It doesn’t matter who you marry
It doesn’t matter who you marry. All you ever end up with is yourself, after all. The other person is always just the backdrop against which you check out your own unmet needs, your own ability to love, your own barriers and hurts, your own vitality, and, most of all, the deep inner rift between your desires and fears. No partner can ‘make’ you happy, or guarantee your self-esteem and self-confidence. So, whoever you meet, in the end you always encounter yourself. That’s why, in my opinion, you might just as well stay with the partner you’re with at the moment, no matter how disagreeable this may seem to you now. There is a lot of work to be done on the rut you’re in, on the coldness, the anger, hatred and disgust – work to be done on yourself!
I am fully aware that this hypothesis will immediately raise howls of disbelief. After all, haven’t we been taught from an early age that Miss Right meets Mister Right and then they live happily ever after? Most of the time, however, the fairytale ends on the wedding day. And the day-to-day reality of married life only kicks in after the wedding. And more and more marriages end long before the ‘ever after’.
In the UK nearly 40 per cent of all marriages end in divorce. The most recent figures show that almost 170,000 people were divorced in 2004. The figures have been rising since the early nineties. All those people got married because they had been searching for something and they believed that they had found it in their partners. Later they got divorced because they hadn’t found it after all. Their partner had turned out to be a fake – not at all what had been promised on the fancy packaging. Marriage felt like a big con.
I am confident that at least 70 per cent of all divorces need not happen. And that it doesn’t matter who you marry, because all you ever meet up with is yourself! With this admittedly provocative hypothesis I’d like to nudge you into seeing marriage from a slightly different angle. Marriage is not a romance, gift-wrapped. The true meaning of marriage is the balancing of the inner conflicts of two people, and as such it is a place where deep healing can take place and authentic, generous love can be found. Some philosophers claim that life is a school. If that is true, then intimate relationships and marriages are a kind of élite university. They are where you face your most difficult tests, where you can learn and grow faster than anywhere else – and where you can gain the greatest rewards.
This is what nature intended – however many fairytales and their Hollywood successors might try to make us believe otherwise. It’s at the heart of a marriage that the most challenging dynamic of life lies hidden. It’s a form of paradox: even though the inherent potential of an intimate bond is more inclusive than in any other form of relationship, nowhere do our weaknesses stand out more sharply than in a committed long-term relationship. It is there that we are forced to discover that we are always missing something – our better half – and that we are only a man, only a woman.
Everybody is born either as a man or as a woman, and so from birth we are polarized. From our very first moments, we are not whole – we are either this or that, male or female. From our very first moments we long for physical, emotional and spiritual union with the opposite part. This search for our other half is part of us, a longing that is practically written into our genetic code. Every cell in our body drives us into this search, until we finally meet somebody who seems to be what we are missing. At last we are a couple, and we marry. Our longing seems to be over. At last we feel complete.
But after a few years of living together, how often does a couple appear to be complete? How connected and whole are the partners? How often do they feel harmonious and joyful? How often are they able to communicate on a deep and meaningful level? Do you know any long-term partners who actually appear to be inspired by the feeling of being complemented by each other? How many couples accept their differences as a challenge to be more compassionate and generous? How many couples regard tensions between them as opportunities for better understanding? If we believe the divorce statistics quoted above, we might come to the conclusion that it’s only a matter of time before living with another human being becomes fairly unbearable. That instead of bringing us happiness, unity and the closeness that we had hoped for on our wedding day, living with someone actually takes away any hope of fulfilment and respect for the opposite sex.
This book is about happiness – about happiness and harmony in relationships. It claims that those feelings can grow over the years. It will show that we are consistently able to nurture this kind of happiness. And it wants to dismantle the belief that all you need to achieve such bliss is the right partner. It will confirm that it is in your power alone to renew your relationship with life and love – but to do this you have to focus on your inner self.
