I now declare you . . .
6th Mar 2008
Hello lovely people
Why is it that so many relationships and marriages break up because of what one partner does or does not do? And even more puzzling: why is it that the same culprit gets into another relationship and becomes the perfect partner to a very happy person? Do people suddenly change their nature overnight?
And another puzzle: why is it that some people seem just unlucky in relationships? Serial spouses and celebrities with a string of broken relationships always make a good read in the popular magazines.
Maybe we need to look at these ‘wrong’ relationships with the ‘wrong’ people from a different angle.
What if these broken marriages and relationships are not ‘wrong’ choices? What if each one of them is a perfect choice, but we fail to see that, and judge ourselves as failures?
Let’s take a step back and work from the assumption that we incarnated into this world because we have particular things to learn about ourselves. We have forgotten the reason why we are here: to live a life that will bring us closer to perfection and to the God that we were separated from.
We have become caught up in man-made and culture-based rules such as that people must be in a relationship for life, or that once married, divorce is a failure.
We have forgotten that our lives are pre-planned before we are born, and that we come here to live a perfectly designed script.
Am I saying that it is OK to flit from one relationship or marriage to another? Is it all right to have multiple partners throughout your life?
Maybe it is. What if your particular life script was designed so that you learn about yourself from having different relationships? And what if someone else’s life script was designed so that they learn different lessons from the same partner over a much longer period of time?
We have been conditioned to focus on the ‘failures’ of relationships, rather than on the purpose of a relationship that has come to an end.
Because of this focus on ‘failure’, we do not allow ourselves or others the space to contemplate on what we have learnt from the relationship.
It is far easier to show interest in the gossip-worthy history of someone who ‘failed’ than to ask what they have learnt from the relationship about themselves.
We prefer to ask why the relationship has come to an end, and the reason behind the question is often to assign blame or to exonerate oneself. Our legal systems, religions and cultures have been designed to reinforce this issue of blaming others rather than understanding self.
Some people come out of a relationship, have clarity on what they want, and find the ‘perfect’ mate. They live happily ever after, but they have other lessons to learn, for example from colleagues at work or from their children.
Other people come out of a relationship, refuse to do any introspection, and repeat the same pattern in subsequent relationships. And rather than encourage them to look at themselves in a loving way and become whole, we comment on their inability to have a stable relationship. That makes us as ‘guilty’ as they are. But we are all guilty of lacking insight, of nothing else.
We often see people being desperately unhappy in a relationship, but staying in it at all costs, and often against the advice of those that care about them. They stay because they are afraid of being out of the relationship and by themselves, or in some cultures because of the social judgement that they will face when they leave, or more often because they simply have no understanding of what it is that they need to deal with before they can leave the relationship.
Whatever the reason for remaining in a destructive relationship or for having the same kind of relationship with different people over and over again, the bottom-line is that we need to understand the dynamic between the people in the relationship, and what there is to be learnt from it.
The important issue is not the destination, i.e. the end of the relationship, but rather the journey, i.e. the spiritual reason why we got involved in a particular relationship in the first place. Only then can we learn about ourselves and find peace and put the relationship behind us, with gratitude and love towards the person who helped us learn about ourselves, rather than with all the destructive feelings that we have learnt to associate with the end of a relationship.
Read an extract from See my Badge, a short story that illustrates how relationships, even those that we experience as destructive, teach us much about ourselves and bring us closer to God.
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