The allure of romantic love casts its spell far and wide. Unfortunately, 'happy ever after' is often an illusion that causes, perhaps, the most personal suffering.
It's a hard illusion to face because every time you fall in love everything seems perfect: your skin glows with the intoxication of passion's perfume and your once-aching heart is fulfilled with love's promise. But let's be honest … how long does this feeling last?
Inevitably, the intensity fades away and we come back down to earth with a bump: your lover is no longer perfect and you discover seemingly irreconcilable differences. Disillusionment sets in as conflict, pain, boredom and stagnation replace the spark of magic that brought you together in the first place.
I've seen this happen time and time again, in my friends, my family, couples who come to me for counselling … and of course, in myself! It seems that love - at least romantic love - is not enough to keep a relationship alive.
Because, like so many people, I went through so much difficulty and pain in my relationships, I finally got wise and started asking myself some pertinent questions.
Like: "If love itself is not enough to keep a relationship alive, then what else is required?" And: "If happy ever after is such an illusion, then what is the secret that makes love grow?" Not to mention: "If relationship is so full of difficulty, then why bother at all?"
The answer I came up with can be summed up in one sentence: because relationship holds the greatest opportunity for transformation.
Far from being a romantic illusion, love holds the key to awakening … but only if there is a willingness for emotional and spiritual growth. The thing I realised is: love always brings up anything unlike itself to be seen and be healed. If we could truly understand the power of this statement, we would transform our relationships and our lives forever.
Love is ultimately the same as light, the basic fabric of Existence. So the more love there is, the more whatever is unconscious will be brought to the light of consciousness in order to be transformed.
When my present partner and I first got together, we were clear we didn't want to play the same old relationship games. Both of us had been burnt badly by our previous experiences and this time we wanted to do it consciously!
Very early on we identified two principles we would have to live by if our relationship was to live up to its promise. The first was Truth. This meant having clarity or knowing the purpose of our relationship.
The questions we asked ourselves were: "Are we just stumbling through relationship, hoping that things are OK? Or is our intention to deepen into love even though we don't necessarily know how?"
The second principle was Love. This meant having an open heart and allowing all possibilities. We asked ourselves: "Do we have a list of rules and expectations for how a relationship should be? Or are we willing to explore how it is and where it might take us?"
We rapidly worked out that Love and Truth were universal principles at the heart of every relationship but that they get distorted over time. In our explorations, we discovered four guidelines that could act as life-rafts to hold onto when the sea gets stormy and we lose sight of where we are going.
These guidelines form the cornerstones of conscious relationship:
Honesty: Honest communication is the life-blood of relationship. The more we lie, the more distance we create between ourselves and another. The most important lie is about how we feel. Very often, we may say one thing with our words and another with our behaviour or our energy. Very often our real feelings are hidden beneath many layers. In order for truth to reveal itself, it requires the willingness to stop and listen, to create space for open-ended exploration. It is not what is said that is important, but the spirit of inquiry.
Courage: The willingness to either tell the truth or hear the truth requires
courage because both of these are scary. How much easier to retract from revealing ourselves in order to keep things nice or to shy away from really listening to another so that we don't have to feel discomfort? It takes courage to even admit we are scared. Letting ourselves be seen is the mark of a warrior of the heart. Eventually, fear stops being the enemy and becomes your ally.
Responsibility: Being responsible means owning your feelings 100%! When you blame your partner for how you feel, you get caught up in a power battle and you lose touch with what is really going on for you. Even 5% blame means you end up in an entanglement. And this includes not blaming yourself either! It doesn't matter who started it and who's right or wrong: what matters is your response to it. It is only when each of you tells the truth of how you feel, however uncomfortable it may be, that space is made for the bigger picture to reveal itself… and in this space love grows.
Vulnerability: The power-games we play to get on in the world are an antidote to intimacy. The sweetness of falling in love is due to a dropping of defences that makes you vulnerable to the other. Over time however, it is easy to ignore either little or big hurts in order to regain control. Rather than seeing the sharing of what scares or hurts you as a sign of weakness, see it as an opportunity to create more love.
A conscious relationship is a meeting of two hearts not a clashing of two personalities. In order to transform a relationship from a contract of limitation to an adventure of liberation, there needs to be shared attitude of self-discovery and an appreciation of the mystery of love.
When I finally saw that romantic love was a myth, the true gift of relationship revealed itself to me and transformed me in ways I could not have imagined. To this day, it continues to shower its blessings onto my life.