The wholeness we are all seeking does exist. Only it’s not where we think it is. It’s not to be found in the outer world. We can only find it in ourselves, in our own inner core. Everybody is born with it, but hardly anybody can remember it. It is buried in us like the seed of a sunflower which contains all the information necessary for the growth of the plant. And a sunflower never asks itself whether it would rather be an apple tree. It simply grows into the best sunflower it can possibly be.
Human growth is less straightforward than that of a sunflower. The restrictions of our upbringing, the demands of our family and the influence of society can all act as genetic modifications on our inner seedling. Over time, they can have such a strong effect that we don’t have even the faintest recollection of our original perfection. Our seedling has been lost to view in a fog of interference, restrictions, demands and challenges. And we lack the roots and natural impulses which we could use as guides. We have lost the feeling of connection. And what we don’t understand is that it is not external connections that we lack but ones inside ourselves. We have lost the link to our own source, our natural, powerful and intuitive spirit. So we build a protective shell around our inner emptiness, and this becomes the role that we play, the assumed personality.
Sometimes we identify so much with this outer persona that over the course of time we forget who we really are. We ask ourselves whether it’s better to be an apple tree than a sunflower, and whether it was wrong to be a sunflower in the first place.
Without any contact with our real selves we are continually searching for something, feeling unsure of ourselves and torn by our contradictory needs. We yearn for freedom, but desire closeness. We seek passion, then are frightened by it. Lifted by our dreams, we are dragged back down by our problems. Generosity alternates with greed. All sorts of contradictions, conscious and unconscious, cherished and rejected, shake us to and fro and push us back and forward through life. We want to get away from it all, but feel duty-bound to care for others. Every fibre in our being wants to explode and be wild, but our upbringing won’t allow it. The sensuous woman in us yearns for unbridled physical love, but the motherly side has to be responsible for everyone. The powerful hero dreams of freedom and adventure, but the little boy is glad when someone looks after him, cooks for him and organizes his day.
When we are trying to find happiness in a relationship with another person, we are really looking for harmony and balance in ourselves. We are looking for a way back to our real being. We are searching for the wholeness of the seed, but we often don’t even know if it exists any more. Our most precious treasure is hidden behind a fog of tension. On the one hand this is the result of so many of our feelings remaining repressed and unprocessed, locked away like animals in a cage. On the other, it is because parts of our being have not been acknowledged and are now fighting with each other in our unconscious mind. The result is chaos and a lack of direction.
But this inner mayhem does not reach our consciousness in a clearly defined way. All we feel is that there is something missing in our lives. So we look for it outside ourselves. We start looking for our better half, our soul mate, the one person who is made for us. Nearly all of us secretly hope to find bliss in a partnership with someone who complements us, supports us, understands us, attracts us and balances us – who makes us whole.
In order to find and to keep this ideal person, our better half, we present ourselves at our best, of course. And that’s where the problems start. In order to look our best, we show off all those aspects of ourselves which we deem presentable and acceptable. After a while, we do it automatically, especially if we have been hurt and felt unaccepted many times in the past. In the end, we play our role so well that we completely forget about the natural wholeness of our little seedling.
So, when we meet a new partner, we are only presenting those aspects of ourselves we deem to be acceptable. On an unconscious level we are also trying to do justice to all the demands of family and society. And at the same time we are trying to hide the ‘less attractive’ side of our personality both from others and from ourselves. This hide-and-seek only works as long as nobody gets really close to us.
A recent film showed a young woman preparing for a long-awaited date with the man of her dreams. She was standing in front of a mirror wearing a figure-hugging dress. In one hand she was holding a tiny, sexy, lacy slip. In the other she was holding a flesh-coloured stretch corset which reached from her stomach down to her thighs. She faced a grim choice. Wearing the corset, she would look slim and fit. But what if the date turned into the night of all nights and her dream lover discovered the flesh-coloured monster while undressing her? But if she chose the sexy little slip he would see her tummy bulging straightaway and that might prevent him from taking things further anyway.
