://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912451630