Non violent communication (and the like) are great for navigating conflict with kindness yet they will dry up your relationship of all aliveness and raw expression if overdone..

Spiritual teachings are great to empower you and nourish personal responsibility yet they will easily turn into by-passing, coping mechanisms when it comes to addressing relational issues..

Strong boundaries, commitments and vows are great to create a safe and reliable structure yet too much rigidity and inflexibility is bound to make things break.

Understand that not only because you have a hammer at hand every problem is a nail.

The same goes for the teachers you follow:

Understand the tool they provide yet don’t reduce your romantic relationships to an over-simplified philosophy.

Relationships are living, evolving entities.

Pockets of life and mystery not meant to be solved, yet aching to be experienced.

Amplified bubbles of emotion, sensation, beauty and pain that serve as great catalyst for spiritual transformation..

And as such, every time you try to put a box of labels and patterns around it, you will either suffocate it or watch it explode and prove your silly mental constructs wrong.

Learn all you can and then put it aside, for love is an art -not a science.