Defining Partnership vs Simply Being in a Relationship
I’ve had a lot of relationships, but I don’t think I’ve felt a true sense of partnership in all of them. It took understanding that you can have a relationship and still feel no sense of partnership for me to realise how important it is to define what partnership actually looks like to you.
A relationship is about the connection between two people and can exist without those people necessarily functioning as a team.
A partnership, on the other hand, describes how those two people choose to operate within that relationship. There’s a sense of shared responsibility, mutuality, collaboration and consideration.
How you approach those things, or to what degree they’re shared, is individual and depends on both partners’ needs. There isn’t a definitive way that a partnership should look. But I’m finding that when you reframe your approach from desiring a relationship to desiring a partnership, it really flicks a switch in terms of helping you define what you actually want your relationship to look like and how both partners (uniquely) show up.
There’s an assumed sense of mutual support in partnership that simply being in a relationship doesn’t always provide.