The DNA of Relationships Read Online Free PDF

the seven-year-old asks, confused. “I don’t get to see Mommy anymore?”
    “No son, it’s not like that. It’s just that you’ll have to visit Mommy at her new house from now on. She won’t be living with us anymore. She will be living at a different place with a different family now.”
    “But, Daddy, what about our family? Why would Mommy leave me?” Jeremy sobs, pain seared on his face. “I don’t want Mommy to have a new family! What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted?”
    People like Daryl and Jeremy and the mother who left him are the main reason why I want to be a part of a national relationship revolution. There’s too much relational emptiness and pain just in our country alone. More than two thousand children every day hear what Jeremy heard. In ten years, that can translate into negatively affecting more than 7 million relationships. This has to stop!
    I believe the best way to address this crisis is to understand how God designed us to live, to understand our relational DNA. Just as understanding our physical DNA reveals the mysteries of how our bodies work, understanding our relational DNA unlocks the miracles and mysteries of how our relationships work. After five years of watching the amazing miracles happen in our marriage intensives, we have concluded that people change as soon as they understand and apply themselves to what we are calling the basic DNA of all relationships. We discovered the DNA, first, by watching these miracles and, second, by seeing the same pattern in the story of the first humans. Later in this chapter, we’ll give you the third reason why we came up with the DNA of relationships.
    We never see anyone who doesn’t want to be connected with others, to love and be loved, to share dreams and hopes, to be valued. Everyone longs for emotional, physical, and spiritual closeness and intimacy with others. Where does that longing come from? We believe it’s part of our relational DNA.
    What is the DNA of relationships? It is simply the genetic relationship code with which we were created. It’s our relational hardwiring. It’s the unalterable, immutable relationship truth that is true for all people, for all times. We’ve never seen the exception.
    To help you understand how we came up with the DNA of relationships, we want to take you back to the beginning, to the oldest story of mankind, Adam and Eve, which is really the story of us.
    The Story of Us
Adam was the first person created. He must have felt a harmonious connectedness to his environment and an intimate connectedness to God. The Garden of Eden was a true paradise, a safe place to exist. There was no war, famine, natural catastrophes, or sin. But Adam felt not only safe and at peace with God but also at peace with himself. Adam was confident of his place in the universe. God gave Adam everything he needed: work to do, a close relationship with his Creator, everything he needed to take care of himself.
    While we have no record that Adam complained about his condition in the pristine Garden, something was, in fact, missing. Even though Adam’s relationship to God was very fulfilling, God wanted to give Adam something even more—a human companion, a human connectedness. God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” 1
    We can only imagine how Adam might have responded when he first saw Eve. I suspect he felt an irresistible longing for her, for a deeper intimacy than their physical senses could experience. For God had planted deep within them a desire for an emotional and physical connection, a bonding of the inner spirit, an intimate attachment of the soul called human relationship .
    The rest of the story is familiar to everyone. God gave Adam and Eve responsibility over everything else he had made and allowed them unlimited access to the fruit of the tree of life in the center of the Garden. Life was very good for Adam and Eve. They were safe and deeply satisfied in their