“I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” is the title of a highly successful and now retired Off-Broadway musical in New York City which emphasized in a light-hearted fashion what has sadly come to be the not-so-light-hearted and oftentimes painful experience found in so many relationships: partnerships foundationed in neediness and expectation, two of the “three love-enders,” as described to us in the book Friendship with God, with the third “love-ender” being jealousy.
Conversations with God offers to us the following insight:
“When you lose sight of each other as sacred souls on a sacred journey, then you cannot see the purpose, the reason, behind all relationships.”
If we are entering into our relationships with the idea that our partners must BE a particular way or DO a particular thing in order for us to experience the depths of our own happiness and abundance, the expansiveness of our own joy and light, and the fullness of our own completeness and sufficiency, we are functioning within an understanding of “love with conditions” and misguided ideas of what perfection truly is.
In an era where the divorce rate exceeds 50%, what is really going on here? What are we not understanding and, thus, not being allowed to experience?
Are our limited understandings and parameters in relation to this institution called “marriage” too narrow to hold a space for a deeply fulfilling soul partnership to thrive? Have we placed unrealistic human boundaries on the aspect of ourselves that is without limits?
Most of us, at one time or another and at one level or another, have experienced the joyful bliss of a budding relationship and the devastating heartbreak of its demise. So many of us are yearning and searching for the perfect partner, what is often termed a “soul-mate,” only to experience repeated outcomes of disillusionment and disappointment; yet there are those who have discovered and held onto that seemingly elusive but deeply satisfying recipe of love and commitment.
Why does this experience of a spiritually rich and loving relationship evade so many in what seems to resemble a cruel game of hide-and-seek? It has been my own personal experience that a gentle shift in perspective can elevate a relationship from an experience of division and angst to an experience of unity and bliss. This type of shift will invite me to take a conscious step away from my expectations and attachment to outcomes; to separate myself from my mind’s craving to be “right,” which oftentimes requires making someone else “wrong”; and to be fully present in the completeness of not only myself, but in the completeness of my beloved other.
Perhaps someone, someday, somewhere will create and produce a musical about relationships that carries with it a message from within the perspective of The New Spirituality, and perhaps a title of…
“I Love You, Without Condition, Eternally.”
(Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support . To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)
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