Love, look at the two of us – deepen your relationship via pop songs

Here’s a fun exercise to make your relationship deeper. Listen with your partner to “For all we know”, famously covered by the Carpenters. Then talk about it; I’ve also suggested an exercise you could do. That’s it, listen and share, and your relating will move a step towards deeper intimacy. (More relationship posts / more pop songs of truth and love)

I got the idea from some great research by Dr. Ron Rogge that newly-wed couples can halve their divorce rate simply by watching and discussing five movies about everyday relating. I don’t claim any such dramatic results for this playlist of pop songs. But listen together to these tracks, discuss them together, and you will at the least have a more loving understanding of each other.

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For all we know aka Love, look at the two of us
by Larry Meredith (made famous by the Carpenters)

This is a grown-up understanding about love. Links and covers are below.

Love, look at the two of us
Strangers in many ways
Let’s take a lifetime to say
I know you well
But only time will tell us so
And love may grow for all we know.

Love is not a one-off happening. It is not a final delivery. It is a continually evolving process, an endless work in progress. It’s sure wonderful to have the certainly and trust in your sweetheart that Emeli Sande conveys so beautifully (Emeli Sande This is where I sleep, Next to me). We all long for that. But even when we’ve got it, a love relationship is still a process, still an unfolding, still a journey of trust and intimacy from moment to moment to moment. “Love look at the two of us” captures that truth perfectly.

I think this, by Sarah Anderson, is the best cover. She brings such a depth from the heart. Sarah Anderson – For all we know [on Last FM]

Or on Spotify: Sarah Anderson – For All We Know

And there’s this as well. Are relationship therapists, hardened as we are to the bitterness, vengefulness and hurt in the front lines of the war of the sexes, secretly romantic and soppy to a fault? Are marriage counsellors secretly delighted when two people fall back deeply in love with each other? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

So here is a sweet, romantic and touching film clip. It’s also one that brings back the very happiest memories, from the time that the film came out, of love in my own life. And it happens to have lyrics both beautiful and true. It’s OK to cry.

“Love look at the two of us” sung by Larry Meredith in the wedding scene from Lovers and Other Strangers (1970)

Here’s a fun exercise, different from the other listening-to-pop-song ones.

Take10, 20 or 30 minutes and work together in co-operation to compose the story of your relationship, but ONLY the good moments. ONLY include moments that both of you enjoyed. You might want to include great learnings that came from fights. But don’t include the fight, unless of course you both enjoyed it. Otherwise, ignore all bad, negative moments. Just the good stuff.

Take plenty of time to bring back details, fine details. You want explicit memories of specific moments. However, the memory tends to smear things together into categories like “all the meals we cooked together.” So you need to do the work to un-smear that into specific meals you cooked that you really enjoyed. Get some paper, draw a line, and mark points on order on the line for each memory.

Now, look at this all-good relationship not as two people connecting, but as something in itself, with its own life. When you push all the bad stuff away, what is the good stuff like? Forget the bad stuff right now.

If the relationship was a river, what kind would it be? Steady, thin, wide, rushing, meandering, changeable? Above ground or underground?
If the relationship was an animal, what species would it be? What are its characteristics: playful, wild, tame, bold, hesitant, mischievous?
What would make that animal bigger, stronger, happier?
Looked at as one thing like this, what are the good qualities of this relationship in just three words or phrases (you each get three.)
Still with only the all-positive relationship story are its downsides in not more than three phrases?
How could you live the positive qualities more? Could you live them more in this room while you are talking?
If the story continued into the future with only and always these good qualities, what would that look like?