Love relationships, marriage, partnerships: the three essential stages or how to be happy together
In primary love relationships -marriage and partner- there are three possible stages. These stages are progressive and sequential; you must go through one to get to the other. Although most of us are stuck in the first stage, to reach your full life potential you must seek to experience all three for the ever-deeper degrees of happiness and fulfillment they offer.
Have you noticed how unhappy people seem to be nowadays in their relationships? Everyone you meet seems to be dissatisfied, unhappy, unhappy. We have euphemisms for the series of events that inevitably seem to lead to the breakdown of the relationship: “She and she are having a hard time right now,” “She says she needs some space in the marriage,” “He always works late.” the office.”
Also, we tend to judge our friends when they enter a new relationship. More euphemisms: “He’s not good enough for her”, “I don’t know what he sees in her”, “They make a very strange couple”.
Or critical. Euphemisms again: “I think they deserve each other”, “What an ugly couple”, “He deserves everything she gives him (sarcastically)”, “I don’t know why they’re still together”.
The only ideal couples are actor and celebrity, and this in a week when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are breaking up (no surprise) and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt aren’t (big surprise), but then again, they’re actors. of course!
In the real world of ordinary, emotional, physical, flawed, vaguely neurotic, sensitive, unfeeling individuals, the Beatles and Le Morte d’Arthur understand the philosophy we live by. Whether we know it or not. So when John Lennon sings, “Love Is the Answer” or when, in both waking and sleeping dreams, we meet the partner of our dreams, we embark on a predetermined archetypal journey toward love. But love has three distinct levels or stages in the entire human experience.
These three stages are self-love, love of the other and, finally, spiritual love, and this is what this article is about.
The first stage is the one where relationships show you yourself. This is true whether you are aware of it or not. This is the reason why marriage and couples do not have a good success rate. We think that relationships are fun, the partner an object of desire, and that pleasure and satisfaction can only follow. Some or all of this may be true, but much more powerful and relevant than all this is the mirror that the relationship has in front of you. People don’t like to see themselves. They move away from the precise reflection. When your partner tells you how moody you are, or how impossible to live with you, or how unpleasant, unforgiving, or insensitive, your first thought is to leave the relationship. As absurd as it sounds, isn’t that why relationships often end? We don’t like what we are seeing in ourselves.
The way we approach relationships is as a learning experience, learning about ourselves so that we can grow in self-awareness and knowledge and, over time, become more of the person we’d like to be, less reactive, controlling and controlled, less subject to automatic impulses and more liberated, awake and expansive, more loving, happier and more fulfilled.
The second stage is the one where relationships help you grow in love. Once you’ve gotten over yourself, your repressed emotions, and your unfinished business, you have an inner space for the person you’re in relationship with. Time to be with them, listen to them, act selflessly at times, and love them. One of the primary functions of love in outward expression is to give time. When you love someone you discover that you have time for them. And you want to spend time, quality time, together. As you learn to relate more deeply to your partner, you find that your heart expands and you feel the flow of love within you. Love is a circular, irresistible and endless flow, and the more you love your partner or spouse, the more love you have available for yourself, for others and for the world around you.
The third stage is that in which you live as partners in God or in your Divine nature. It bears repeating that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. You don’t have to wait for time to convince you of this. Although as you get older, it will become more apparent to you. In middle age and old age (even within this effectively pro-youth culture) you become more and more oriented towards the immaterial world and towards your next demise. The inner spiritual world becomes more real to you and your relationship with the spiritual background and the ways in which you live and exist become more central to your life. You are growing in love, knowledge and, inevitably, wisdom.
If you are lucky enough to have a love relationship and a life partner by your side, you look at it with the eyes of the Divine and celebrate your partner, along with all the other gifts of this divine world. Passing through the spiritual and transcendent realms of truth and reality, you turn your face towards God, towards the Divine, together.
These are the stages of deepening love in marriage and society.