Question

Quick Recap Of What Roles Are

The essence of every romantic relationship can be broken into these four roles; Lover, Friend, Consultant, and Supporter. How often and how well you play each role will define the balance, health, and experience of your relationship dynamic. Too much of one and not enough of another may be the reason you and your partner feel "off". The way you play your roles may even be contributing to your relationship conflict.

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What Is the Function Of The Lover's Role In A Relationship?

The role of a lover is much more simple than we make it out to be. We often assign too many expectations to the lover's role and fail to recognize where the lover's role begins and ends. We expect our lovers to do things that friends, consultants, and supporters do instead of letting lovers be fully and completely in the role of lovers. Pairing back the expectations on this role is the most important work you will do in your relationship outside of your own personal development work.

It is so important to get the lover's role right that I am standing on a preverbal soap box when I speak to you in this section. Don't overcomplicate it. Putting more unnecessary stuff in this role is like writing a vague job description that includes everything under the sun and expecting the person who takes it to be good at one key significant thing. That thing gets shuffled to the back and forgotten, and the role fails. The role of the lover is direct. Do the work to fully understand this, and then make the changes necessary to reflect this in your lover's role in your own expression within your relationship.

The main characteristics of the role of a lover are pleasure, admiration, affirmations, and regard. The big work in defining and embodying the role of a lover is to first peel away all that is not included. In the beginning, we naturally do this in our relationships without having the cognitive framework to support it. We treat our friends and lovers differently, yet we have not clearly defined and delineated the role of a friend from the lover within one partner. Having clear expectations and boundaries around this role as it relates to the role of friend within one person can create a whole lot more space and opportunity in the lover's role. Once we are aware of what is NOT included in the role of lover, we can see that many of us spend a LOT of time in the role of friend, believing it to be the role of lover. The unforeseen consequence here is that the time, energy, and effort we spend truly in the role of lover dwindles over time. We think we are doing it, but we are not. We confuse the two. No wonder we can't keep the fire alive; we are misunderstanding the responsibility of the lover role and transposing the responsibilities of the friend here instead.

Let the role of the lover be simple. Let it simply be about giving and receiving pleasure, giving and receiving admiration, giving and receiving affirmations, and holding each other in high regard. Let the lover role be about sex, touch, cuddles, massage, eye gazing, nose nuzzling, hand holding, kissing, and beautiful juicy words like poetry, love notes, declarations, letters, tokens of affection, and quality time. Recognize that putting energy, effort, and time into the friend role will balance out your zone of play but will not balance out your felt sense of intimacy and eroticism. Choose to embody the Lover role as often as you can. This is the role that we start with and then access less and less over time if we are not intentional. Find a way to begin and end your day in the lover's role for each other. That is the fast track to relational security.

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