Someone had this to say about love,

To choose not to love is to decide not to live. Everyone needs to love and to be loved. If you surrender, and then the spell descends, and you get swept away into days and nights of fantasy, memory, longing, and a strange sensation of loss…Even if you have had many experiences of painful and unsuccessful love, you don’t give up on it. The soul so hungers for love that you go after it, even if there is only the slightest chance of succeeding. The soul craves love, and if you give up on love because it is so difficult, the life of you will seep out of you…


I have suspected all along that love is a deep need of the soul which helps explain why despite all our failures to love and the emotional pain associated with love we still continue to seek it out with the fervor of the Knights of the Roundtable in search of the Holy Grail. I just wish the feeling of love wasn't so fleeting. This is the last entry of relationship ponderings. Here are some more thoughts to ponder.

In everyday life there are always opportunities to honor both separateness and togetherness. Often one person in a relationship feels one emotion more than the other. In matters of the soul it is advisable never to compensate or to try to escape but instead to tend better the very thing that is causing trouble. A person in a marriage who is longing for freedom, finding marriage too limiting and confining, might best avoid the temptation to flee and instead work at re-imaging marriage and partnership. His notion of marriage is likely too limited and therefore painful in the living of it…Honor both intimacy and solitude….

Humor and wit are also signs of the soul. Humor allows two people to enjoy each other’s company even as they consider some of the serious and painful aspects of everyday living without falling into despair. People who have to be perfect, or who can’t admit to each other the difficult or impossible situations life presents, can hardly be intimate. Humor allows us to entertain failure and inadequacy in life without being literally undone by them.

In the final paradox, if we want to light the fires of intimacy we have to honor the soul of the other. A relationship demands not that we surrender to another person, but that we acknowledge a soul in which the parties are mingled and respect it’s unpredictable demands…

The soul of a relationship doesn’t ask for the right ways of acting. It wants something even more difficult, respect for its autonomy and mystery. The soulful relationship asks to be honored for what it is, not for what we wish it could be. It has little to do with our intentions, expectations, and moral requirements. It has the potential to lead us into the mysteries that expand our hearts and transform our thoughts, but it can’t do that when our primary interest is in pursuing our cherished ideologies of love, family, marriage, and community. The point is a relationship is not to make us feel good, but to lead us into a profound alchemy of soul that reveals to us the many ways and openings that are the geography of our own destiny and potentiality.

What begins full of hope and promise turns into serious questioning and emotional ambivalence. While a lover may interpret these ups and downs as a personal problem in making a commitment, it might be more accurate to understand that love itself is inconsistent and has a kind of inherent hysteria.

When deep attachment is set in place in a marriage, friendship, or relationship it should not be let go of easily….We should stay with a friend or lover as long as we can, until we are compelled to abandon them completely against our will. It’s a serious thing to toss away money, but to cast aside a person is even more serious. Nothing in life is more rarely found, nothing more dearly possessed. No loss is more chilling or more dangerous than that of a friend or lover…

“Whether you are looking for love or trying to make it work, it can be the most difficult challenge in life and at times may seem absolutely impossible. The impossibility slowly cracks you open, and teaches you the limits of human understanding”…

If you don’t realize that you are walking on coals and running the gauntlet and surviving the wilderness in quest of a vision---all within the confines of a simple human relationship—you could be undone by it. Love gives you a sense of meaning, but asks a price. It will make you into the person you are called to be, but only if you endure its pain and allow it to empty you as much as it fills you.

Waiting for another person to love you is not living. Once you allow your own life to flow, you have the best chance of attracting the lover you should have.

Relationships are a paradox, when you feel a strong desire for union, an opposite desire lies in the background. The more you press for connection, the more you may settle yourself up for disconnection. It isn’t enough just to be aware of the paradox. You have to give something to both sides. If you get married or live with someone, you might also give serious attention to your need for separation from time to time. You don’t hold back your love and involvement, but you understand that you need your solitariness and individuality as well. You have to be subtle, loving your partner and loving yourself, or very soon you may find yourself in a dark night.

Imagination is critically important in relationships….and internal diversity, the capacity to hold opposite desires in creative tension…For example, isn’t it possible to be both solitary and wedded, hardworking and relaxed in relationship?

Marriage is a vessel of transformation. Marriage makes you a better person, though not necessarily a happier one. One hopes it offers moments of bliss, but you can be sure it will entail unexpected ordeals. Together, moments of bliss and periods of struggle make it a humanizing force, a way toward personal fulfillment that paradoxically involves an immediate concrete, and felt transcendence of self. You are forced to move beyond self-regard and seriously consider another person.

Giving yourself too much to another person can be masochistic…building a marriage can be a joyful experience, but surrendering to another person is never a happy choice. But, if both partners surrender to a marriage, they may escape feelings of masochism and even enjoy the limitations of being with one other person. But if both partners surrender to the marriage they may escape feelings of masochism and even enjoy the imitations of beign with one other person.

It is futile to try to simplify your partner and make them fit your expectations. Without real, complicated people as partners, there is no marriage anyway…To honor the underworld of marriage, one has to appreciate the irrationality and mystery in both you and your partner…You have to have your eyes on the promise of bliss, but you have to be prepared for the dark.

It isn’t advisable to try to make an idealistic model of married life born out of union blessed both in heaven and hell. Don’t expect to solve all your problems. Don’t imagine that one day everything will settle down into harmony. Don’t expect perpetual sunshine.

Know that marriage, for all its beauty and pleasure, is a also a dark night of the soul.

It takes time for the soul, so deep and complex, to sort itself out and arrange a decision for itself for a decision…It’s important to gather oneself together before making a move. Many people make decisions just on the principle that you should do something.