Nothing exposes our little secrets more shamelessly, nothing reveals our little subterfuges more bluntly than an intimate relationship. The closer we allow ourselves to become to another person, the less we are able to control ourselves and to function in the way we would like. In fact we experience the most unattractive side of ourselves. We get angry and moody. We feel hurt, misunderstood and powerless. We threaten or withdraw, we cling and moan, we run away. The more we open our heart, the more vulnerable we become, and the more we try to defend ourselves, the more of our own hideous nature rises to the surface. But all the other person does is take your dress off – not make you look fat. In all fairness, it is vitally important that we look at ourselves honestly and learn to accept ourselves exactly as we are.
This means having the courage to plunge into all the aspects of ourselves that we don’t like, that we try to ignore, that we detest, dismiss and finally repress. But if we don’t explore them and accept them with an open heart, we will continue to drive away all the people who bring them to the surface – and that means anyone who gets close to us. So we need to look under our own clothes, to take care of our own problem areas and eventually to transform them. Transforming does not mean banishing completely. It means recognizing the real essence of something and turning it into a different shape or form. In the case of a spare tyre, it means exploring whether it might make sense on a deeper level and even fulfil a purpose.
A therapist colleague told me about a client who was overweight. She had tried all sorts of methods to lose weight but without real success. During therapy she discovered that she always put on the pounds when she really wanted to commit to a partner. For a while she explored her core beliefs about men. She had to acknowledge that she had the same negative beliefs as her mother, who had been left by her father shortly after she was born. Eventually she began to suspect that her layers of fat were a very efficient defence mechanism. They prevented her from getting close to someone who, in her opinion, would only leave her anyway.
Then something really made clear the link between men and her weight. She had to go to Egypt on business for a few months – a country where curvaceous women are highly appreciated. When she came back and restarted therapy, she had lost quite a lot of weight. ‘The pounds just dropped off me!’ she told the therapist. ‘Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more…’ Once more her body had looked after her. Once more it had managed to keep men at bay. Only this time that had meant losing weight. Now the woman fully recognized that her body had only obeyed her mind by being overweight, but it still took a little while before she was ready to meet a man without her carapace of fat.
We all hate our rolls of fat, whether they are physical, spiritual or emotional. They show others how imperfect we are. They make us angry and ashamed of ourselves. And we attack them with corsets. If that doesn’t work, we try to get rid of them entirely. We give up smoking, start dieting, drink less and show only our best side to our partner. But we never, ever dream of admitting that we feel hurt and inadequate. Or that we give in to the sweet temptation of chocolate or stuff ourselves with jelly babies and crisps because we feel alone and helpless. Or that we loosen up with a cigarette or a drink because we feel inhibited and uptight. We don’t want to be weak and we don’t want to have any rolls of fat. So we fight against our weaknesses, our faults and in the end ourselves. But anyone who has tried to battle an addiction with willpower alone knows this rarely works in the long term. We can be disciplined for a while, but in the end we always give in.
The way to get rid of an addiction for good is different. For one thing, the withdrawal process clarifies that it is not the cigarette, the chocolate or the wine that gives you the good feeling. Regardless of what you use, it only serves to cover up a bad feeling, an inner tension. The resulting good feeling isn’t really good, as it only masks the bad feeling. The bad feeling doesn’t really disappear – you only get distracted from it for as long as the effect of the addictive substance or behaviour lasts. This is also true for most relationships, in which we consume our partners like a drug to combat our inner emptiness.
As soon as we acknowledge this link, the relentless cycle of every addiction – including our dependency on attention and relationships – becomes clear. Therefore it is much more important to explore the real core of our dependency rather than the distraction from our inner pain.
All addictions are good intentions. At the root of the word is the verb ‘to add’. We want to add something to our life, whether it is a partner, food, drink, tobacco or drugs. When we binge eat, we are really looking for warm, nurturing physical contact. Alcohol helps us to release our hardened and suppressed feelings. After a few glasses we loosen up, relax and become less inhibited. Cigarettes are supposed to add freedom and adventure to life – we need one when we’re on the telephone, when we’re talking and thinking. And our partner is supposed to be the ultimate panacea – the one and only person who can make us feel whole.
