Relationships: Finding Middle Ground - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. You actually do not have to have the same views. In fact, a lot of people think that differences are a great source of variety if you let yourself appreciate the differences between you. We like to think of relationships as a kind of dance, and it is a dance of closeness and separateness. And there are times when you are going to want to do things together, and there are gonna be lots of times where one of you is interested in something else in your career path, or something else that you are investigating, or a shift in what you are wanting to do in your career. We live so long now, and society is moving so quickly that people really can have more than one or two careers in their lifetime. And those periods of transition can be stressful for a relationship, because it can bring out fears of how we are gonna make things work, how we are gonna have enough money, who is gonna be in charge of the kids, are we gonna be living in different places, is everyone gonna have to move... It brings up a lot of different questions, and what we found is most important is each of you really following your deepest creative urges, because that is what is going to renew your relationship. That is what is gonna really fuel your relationship long-term; is are you supporting each other's creativity? Are you supporting what we call "your genius"? What it is that you love to do such that when you are doing it, time disappears. And if you are looking for that, and you are looking for that in your partner, you are gonna keep moving into, over the life of your relationship, accelerated creativity, more and more co-creativity where you are finding things that you like to do together, and you may be opening up whole new skills in yourself that you did not even really know that you had. So, for example, when I got together with Gay I had no idea that I would become a relationship expert. If you had seen me back then, I was a hippy, had long hair, I was a dance movement therapist. I taught people how to tune into their body language by being together and really exploring together what it is we both love to do. We have grown over the years in lots of different career paths that have kept feeding back into renewing our relationship. And one of the other things that I want to be sure that you do is let yourself know that there can be times of what we call "individuation" that can go on for more than a week or two. You might be on a career path. For example, one of our friends decided in his 30s that he wanted to become a physician. And that is a long path, you know, a career path of 6 to 8 years. So sharing that with his partner was a bit of a conversation, but they kept communicating with each other, and she was also keeping her life juicy by doing what she wanted to do, and giving him the space to really grow in the way that was most meaningful to him, and he brought that appreciation back to their relationship, and they are more deeply connected now, and he is a physician.