The spiritual quality, the spiritual potential in a relationship is really fascinating, really very powerful.
So I'm in a relationship now with my partner and I want to be connected to her or to him. I'm frustrated when we experience alienation, when we experience anger, when we're not making love, when we're not talking, when we have these long
period of silences, or I'm frustrated when we're yelling and screaming all the time. And I've analyzed the patterns of complaints behind fights and are all, “We're not connected, we want to be connected.”
And the way that I've figured out how to help partners do that is by a communication device call dialogue. Dialogue is a way of talking in which when I talk to you, you mirror back to me what you hear me saying, and you mirror it back accurately, and you don't put anything of yourself into it. You let me come
into being for you, you let me experience myself existing in your presence and you're just mirroring it. And then once I come into being you say to me, "You know you make sense." In other words, “I don't only exist, but I'm validated.” My truth is not judged. The truth of my me-ness or my I-ness is beyond your evaluation, so that I have nothing to defend, I can be really safe with you. Now
when I get to that point of feeling safe with you, my energy begins to flow again.
I can breathe. I can relax.
And you know the more you're empathic with me, the safer I become, the more I come back on line, and I begin to feel connected to you again. And when that connection happens, I simultaneously feel the universe. And that's what I mean about marriage or committed partnership as a spiritual path.
John Gray
If you don't have passion in your relationship, don't go outside the relationship to find passion. There are skills to create passion in your relationship. There are reasons why the passion has gone away. A woman might feel neglected. She needs to take responsibility to ask for what she wants in a way that doesn't offend the man.
A man might feel rejected or criticised in the relationship. He needs to learn those things to do: generally to listen to what she's feeling, do romantic things to open her up again where she is responsive to you - and the passion can be there. There are reasons passion goes away, and going outside the relationship to regain passion is only reinforcing that reason.
My partner doesn't love me. They have to be turned on to somebody else. That's certainly not going to make a woman feel cherished. As a man, I'm certainly not going to be very impressed if my wife's getting turned onto somebody else instead of me.
It's an actual discipline. Just like you have a spiritual practice, monogamy is the primary spiritual practice associated with marriage. That's really what separates a marriage from any other relationship, is you say yeah I'll share my love with other people. I share my mind with other people. I even share my money with other people. But I don't share my sexual energy with anybody. That's just for my wife. That's where we unite on the physical level.
And we make the mistake of thinking, “What my partner doesn't know won't hurt them. I'll just do this.” But the reality is your partner does know. Everybody knows... on a certain level, you feel something's missing, something's missing.
Erica Jong
I think in Fear of Flying I said that nothing was so bland as marriage when it became like Velveeta cheese. And that you didn't want Velveeta cheese. After five years of marriage, I was restless for a cloven hoofed creamy Camembert. I always use food metaphors. Food and sex, it's all the same thing in my imagination I guess.
The big problem with marriage is that marriage tends to become about arrangements. “I'll pick up the dog at the vet, you'll take the car to be fixed, you know, I'll drive the kid to school, you'll do this.” And married couples are so busy managing their lives that they tend to eliminate any place where you can giggle and laugh and have fun together and lick each other all over and make love and all those things. The space gets lost. The space to talk to each other gets lost, as a matter of fact. So that's the danger.
Barbara DeAngelis
Marriage is the way you treat your partner every single day. And it's a huge commitment. It's not a commitment you make once or renew once a year, it's a commitment your make every day, many, many, many times. And I think a lot of people are roommates but they're not really married. Because marriage means I'm committed to learning everything I can to be a better partner, to be a better mate, to be a better person. I will do whatever it takes to make this relationship work. I understand that you are my teacher and I am yours and that the purpose of a relationship, and this is just the crucial point that I love to teach people, the purpose of a relationship isn't to necessarily make me happy, it's to help me grow.
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