At some point in our lives, our original feeling of completeness was disrupted. It was not satisfied, or was condemned or rejected by others, and we couldn’t bear the pain that caused. So we cut ourselves off from those needs and made ourselves believe that we didn’t need them any more. The pain had gone, and nobody could hurt us again. But deep inside a niggling emptiness lurked. Without real feelings and meaningful contact with others, we could never be complete again. Still, addictions filled the gaping hole and everything was fine.
Most of us can carry on like this for a while, but sooner or later we all have to recognize that we have entered a vicious circle. We are not really getting anything out of our addictions, but we need more and more of them. Even then we can only be distracted temporarily. If we are honest, we have to acknowledge that deep down, beneath all these distractions, our inner emptiness has grown, that every attempt to calm, numb and liberate ourselves is only short-lived, that no partner can be right for us in the long run, and that we need more and more of our particular drug.
We can only heal our wounds when we dare to feel the emotions we have numbed, face what we have tried to distract ourselves from and find what we really wanted to add to our lives through our addiction. And then we can give ourselves what we didn’t receive earlier. If we dare to take this path, we can transform our addiction into a power that truly adds something to our own selves.
The same is true for the rejected or repressed parts of our personality. Over time, one after the other, like Russian dolls, we have taken on a whole range of roles. We have tried to be a loving partner, a caring parent, a helpful colleague and a loyal friend. We were taught that it was good to be all those things and integrated that entire catalogue of demands into our personal value system. But what if we can’t meet all those standards and expectations?
When we were very young we learned that, depending on our behaviour, we were either good children or bad children. And since then we have also learned to hide all the bad things about ourselves. But try as we might to comply with our image of a good person, deep inside we have totally different needs. As children we wanted to be wild and noisy, to try things out, to have everything now! And as adults we sometimes, in a quiet moment, yearn for passion, dream of doing something really wild or want to shout at everybody, and those unappeasable needs relentlessly drive us to consumerism. Depending on how disciplined we are, we resist those desires. We bite our tongue and present our best aspects to the world. If that doesn’t work, we start building a diversion route for all our ‘bad’ desires, longings, feelings and needs. We stuff ourselves with food, get drunk or allow ourselves at least once, in secret, to be a passionate and unbridled lover.
The more we pretend that this unacceptable part of ourselves doesn’t exist, and the harder we try to hide it, to reject it and to compensate for it by playing out a ‘good’ role or by simply repressing and forgetting it, it just won’t go away. Quite the opposite – everything that we have banished from our conscious awareness emerges in other places, often in a distorted form. It turns up in close relationships in particularly full force. All those supposedly distasteful parts of ourselves are reflected back to us most accurately in our most intimate encounters. So, in our relationships, we lose control, we hide, we cheat, we let ourselves go or we greedily demand more. And we are outraged. This can’t be our fault! Our partner has driven us to distraction, has ‘made’ us unhappy and practically driven us away. We ourselves are doing everything we can to have a loving relationship. We are completely unaware of all those ‘bad’, destructive or sabotaging feelings and thoughts deep inside us, and we don’t want to hear about them either.
I can’t repeat it often enough: there is only one way of real healing, only one way to an authentic and successful love relationship – we have to confront the abyss within us with courage and honesty.
This doesn’t take years of psychotherapy or agonizing self-analysis. All it needs is a real closeness to your partner and a true willingness to explore your inner self. When this leads you to discover unwanted qualities and hidden fears in yourself and your behaviour, you will begin to see the difficulties in your relationship in a different light. Then you will get an idea of how the deeply hidden, negative and maybe even destructive core beliefs within you mirror truthfully what happens on the surface. Although you long for attention and love, for example, on an unconscious level you don’t feel worthy of it. Although you yearn for closeness, you prevent it at the same time. You might even begin to find that you have never felt worthy of being treated any other way than badly. You might realize that your relationships have followed the same pattern time and again and understand that you cannot stop compulsively recreating this pattern simply by choosing a new partner.
