A friend writes:

There are no rules.
Love is a mystery.

Sometimes it happens that we find someone very-well-matched and we spend the rest of our lives with them. Sometimes we partner with someone very-well-matched and then our lives take different directions, yet we remain lifelong friends and continue to grow from the relationship (as happened in my marriage).

There are no rules.
Love is a mystery.

Often what happens is that we look for love in the wrong places and attempt to partner with someone for the wrong reasons — meaning, it was our egos driving the dynamics. These egoic reasons can take many forms: Lust, status, the person fits our mental checklist for a partner, family/peer-group pressure, loneliness… Then life can become very difficult, and it may suck the life out of both people to stay together.

“Wrong reasons” is not some external, moral judgment… it means “unsustainable except at great cost to our sense of wholness.”

What happens VERY often in the West is that the woman gets with the man and expects him to change — and he doesn’t. He gets with her expecting that she’ll never change — and she does.

So, yes, it is only the love-relationship with God — or, if you will, “our deepest and most authentic substance” — that is constant. It’s constant because it existed before we incarnated, it will exist after we quit the physical dimension — and it is the very substance of our existence itself.

When the heart opens, we perceive this relationship as living inside our human love relationships, whether in a marriage or in deep friendships. Then the ego gradually ceases its clinging and its sounding the alarms of our survival instincts when we hit the inevitable human-level speed-bumps of life and relationship.

There are no rules — except “be kind to yourself and others.”
Love is a mystery.
We do our best.