When we talk about falling in love, that's usually as far as we go--the falling in love experience, the blissful drug of the fulfillment of our need for unity we have when we meet someone and all the stars align so that we stumble into the dissolving of ego boundaries that lets us feel at one with this other. It is perhaps the single most powerful transformation that many of us ever feel in a lifetime. It has caused wars to be fought, novels to be written, movies and plays and poetry made, suicide and murder committed in its name. Helen of Troy and Paris, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Brad and Angelina. As a society we worship these couplings because we worship what we imagine they bring to us. And what is that? The experience of unity. The feeling of being touched by the Divine. Falling in love is a fulfillment, at least temporarily, of the inherent need within us for an experience larger than ourselves. And in the fulfillment of that need, our brain is bathed in an amazing stew of bliss chemistry.
The next time someone you know 'falls in love,' and they are in the first blush of that experience, ask them this: 'When you say you love this person, does that mean you love him or her, or does it mean you love the way you feel when you're with him or her? Though one does not preclude the other, the fact is that the 'falling in love' phenomenon is about the way it makes us feel. There's nothing wrong with this; in fact it is the way nature has conspired to continue our species; however it is a phenomenon that ends. No one can stay 'in love' like this. Nor would we even want to. This experience fades away and we are left to form a true relationship with this other person, or to move on to find this experience somewhere else.
So, if we get this, if we understand that our idea of '...and they all lived happily ever after' is, was, and always will be a fairy tale and not to be taken literally, then we will want to choose the former. If we have a basic compatibility with our love partner, then we can begin the steps to structuring a true, loving relationship that is not dependent upon massive downloads of bliss chemistry at the merest whisper of his name, or the scent of her hair. What is required for this?
First we must recognize that only God can fulfill our need for the touch of the Divine. Yes, we want to move in the direction of recognizing the Divine in all that we see, in the eyes of everyone we see; but the place from which we draw strength, the source of our courage and our creativity and our ability to move forward when all seems to be against us, this source has to be God. It can and should be reflected in the people closest to us, but the inner experience of these qualities cannot come through our partner. It only can come from within us, from that place we touch upon in our least excited state, the place of true unity. When we know this, we will not blame our partner for not coming up with it, and we can be involved with them in the process of finding out what it is we can expect from a relationship.
Second, we realize that the only thing ever that's going on in nature is evolution. If our relationship is in alignment with nature, if it is 'right' for us, this means that it will be a place in which we will be called upon to evolve. And here's where it gets tricky: because the one thing that a love relationship is really good at is to call forth the biggest flaws in our character. In a love relationship that is for us a place of growth and evolution, it is a guarantee that our biggest shortcomings as a person will, at least once in a while, come front and center, and we then will have the opportunity to choose to grow and heal those places in us where our shortcomings reside, or to blame our partner for causing this experience in us. If we choose the latter, we either will move on to find someone who doesn't make us feel this way, or we will stay and torture our current partner so they won't make us feel this way.
But if we choose the former, it means that we are choosing to grow, and we are saying to our partner, 'Together, you and I will make a safe place wherein that which is broken in each of us may be allowed to arise so that we may find healing. I promise this to you as you promise this to me.' This is what love can grow into--a place where we safely can grow into our best self while supporting our loved one in doing the same.
And just remember, it's not always going to feel good. Growth rarely does. But as Dolly Parton says,
'The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.'
Today I will recognize my partner's better self that is there, just behind his apparent shortcomings, and I will hold the space for him to recognize it himself.
All material copyright JeffKoberMeditation |