I love reading the tabloids. The lives of so-called celebrities are full of things the rest of the world won’t allow. We may all secretly dream of doing such things, but probably don’t have the means to do so, and we just love to point the finger at those who do.
From Hollywood to the Centre Court, from Monaco to LA, we can observe something I like to call ‘the celebrity phenomenon’: a deep and meaningful relationship followed by a surprising separation (surprising to the outside world at least) and a quick succession of bafflingly similar affairs. Like an old LP with a scratch, whether at a film premiere, an Academy Award ceremony or the Oktoberfest, it’s the same story over and over again. The record gets stuck at exactly at the same place, whether it be film stars, royalty or sports personalities. After a love affair which frequently ends in marriage and then in divorce, there is a whole series of partners who look like clones of the first one. Celebrities all seem to be on the search for something they really didn’t want in the first place – a new edition of the first relationship. With some celebrities, after the first divorce, photographers have recorded about half a dozen replacements – all interchangeable. Obviously the stars reached their intimacy limits in their first relationship and couldn’t cross them with any of the new partners either.
Every now and again the tabloids put the photos of all the exes together, and then it’s not only the gossip columnists who are asking themselves why someone like, say, Boris Becker didn’t simply stay with his wife Barbara and their children. Why did he continually search for the same type of exotic woman when he couldn’t actually live with any of them? But if you read the autobiography he wrote after this very turbulent phase in his life you will realize that Boris was looking for something that Barbara and all her successors couldn’t give him: he was looking for himself.
Many celebrities have lost their true selves while playing a role for the outside world. And when we can’t see ourselves any more, we seek more connection and recognition outside ourselves. But if we can’t recognize our own feelings, we can’t empathize with the people close to us either. We look for the feelings, but we can’t find them. All we can do is follow a series of inner patterns which are partly contradictory – until we meet our true self.
The first thing we do on our search for happiness, though, is not look for our true self but for another person. And when that relationship fails, we look for yet another person. The celebrities we read about in the tabloids may have more opportunities, more temptations and more independence than we do. But deep inside, they too are haunted by the same phenomenon as everybody else: a conscious desire for a relationship sabotaged by an unconscious programme.
Our most important task is to detect and acknowledge this conflict. If we shy away from this inner work, if we don’t explore why at a certain point in a relationship the record gets stuck, then it will simply start all over again until we finally withdraw with a broken heart or turn into a notoriously heartless Casanova.
This work can’t be done by our conscious mind alone. Even if we decide never to have a relationship like our last one, vow never to go through anything like that ever again, swear never to want anyone like that ever again and then consciously choose a very different type of person from our previous partner, believing that this time everything will be different, our hidden patterns, beliefs and wounds will ensure that everything repeats itself all over again.
When Kim first came to me she had just split up with her long-term partner because he had had a string of affairs with ever-shorter gaps in between. Finally, a new man saved her from the arms of this cold-hearted Don Juan. Everybody was happy, because the new partner was obviously so much more loving and caring. He really fought to win her, and eventually they got married and had children. Years went by and then this man seemed to undergo a complete metamorphosis. In the end he even drove the same type of car as Kim’s ex. And at one point he cheated on her in an even more scandalous and inconsiderate way than her old lover had done.
Kate’s first husband had beaten her and sponged off her. Her friends said, ‘He was selfish and out of control.’ Everybody agreed that she deserved better. Her next boyfriend seemed so different! He was softer, more empathic and generous. Things looked good. But eventually Kate’s bruises couldn’t be overlooked any more. This man too had beaten her. When they separated she had to leave her home and was again left with more or less nothing. With the third man a miracle seemed to happen. This guy was a successful manager and was besotted with her. He signed over half his property to her. But during the course of the marriage he somehow lost his fortune and had a nervous breakdown. He beat her up and, as the co-owner and guarantor, she lost everything they owned together.
