The Spirituality of Romantic Relationships

Sentimentalism does not equal soulmate. Find out what does.

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I don’t know if there is a more abused term in the English language than “soulmate”. It seems like it can be variously used in combination with infatuation, “soul contracts,” past lives, celestial love, who knows? “Soulmate” has been reduced in many quarters to an everything and nothing term, simply reflecting back what is projected on to it. But what does a REAL soulmate, a true spirit partner entail?

First, let’s look at the generalizable wish around the term, “soulmate”: A desire to find that “one” who will forever fit you like a comfortable shoe, excite you, protect you, and last forever. If soulmate-hood doesn’t last, well then, it was because your ex-forever-partner deceived or betrayed you and broke with the integrity of this beautiful spiritual union, wasn’t it?

“No.” More likely a breakup in these situations eventuated because you were both emotionally overcome, romantically sentimental, and spiritually immature. In fact, it ought not be our goal in this human life to exist as a forever-child unto whom God will deliver a helpmate to solve all our problems. If we are to grow intimately and spiritually, we must cut through this fog of feeling toward a hard-won, cultivated living reality of healthy, fulfilling, growing and deepening spirituality.

So what is the separator between spiritual immaturity and maturity in romantic relationships? Using the framework of my essay published previously on Substack, one progressively deepens beyond possessing or “having” the other (“he’s a good catch”, “she’s mine”), toward “doing” with the other (sharing interests, activities, raising kids, etc.), toward “becoming” (mutual transforming and supporting the development of talents, vocation, and greater contributions), toward “being” (loving that person “as they are,” being loved “as you are,” and seeing in our shared and contrasting spiritual makeups an infinite universe of loving possibilities to explore.

I will apply this framework to four critical areas of spiritual human relationships: attraction, adoration, attunement, and appreciation.

Attraction

I always say the number one determinant of how healthy your relationship will be is how attracted a woman is to you as a man. If if you bypass this very fundamental component you will suffer in the forms of very abusive relationships.— Dr. Sadia Khan (video— Soft White Underbelly interview)

There are many reasons for attraction ranging from the more physical to the more spiritual. Typically those attempting to bag a “high value” mate, are in a contractual, “having” mindset, rather than a spiritual sharing mindset. In the same video referenced above, Dr. Sadia bemoaned the turn by many men toward a sole emphasis on attraction to physical beauty, reinforced, unfortunately by pornography, the purely physical and programmed (false) promise of pleasure. For men, the implicit question of this shallow attraction is, “What can they do for me?” For women, this attraction can be just as “physical” but cast in more survival and safety terms: “Can this person provide for me, protect me, be a good parent with me, serve my needs, etc.? Though these desires are understandable, the are almost entirely self-absorbed.

Jumping up a level from “having” to “doing”, one might be attracted to another person who shares your interests or has a zest for engaging things together at a music venue or a bicycling club, for instance. This involves deeper, more equal, and more mutual connection, but it is still at the level of doing and not the higher levels of becoming and being. Another level up might involve being drawn to another person’s higher virtues— principles, morality, or honesty in ways that center relationship around higher shared purpose and service of the world. Finally, one may see in another a beautiful and wise soul who exists as a confirmation of goodness for the sake of goodness, amid a wider, deeper love which exists for the sake of love itself.

You can see the progression of attraction from using to enjoying to supporting to co-creating. You can see the focus of attraction turn from self to other to relationship to cosmos. When one is thwarted in this maturation process (perhaps as a result of trauma or stubborn attachment to fantasy), one is kept at the level of the lower game. This brings up a practical principle: You cannot have a spiritually mature relationship without putting in the work to open to spirit and be informed past sentimentalized mental images and emotional programming. So much of arrested relationship development rests in an adherence to comfortable but confining assumptions that do not serve the growing spirit.

In spiritual maturation, sometimes the worst relationships are the best accelerators. The disorientation caused by be in a relationship with a “Cluster B” personality disorder (narcissism, borderline, antisocial, or histrionic personality disorder), may shake one from entrapment in one’s own dysfunctional assumptions, engrained unconsciously in childhood. This “crazy” person we are with stands in such stark contrast to who we assumed we were, that he or she thrusts us into a new frame of being (or simply causes our old frames to collapse). By contrast, a comfortable relationship that is “just good enough” but unchallenging or uninspiring, may be the death knell to growth as you find yourself wandering along and wondering where the decades went.

Adoration

Maybe now you are ready to say, “I’d rather have my freedom than your love.” If you could have company in prison or walk the earth in freedom all alone, which would you choose?— Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love, p. 35.

We all feel inclined to be cherished and adored, to absorb a flood of meaning and worth from another person. But here too, adoration has different levels, features, and consequences as we progress from the merely physical to the familial and social to the mature spiritual relationship. First, it is common that we make missteps and get our emotional wires crossed when it comes to adoration. Naivety may prompt us to fall in love with someone who is “love bombing” us (another common tactic of Cluster B personality disordered people) and then become “hooked” into a relationship that is not what it seemed at first. Many times these people will use words like “spiritual” and “soulmate” to make it seem as if the very heavens itself has ordained this or that relationship.

So it is is easy to confuse “adoration” with attachment or to confuse love for the other person with fixation upon (or codependency with) them. In these cases, one person ends up endlessly serving and the other person, sensing the emotional “hook”, will take the role of the one to be endlessly served. The “server” just wants to be adored for his or her adoring of the other, and the “servee” withholds that mutual adoration because it gives him or her power over the other person. So we have slavery, rather than adoration, and the only antidote, as Anthony de Mello says above, is freedom to stand on one’s own, first, and to find someone we can adore and who adores us for more sublime and admirable qualities rather than simply as an emotional reservoir.

