Over the years I have read my share of books on relationships and after awhile the advise and insights they provide generally start to all sound similar…but…every once in a while I come across a book or a saying here or there that stops me in my tracks and influences me ponder the deep meaning of my relationships. Following is a collection of what I consider some of the more profound things I have heard about relationships over the past ten years.

Intimacy begins at home, with oneself. It does no good to try to find intimacy with friends, lovers, and family if you are starting out from alienation and division within yourself. ..We may feel tension in our lives and assume it is due to problems in a relationship with someone, but that seemingly outer tension may be an echo of inner conflict…For example, we may think we’re lonely because we have no friends, when the fact is we have no relationship to ourselves and for that reason feel lonely and friendless.

Some say love is blind. But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity

We may not like the feeling of loneliness that may inspire us to get married, but neither, sometimes, do we like the change from being a single person to living with another, with all the limitations and challenges that such arrangement entails. Many married people confess to deep ambivalence about being married, and many secretly harbor strong fantasies of divorce and the single life…but….it isn’t necessary to give up solitude altogether to be married. But even more deeply we can imagine marriage as something we do for ourselves as well. Marriage is not a surrender to another person but to another condition of life, one that can be deeply rewarding…

Conversation does not have to be confessional in order to be soulful…Sometimes people who are psychologically aware feel compelled to speak whatever is on their mind or in their heart too directly and innocently…But soulfulness is not created by naïve exposure. What matters is not how much you expose about yourself in conversation, but that your soul is engaged. Two people working on plans for a house or immersed in a recipe can be caught up in a soulful conversation---the topic doesn’t have to be personal.

Focusing exclusively on life, we may give too much value to compatibility. Differences between people may give more to a friendship than what is held in common, precisely because the soul is so unique.


Soulful intimacy is not to be found in clean, well-structured, meaningful, unperturbed, ideal unions, if such a union even exists. Perfection may well appeal to the mind, or to the part of us that craves spiritual transcendence, but soul doesn’t establish a home there. For some perverse reason, it prefers the colors, the tones of mood, the aberrations of fantasy, and the shades of disillusionment.

If I ask, what is wrong with me that I can’t have a long lasting relationship the question borders on narcissism….the focus is on me…to get to the soul we might re-direct our questions outward: What does fate want in its demand on me? What is the meaning of this continuing failure to find love? What am I made of that my heart moves in directions different from my intentions?

As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself…It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the other’s depth of soul.

Oddly, the most intimate relationships may be the very ones that appear most foolish…The most unpredictable couplings sometimes make the best marriages…But soulful marriages are often odd on the surface. People make unusual arrangements….because…the soul generally does not want to conform to the familiar patterns of life…It follows that a particularly soulful marriage may look oddly individuals, its forms and structures contrary to accepted patterns


When a marriage or romance breaks up or when a friendship fades, we tend to look for rational causes and to blame one of the parties for committing the crime of ending. Fate and its important relationships to the soul are forgotten and we take for ourselves both authorship and blame for developments that are clearly the work of the soul….If we are going to honor the soul of relationship, we will have to do so all the way, even, if necessary, through the ending….Blaming the other party for the ending of a relationship is understanding as a way of avoiding the pain caused by the inexorable, sometimes heartless demands of fate, but by avoiding that pain we may condemn ourselves to years of being frustrated by the very emotions and images we are attempting to escape.