Tag: soulmate

Navigating Modern Marriage: Beyond the Perfect Partner Myth

Paradoxically, the Internet, despite all its dating sites, has made it harder to get and stay married. 

    One site is called “Plenty of Fish.” The problem is choosing between infinite “fish” (potential partners) in the sea. People hoping to get married make a list of qualities of the ideal spouse and hunt for this mythical person on the Internet. This is making people much more choosy and less willing to accept imperfection.

       Fifty years ago, there was limited choice in a spouse, and you had to work with your partner’s imperfections, knowing you were not perfect either. The present emphasis on finding the perfect mate results in people who are looking for love getting locked in the prison of their own ego.

       This is the polar opposite of what marriage is about. For centuries, wedding vows involved vowing before God and other people that you would love your partner in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. In other words, the wedding vows were about unconditional love, not about rejecting people who fail to meet one of the conditions on your list. True marriage is about freedom from your ego through a commitment to something bigger than your ego, that is, marriage.

       God designed marriage to be two soulmates sharing life and love. So why do we so often fail at it? Why is the divorce rate for first marriages in Canada thirty-five percent and sixty-five percent for second marriages? Quite simply, marriage is one fallible human being having to cope day after day with another fallible human being. People seeking marriage should compare their lists with my lists of the hundreds of things couples fight over, from how to cut up the carrots to whether we should start having children.

       All marriage experts agree there are four distinct stages of marriage: romance, disillusionment (or ‘reality check’), misery, and true love. This is not what people expect when contemplating marriage. Despite the fantasies created by the wedding industry, in marriage, you have to go through the hard stuff to get to the good stuff. You have to go through the crucifixion of your ego in misery to get to the resurrection of true love. This is normal marital reality, but the list makers will not survive disillusionment, let alone misery. They will never experience true love.

       God allows conflict in marriage to challenge us to love and accept someone who is different from us, someone who is ‘other’ than our ego. To survive and thrive in marriage, you have to get out of your ego and grow in a whole list of spiritual virtues such as patience, trust, honesty, respect, acceptance, service, compassion, forgiveness, and commitment. God intended marriage to help you and your partner grow in mutual wholeness or holiness.

       Unconditional love and commitment and developing these spiritual virtues is a tall order. This is where prayer and the power of God come in. You cannot do these things on your own. You must call upon God’s grace to help you love as God loves. Faith is essential for a truly fulfilling marriage.

       Your spouse is made in the image of God (Genesis 1: 27-28), and since marriage is the most intimate of all relationships, the closest you get to God in the flesh is your marriage partner. The way you treat your spouse is the way you treat God. If you can’t love your spouse who you can see, how can you say you love God who you can’t see (I John 4:20)? Therefore, growing in spiritual virtues with your spouse is an essential part of spirituality. Treating the person closest to you badly is false spirituality.

       If there is prolonged or severe emotional or physical abuse, neglect, or infidelity, it probably was not God’s will that the two of you be married in the first place, and you should get out. However, short of that, prayer, commitment, and counselling can overcome almost any obstacle to love.

      Before and during engagement examine your partner’s character, his or her attitudes and values. If you are going to make a list do so wisely, putting at the top not how rich or good-looking he or she is, but is this a person who can help you grow spiritually? Is this someone with whom you can fulfill the goal of marriage, that is, mutual holiness, not ego-gratification? Putting spiritual growth first is foundational for a truly happy marriage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and marriage coach. http://www.brucetallman.com  

Cosmic Lovemaking

A COSMIC, SPIRITUAL VIEW OF MAKING LOVE

    If God is love, the universe is grounded in love and exists by and for love. Love is the purpose of the universe.

    It was out of wanting to share love that God created the universe in such a way that matter intrinsically evolves towards spirit, and Earth went from rocks and water to human beings. Things have gone from pre-personal to personal and are heading towards the super-personal where all are filled with God and love God in return.

    Humans are at the center of this personalization process, not some accidental branch on the tree of evolution. And the process was furthered when Jesus said the greatest commandments are to “Love God with all your passion, prayer, intelligence and energy, and love others as well as you love yourself” (Luke 10:27 as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message).

    Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun, wrote in a chapter titled “Love, Sex and the Cosmos” that sex is basically spiritual. The sacred life-force that drives the evolution of the universe moves us from within with unitive desire. We all want union as intimately as possible with another human being. Sexual intercourse was meant by God to be the apex of the personalization of the cosmos, an integral part of our personal fulfillment with a beloved soulmate we can share life and love with.

    Going even further, sexual intercourse could be thought of as the primordial sacrament, since God’s first words to humans were “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) and without sex there would be no human race, religion, church or sacraments. 

    Given the sacredness of sexuality, how did we end up with a widespread culture of sexual abuse and rape, as the “Me Too” movement testifies?

     One explanation was given by Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian, who wrote in his spiritual classic I and Thou that there are two basic ways of relating to everything: I-Thou and I-It. The I-Thou way sees everything as a sacred “Thou” full of the presence of God, including humans, animals and all of nature. 

    However, in a technological consumer culture we tend to relate to everything as an It, that is, as a soulless object to be used for our own self-centered purposes. 

    A young woman once said “I decided to get married because I am fed-up with the ‘hook-up’ culture where you are expected to have sex on the first date. I want true intimacy not fake ‘intimacy,’ a code word our culture uses for sexual intercourse. It is easy to bare your body and have sex; it is hard to bare your soul and make love.”

    Not everyone can have sexual intercourse, but anyone can make love in the sense of opening up your soul and sharing who you really are with others. Single people, the elderly and even vowed celibates can make love in this sense. William Johnston, a Jesuit writer on Christian mysticism, described in his autobiography Mystical Journey how he and Amy Lim, a Japanese nun, had a decades-long intimate but non-sexual relationship when he taught spirituality and theology in Japan.

    To learn more about making love in the spiritual sense, I would recommend Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path of Awakening which describes a Buddhist way of intimacy as a “tandem inner journey towards spiritual realization.” Or read Pope John Paul II’s personalist “theology of the body” as popularized by Christopher West.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director, marriage coach and religious educator of adults. brucetallman.com