Why Fixing Your Relationship Won’t Help — Until You Do This First

On contact, lost connection, and finding your way back.

This morning, after letting out the hens, the ducks, and the goose (that we have named Queen Margrethe, because she is majestic), I walked across the yard in the morning sun and found Theo already in the hammock.

The sheep grazing in the meadow. The Pyrenees rising up behind it all. The sun just starting to rise to this new day.

We’ve been here in Recurt in the south of France for almost three weeks now. And every morning that the weather has allowed — which has been most of them — we’ve spent about an hour together in the hammock, before the day begins.

We start by praying. Expressing gratitude. Asking for guidance: how can we be in contact with as much love as possible today? Not just in ourselves, our relationship, but also with everyone we meet. Then we read from a little box of spiritual messages — a gift from our mentors when we visited them in Austria on the way here. We talk about what the words stir in us, and it is always so inspiring. And then we meditate together, while the sun rises higher and warmer over the Pyrenees.

This morning, walking across that yard, I thought: this is what the trip has given us more than anything else. Not the nature, not the cheese, not even the slow unhurried days — though all of that has been extraordinary. It’s this. The space for a shared morning practice. Time to come to contact with the divine together, before anything else asks anything of us.

And it made me want to write to you about contact. Because I think it might be the most important thing in a relationship — and maybe one of the most overlooked.

What I mean by contact

You know that feeling when you’re fully present — all of you — and life and you are just aligned? No static. No gap. Just flow.

That’s contact. Contact with yourself, with love, with life.

From that place, synchronicity shows up. Things fall into place. Even what’s hard feels meaningful. I know you recognize it, because it’s the place where everything just works — where you move through the day with a quiet ease you can’t quite explain.

When both Theo and I arrive there together in the morning, our relationship simply can’t be anything other than in contact too. It’s almost effortless.

The cog that slips

But when one of us loses that contact? You feel it instantly. Something starts to chafe. Like a cog that’s slipped out of place. And the instinct — for most of us — is to fix the relationship or our partner. To talk it out, analyze it, try harder.

And I’m convinced that’s exactly why it gets harder.

The relationship isn’t the problem — it’s just the space where what is present shows up. The lost contact is the problem.

When we try to solve a relationship issue from a place where we’ve lost contact with ourselves, we’re working from the wrong level. We’re rearranging furniture when the foundation has shifted.

What this trip has made possible

Theo and I each have our own individual ways of finding contact — practices we’ve carried for many years. But what this time in France has given us is something we don’t always have at home: a shared space. A morning ritual we enter together, without the usual demands of ordinary life pulling us in different directions before we’ve even had our morning coffee.

And the difference is remarkable. When the practice is shared, it becomes so much stronger. It’s not just two people individually finding their own center — it’s two people arriving at that center together, before the day has even started.

That shared contact becomes the invisible thread running through everything that follows.

The question I want to leave you with

You don’t need to be in the south of France for this. You don’t need a hammock or a goose named Queen Margrethe.

But I am curious about you: what’s your way of finding contact? With yourself, with love, with life? And is there space in your relationship for finding it together?

I’d genuinely love to know. With Love, Beatrice

PS: And if you’re feeling called to explore what it means to build a relationship from this place — from contact, from love rather than fear — my program Next Level of Love is where we go deep into exactly that. You can find it at beatricekarinsdotter.se/next-level-of-love.