I’ve been writing a lot about personal growth and maturity in relationships.

I am inspired by the work of Peter Kramer, who says that personal growth happens within relationships. The challenges of loving another human being and accommodating the relationship help make us mature.

Growing within a love relationship is a learning process; a difficult one, because for anyone beyond the adolescent years, it requires unlearning, as well as facing hard truths about oneself.

We expend so much energy in our relationships, trying to “communicate,” to “get our partner to understand us.”

We battle, we rage, we contradict.

We get offended at what they tell us about ourselves.

We try to tune them out.

But what if they’re right?

Peter Kramer reminds us that personal growth happens within relationships. I’ve been trying to understand What does he mean by this?

This is what I came up with this weekend:

I make my living as a private tutor.

One of my students is a 16-year-old high school junior, enrolled in an elective English course entitled Psychology and Literature.

His most recent assignment was to research a mental illness and then write a creative piece from inside the mind of a person with this disorder.

What do you think of this assignment?

• Is it helpful to get young people to try to imagine what mental illness might be like?
• Is it disrespectful towards people with mental illnesses?

Of course I referred my student to the resources and blogs available here on PsychCentral, and I had him read excerpts from The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon. We also discussed the works of Kay Redfield Jameson.

Here’s his creative piece.  We’d like to know what you think!

P. and I are making some special time this weekend to enjoy some of the things that keep us close: Good food, great music, and time to relax and appreciate each other without the world intruding.

In anticipation, I’ve revisited some of my most personal posts:

In Emotional Sea Water: A Destructive Cycle of Love and Unmet Needs, I was reflecting on painful relationship patterns I had fallen into, and which I believe I have seen in other people as well.

Hope for Love: Don’t Leave Just Yet was my Valentine’s Day tribute to my present relationship and all the hard work we have invested in it.

I’m not going to talk here about the obvious problems with deceitful affairs, all the hurt and damage that happens when people lie to and cheat on their loved ones.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about other psychological and emotional losses that might occur when people triangulate their affections.

I’ve been musing about relationships in which three people are involved.

Immediately we think of extra-marital affairs.

But first, let’s explore the qualities of a triangle. In geometry, the triangle is the most stable of figures. The girders of buildings and bridges contain triangles to strengthen the structures and keep them from collapsing.

Murray Bowen, the prominent family systems theorist, said that the basic family unit was the triangle. He said that when tension or anxiety arises between two family members, a third gets “triangled in,” in order to relieve the stress.

Bowen also cautioned that, although stress is relieved, the actual problem which created the tension to begin with does not get solved.

Of course triangles are also used in love relationships, for much the same reason:

You are who you sleep with is a line out of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

I find it interesting that Rand was sleeping with two men at the time she wrote this.

And they were very different guys!

Ayn’s husband, Frank O’ Connor, seems to have been mild-mannered and not nearly as ambitious and outspoken as his famous wife. He was devoted, adoring and supportive to the end of Ayn’s life. This is from the book The Facets of Ayn Rand:

Frank understood Ayn. He knew what she valued, he knew what to say to help her restore her view of life and give her the motivation—the fuel—to move forward. And he didn’t give up; he spoke for hours until he convinced her. And equally important, she respected his understanding of her—she knew she could turn to him for that encouragement.

Frank even tolerated the open affair Ayn had with her protege, Nathaniel Branden.

Those of you who have read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand likely recognize my title line. It’s my favorite sentence out of the book, and it captures the relationship theory of matched differentiation, which says that people choose partners at the same maturity level as they are.

It especially interests me that, as she wrote Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was sleeping with two men. One was her husband Frank O’Connor, and the other was her much-younger protege, Nathaniel Branden.

The most famous line of all out of Atlas Shrugged is: Who is John Galt?