What's love got to do with it?

I wanted to share a couple of insights since my partner, Katherine, and I, both students of Andrew Cohen's for over 14 years, got into a relationship a few months ago. The first is that it is utterly great to be in a committed relationship. I want to start there, because what I say next might be considered a little controversial.

Our culture characterizes the union between two people as puzzle pieces fitting together perfectly, as soul mates who "fill in the missing colors / in each other's paint-by-numbers dreams" (Jackson Browne, The Pretender). That was certainly how I always imagined it: the journey realized, finally made whole by filling the hole in the center of my being, ultimately affirmed by being seen through her eyes as that someone special.

In our oh-so-secular world, the pinnacle of life is often held to be the sexual-romantic bond. And if the matrimony is in a spiritual context, the pinnacle is even higher.

Again, I have to confess, standing where I am in the land of post-nuptial bliss, it is pretty nice. But paint as we might, we both know that we can't fill in each others colors. In fact, we don't even try. And this is in striking contrast with the strongly cherished belief encoded into our psyches - hers, mine, and everyone else's - that we can reach ultimate fulfillment in the arms of another. That we deeply, often invisibly, hold this to be true makes sense. Life has been making more of itself for hundreds of millions of years, and we are hard-wired to keep the program going. But as powerfully seductive as the idea is that only two parts can make the whole, it is just not true. That perfect other can never fill "the God-shaped hole at the heart of our being." The part of the self that calls out for wholeness requires not a union with another but for a union with the whole of the life process.

I sort of knew this before getting into this committed relationship, but being together now is a constant revelation of why previous efforts at committed relationship never worked: they were built on totally false premises. Worse, as written into the plotline of every daytime TV drama, these failed efforts were a set-up from the first twinkle in my eye for conflict. "What do you mean, you don't love me anymore?!" Isn't it just a bit curious that all too often people bond as friends and lovers, build a life and family together, and descend into bitter estrangement? Sleeping with the enemy, wanting fulfillment from another, then demanding it...it is all so desperate, when you get right down to it.

So what I find exciting, and this is the second insight, is that the play of these forces arises in a context, that of awakening to one's purpose - and to the only true source of ultimate fulfillment - which is to be here to create a new world, and in this case a world in which the sexual bond, with all of its inherent attachments, is entirely free of conflict because you enter into it already whole and want nothing from it.