How many relationships do you know of that you would regard as high functioning and responsible for bringing out the best in each person?
Neuroscientist Bianca Acevedo and her colleagues took brain scans of people in long-term relationships and discovered that only 10% were fulfilling and happy.
Most people struggle to nurture the conditions necessary for a flourishing relationship and maintain interactions that result in passionate coupledom, which the researchers dubbed as ‘swans’.
As with so many other areas of life, our childhoods set the framework for our attachment style, schemas, anusayas and other blindspots which sabotage our chances for optimal connection and leave us in the ugly duckling stage of development.