Coaching with Stefan
Relationships & Life Together
When you care about someone, but somewhere along the way you’ve stopped really meeting each other.
Relationships change.
So do the people inside them.
The person you are today may not be the person who first entered the relationship. The same is true of the person beside you.
Sometimes nothing dramatic has happened. Life has simply become busy, familiar or complicated, and somewhere amongst work, children, money, responsibilities and everything else, something between you feels different.
You don’t have to know whether the relationship needs to change.
Sometimes it helps to understand what has changed first.
Recognition before explanation
You might recognise…
- “I love them. I'm just not sure we really see each other anymore.”
- “We talk about the children, work, money and everything that needs doing — but not much about us.”
- “I don't know whether I've changed, they've changed, or we both have.”
- “I keep things to myself because I already think I know how they'll respond.”
- “I'm there, but I'm not always really present.”
- “We seem to have become very good at playing our roles.”
- “Part of me misses who I used to be.”
- “I don't want to blame them. I want to understand what's happening between us.”
- “I'm not even sure this is about the relationship. Maybe something is happening in me.”
There is me. There is you. And there is us.
Sharing a life doesn’t mean becoming the same person.
Each person brings their own history, expectations, fears, dreams and ideas about what a relationship is supposed to look like.
Then together, you create something else:
us.
Sometimes one of those three begins disappearing.
Perhaps you lose yourself inside the relationship.
Perhaps you stop being curious about the person beside you.
Perhaps the relationship becomes so occupied with keeping life moving that there is very little space left for either of you.
Understanding what’s happening doesn’t have to begin with deciding who’s right.
Sometimes it begins by becoming curious again.
A lived connection
I entered marriage with a blueprint.
I grew up watching my parents build a marriage and raise a family.
Without really questioning it, I created a similar plan for myself.
Find someone in my mid-twenties.
Get married at 28.
Start a family by 30.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I met my first wife while living abroad. There was something almost like a permanent holiday about that period of our lives. We worked, but there was adventure, travel, freedom and something new to discover.
Then we moved home and ordinary life arrived.
By then we were engaged and planning a wedding.
I remember the feeling:
No stopping now.
So I went with the flow.
What I couldn’t see then was that I wasn’t really asking what kind of relationship or life I wanted to create.
I was following the only blueprint I knew.
I knew how to play the role. I didn’t really know myself.
When I felt trapped, I tried to find pieces of my younger self again.
I built a music studio. I made music and played gigs with other artists.
At home, I found myself behaving in ways I recognised from my father — becoming frustrated and angry when jobs or DIY didn’t go the way I wanted.
I also enjoyed attention from a woman at work.
Looking back, I think part of what attracted me wasn’t simply another person.
It was who I felt like when I received that attention.
Younger.
Freer.
Less weighed down by the role I thought I was supposed to be playing.
That leaves me with a question I couldn’t have asked myself then:
What part of myself was I trying to find through somebody else?
Writing our own story didn’t make relationships easy.
My relationship with Amanda began differently.
We were living abroad and building a life that wasn’t based so heavily on the blueprint either of us had inherited.
There was freedom in that.
Her work gave us stability while I explored ideas, started businesses and followed possibilities.
But my freedom had another side.
My income could be unpredictable. There were long hours. Networking and socialising took me away from home. Amanda carried responsibilities that I didn’t always fully appreciate at the time.
The same life could feel like possibility to me and uncertainty to her.
Neither of us had to be wrong for both experiences to be real.
That is something I understand much better today.
The person beside me has taught me about myself.
Amanda has helped me see things I don’t think I would have understood alone.
She helped me understand the difference between simply being there and actually being present with my family.
Her thoughtfulness towards other people has made me more aware of my own.
When she became more intentional about our finances, I initially resisted. Structure felt restrictive to me.
Over time I discovered almost the opposite.
Knowing where we stood financially could actually create freedom.
And she challenged me about something else.
I sometimes kept my dreams and ideas to myself because I was frightened of what she might say.
Instead of letting her respond, I was already having the conversation with her inside my own head.
She wanted me to let her in.
How often do we stop talking to the person beside us because we think we already know what they’re going to say?
I’ve come to think about relationships a little like dancing.
At the beginning, we’re often paying enormous attention to the other person.
We’re curious.
We notice what makes them laugh. What they enjoy. What excites them. We discover each other and respond to what we’re learning.
Then life happens.
Work.
Children.
Money.
Responsibilities.
Familiarity.
Perhaps sometimes we don’t need to immediately ask whether we’ve stopped loving the person beside us.
Perhaps there is another question worth exploring:
When did we stop dancing?
What happened around that time?
What did I stop bringing to the relationship?
What did you stop bringing?
What have we started expecting rather than appreciating?
Who have each of us become since we first met?
And what might dancing together look like now — not as the people we were then, but as the people we’ve become?
Your relationship doesn’t have to look like mine.
My relationships have taught me things about myself.
Yours may be teaching you something completely different.
You may want to stay together.
You may be questioning whether you do.
Your partner may not even know you’re thinking about any of this yet.
You don’t need to arrive with a verdict about the relationship.
And you don’t need to come together.
Sometimes one person simply needs somewhere to understand:
What is happening between us — and what is happening inside me?
That is enough to begin.
A conversation first
You don’t need to know what needs to change before we talk.
A conversation with Stefan. Somewhere to think honestly about yourself, the person beside you and the relationship you’re experiencing — without needing to arrive with an answer.
An unhurried twenty-minute conversation. Nothing needs to be decided.