During the weeks leading up to Valentine's Day a lot of people focus on the joys and pleasures of love and romance which is in my opinion a thing. Despite the ups and downs of relationships and the intense pain we may experience at times in our relationships I do still believe relationships provide the best fertile ground for personal growth, healing and a deep and mature experience and understanding of the meaning of love...but... Today I was reminded of the "dark side" of relationships. Relationships do hurt us and at times the pain is so deep it remains with us for years if not a lifetime. We tend to associate a "dark night of the soul" with the individual but the source of many of our dark nights more often than not originates from our relationships with others. Following are some quotes to remind us all of something we already know but prefer to repress most of the time regarding our relationships.


Frequently love doesn’t work out or it gets stale…love is bittersweet…People often talk about love’s sweetness and keep its bitterness private…Love is a kind of madness. It seals you in a bubble of fantasy where emotions are intense and you most often feel unbalanced.

Marriage is a shock to the system of each partner: That is its promise and pain. It can mature you like few other experiences can, but the process in neither nor entirely pleasurable.

In some instances love may ask near impossible patience. You may have to wait for circumstances to change, for the loved one to wake up to the possibility of real love.

Unless we deal with the shadow of love, our experience of it will be incomplete. A sentimental philosophy of love, embracing only the romantic and the positive, fails at the first sign of shadow…Love finds its soul in the feelings of incompleteness, impossibility, and imperfection.


But lest we fall into despair let us not forget,

"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…