There is a difference between being smitten by someone and deeply adoring them. In the first instance, you tend to lose yourself nearly entirely, you “fall madly in love” (with the emphasis on “madly”) In the second, you find yourself reaching into a deep reserve of love you did not know you had, and you feel compelled to share it with the beloved. This kindles a different emotional response, one of clarity and purpose, vs. the euphoric “losing oneself” of the former. The first entails abandoning the self and responsibility. The second requires a much deeper exercise of the self and far greater responsibility.

In a spiritually mature relationship, you adore who that other person is, independent from and different from you. You do not seek to concoct or force commonalities, nor have the other be a mirror for yourself and your vanities. You are delighted and intrigued by their authentic otherness and find within that delightful reality a certain bond of two free souls who are committed to enhancing each others freedom. From the pseudo-adoration of romantic obsession, to the doting (and somewhat condescending) cherishing of children, to sapiosexual attraction (adoration of the other’s intelligence), to the higher adoration of the person’s unique spirit, one grows increasingly adept at finding love in greater and greater freedom both for the self and for the other.

Attunement

To be attuned to someone is to be moved by them, independent of my being or concerns.— Zeus Yiamouyiannis

There is an excellent German movie, a sci-fi romance entitled Ich bin dein Mensch (English: I’m Your Man) that centrally involves the relationship issue of attunement.

To obtain funds for her research, archeologist Dr. Alma Felser (Maren Eggert) agrees to participate in a research study; for three weeks, she will be required to live with Tom (Dan Stevens), a humanoid robot designed to be the perfect partner, tailored to her character and needs.

The films raises the question: “What is is that really gets us to know another person from the inside, independently an authentically, and not merely project our preferences on that person (or robot in this case)?” There was a particularly poignant scene in the film where Alma, the archeologist, takes great care to prepare a perfectly boiled egg for Tom, who not only cannot truly appreciate this gesture, but who cannot eat at all. Alma breaks down and cries, as she realizes that this robot is built merely to serve and reflect her needs (not unlike today’s social media), leaving her feeling even more hopeless and alone. Precisely because the robot has no independent ability to truly give and receive spontaneous care, engage in inevitable conflict, and love in a way that transcends the merely alone self, there is no real connection, no attunement.

There is a scene later where Alma meets a homely-looking colleague who is overjoyed to have his beautiful robot partner reflect his every need. He couldn’t be happier. He had always been cast as the ugly loser, and now he has a beautiful mate who “adores” him (or mimics adoration) casting out his demons of felt alienation, judgment, and poor self-esteem. Alma, on the other hand, stops this robot-relationship experiment short, upon realizing that this “relationship” is an illusion and not real connection. One can see in this contrast the difference between romantic “relationships” attuned to my physical and emotional needs (or mirroring me, more likely) and those in which partners are attuned to each other’s deeper spiritual needs, who love each other “deep down,” feel the other’s suffering, who can be moved and inspired by each other, and who can express true compassion rather than simply offer a pale, if sympathetic, consoling hand.

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We so want our life mates to deeply understand and respect us. However, can that really happen, if we are authentically different people? I think it can. There is a vulnerability, and then a permeability, between human beings, that can be created with courage, compassion, and love, where one’s unique “thou” (spirit) vs. “it” (identity as image and object) diffuses through this membrane between you and me, whereupon our unique beings awaken and respond to each other with complementary movements. In this dance, one recognizes the significant uncertainty, hurt, and misunderstanding that may arise on this “road less traveled” but chooses to take that path anyway.

Appreciation

Closely aligned with attunement is appreciation or deep gratitude for your spirit mate showing up vulnerably, permeably, and authentically at their deepest levels. There is great emotional risk in this exposure of the soul, for one cannot hide anything once that soul is bared. The soul is who one truly is at the core, and all the convenient masks and avatars we put up (to survive and negotiate an often cruel world) must fall aside. This is where you not only are moved by the other, but tangibly blessed and enhanced by them. You recognize they are giving you something precious that you could not even know to give yourself.

A soulful appreciation of God works in the same way. I cannot number that ways in which I have thought I failed in life, experienced injustice, including so-called “failed” relationships, only to realize how blessed these relationships were in opening me to a higher possibility not only in my spirit, but in my relationships with others. Having been intimately involved with someone who had no stable sense of self, I was forced to reexamine my own outmoded thoughts and ideas of my “stable self.” I came to find that this so-called stable self wanted to grow and assert its deeper nature beyond itself and my dusty presumptions about it.

So what looked like a bedeviling curse turns out to be a gift, an extraordinary blessing, precisely because it did not conform to my confining and self-reinforcing ideas of the good. Time and time again in career, I have found myself spit out of institutions, often for voicing uncomfortable truths, and yet these failures and exiles admitted me into a different and higher kingdom of inquiry and action where spiritual integrity is honored. This is no small part of the reason why I started and continue this blog “Spiritually Confident”. I have grown in spiritual confidence from past circumstance toward the the core of who I am. I find faith and spirit residing there, welcoming me home and encouraging me higher and closer.

This is by no means theoretical or “putting a nice face on it”. I may have experienced deep confusion and pain in this process of nearing the spirit, but the clarity, peace, love, and knowledge I have found far outstrip whatever complaints I could lamely generate without knowledge of the larger picture. Now that the results are in, I can only express gratitude for that wisdom, much greater than mine, that guided me by blessing and by bumps and bruises to the spirituality of true relationship and growth.

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Please share some of your experiences with attraction, adoration, attunement and appreciation or simply believing you failed spiritually in relationship only to later find that your succeeded more than you could have imagined at the time.

All blessings, Zeus