Are relationships a puzzle you cannot solve? Are you wondering if the puzzle box you picked up isn’t missing a few critical pieces?

You may be more correct than you know. The puzzling way we look at relationships was just one of the many issues explored in Access Consciousness^® Founder Gary Douglas and Dr. Dain Heer’s workshop “Getting the Relationship You Desire and Sex You Deserve.” This class was held recently in Houston, live-streamed around the world.

One woman attending, a bold self-confident woman with lots of success in her business, was applying her goal-oriented behavior to creating the relationship she’s unwilling to live without. She knows her type and goes after him, certain that with enough coaching from her, the man she picks can be all he can be.

The difficulty with this strategy is that it’s so very much like a jigsaw puzzle. She’s decided what space a man should fill in her life, and she’s jamming him into it, regardless of whether his shape will fit or not.

It’s also an example of what Douglas calls triangulation. Triangulation is a common way of creating in this reality. It’s a bit like what a surveyor does to create a road. A few defined places are set, like with the surveyor’s poles, and other parts of the puzzle are fit into place based on this definition.

While triangulation may work for surveying, it’s not a recommended way to create your life. First of all, it relies on definition. Definition by definition alone creates limitation. Is there any question in those defined points, or are they all conclusion and judgment and answer? Attempting to create our lives from conclusion, judgment, and answer doesn’t work any better in creating relationships than it does in any area of our lives.

Another woman, equally attractive but less confident, approached the puzzle of relationships from the other way around. She had been trying to create her relationships by fitting into the guy’s life. In effect, she was doing to herself what the first woman was doing to her potential mate. The obvious question from Douglas and Heer was, “How much are you bending, stapling, folding, and mutilating yourself to fit into his reality?”

This automatic self-sacrifice in favor of a relationship is what Douglas has called divorcing yourself. He’s written a whole book on how to avoid it, entitled, curiously enough, ­Divorceless Relationship. The divorce most people seem unable to avoid, no matter how much they try, is the divorce of themselves in favor of the other person or maintaining the relationship with them.

Are you recognizing these strategies, but still puzzled? If a relationship is what you truly desire, how should you go about creating one?

Douglas and Heer recommend creating a relationship, like everything else in life, from question rather than judgment, conclusion, and answer. Questions create possibilities, whereas answers limit all possibilities to whatever you’ve already decided the answer is. A question empowers, while an answer disempowers.

How would you create a relationship from question? A great way to start would be to ask, “Would this person add to my life?” Asking that question shifts your creation from judgment, answer, and conclusion to question, choice, possibility and contribution—the elements of true creation. It’s also a way to shift you out of creating from triangulation, in which everything is defined and fit into a smaller and smaller box, to extrapolation, in which elements beyond definition are combined to create something that’s greater than what existed before. Doesn’t that sound like more fun?

Living in a relationship from question allows the relationship to stay fresh. Instead of expecting the person you wake up with to be the same one you went to bed with the night before, you can ask questions like, “Who is this person going to be today?” or “Who are we and what grand and glorious adventures can we have?”

Looking for a relationship as something that adds to your life shifts you out of perpetual jigsaw puzzle-land. You are no longer the incomplete puzzle looking for your missing piece, nor are you the missing piece trying to fit into someone else’s puzzle. How much judgment of yourself and your partner were you required to keep in place to see either of you as incomplete in any way? This very judgment limits your awareness and receiving of who you truly are, by necessity, because all judgment limits receiving of anything that doesn’t line up with it.

If you left the jigsaw puzzles on the shelf, who would you be? What grand and glorious adventures in relationships could you then create? What are the infinite possibilities?