You might think those stories are exceptional or incredible coincidences, yet relationships follow very precise laws that your conscious mind doesn’t recognize or comprehend. Each and every one of your inner beliefs, your fears and defences, no matter how deeply buried they are in your soul, will manifest in your relationship. You can dream of your ideal woman until the cows come home, but if you are unconsciously afraid of women or even harbour doubts about female integrity from generations back, these inner beliefs will turn up right in front of you. You might think this is an exaggeration, but during the course of this book you will come to understand that time and again you recreate all the unsatisfactory relationships that you don’t really want.
The fact that there are precise laws ruling relationships might sound alarming. Romantic illusions might have to be ditched. They will. But when romantic illusions go, true love can come in.
To begin with, though, we wait for a noble prince to appear on a white charger or hope that a beautiful princess will let her hair down for us. We search moats and courtyards for perfect partners and at best discover only average men and women. And if, in spite of our disappointment, we get involved with them, they turn into frogs.
A wise man once said, ‘The moment you fall in love with someone is the moment they start turning into a frog.’ But that’s no reason to be anxious, according to the same wise man: ‘There’s nothing bad about frogs – frogs are wonderful. The world is full of frogs.’ He thinks we should be happy that our dream prince or princess has turned out to be a frog. ‘Because real princes and princesses would never fall for frogs like us. Just accept that you are only a frog yourself and be really curious about the other frog.’ That’s his solution to all romantic dilemmas.
In terms of relationships, my favourite fairytale is The Beauty and the Beast. It suggests that you shouldn’t leave your dried-up old frog or send your nagging and shrivelled old frog wife packing. Instead, if you love the ugly and scary beast at your side with all your heart and passion, in the end, through your unconditional love, it will turn into a prince or princess.
We all know how we want people to be: beautiful, strong, clever, sensitive, loving, educated – we have a whole list of demands, based on our upbringing. A prince for one person might be a beast for another. In any case, we judge our partners according to our own personal expectations. And whenever they don’t match up, we call them frogs or beasts.
Real love, however, is nothing to do with an ideal. Parents of disabled children know this. They love them not because of what they are, they simply love them, and often more unconditionally than they could ever have imagined. But it’s the same with healthy children too – you know how deeply and devotedly you can love those whingeing, crying monsters and that in your heart they are always little princes and princesses.
Have you ever asked yourself whether you would leave your children? But if your partner didn’t make the grade, you’d leave, wouldn’t you? ‘Absolutely!’ some of you will say. You know people who have found a more harmonious and peaceful relationship second time around. I know them too. Some of them went through a phase of deep transformation and personal growth before the new relationship began. Most of them, though, simply distanced themselves from the trigger for their pain, not from the pain itself. Many of those people have children with their first partners. Today, although they are no longer a couple, they are still parents with their ex-partner and not yet married to the new one.
What I want to say is, being married means being father, mother and lover – it means playing every role and sharing every part of yourself. In church weddings it is sometimes said: ‘When the two of you become one.’ This doesn’t mean romantically melting into each other, or two ideal partners meeting each other, or being joined at the hip from now on and not having any personal space. Becoming one in this sense means loving the otherness in your partner in order to experience your own love more profoundly. It means being fully responsible for yourself – including your own space and boundaries – in order to meet another person as truthfully as possible. It is all about recognizing what the other person is really like – and that may be just as average as you are. It means acting differently, thinking differently, accepting weaknesses and failures in the other person and integrating them.
Being a couple is one of the most important ways of maturing and accepting another person. First and foremost, it entails personal growth. In its deepest spiritual sense, being a couple means overcoming the illusion of separateness – not physical or geographical separateness, but the personal separation of rejecting, judging and condemning.
Being a couple also means having responsibilities, caring, giving and nurturing. Being lovers means receiving, discovering, playing and experiencing abandonment. Life is never entirely one or the other. Within us, the two principles alternate too.
When we divide our life in two – when we are a parent in one relationship and a lover in another – then we transfer our inner conflict to the outside. Our relationship to our former marriage partner is ultimately about money, duties, education, agreements and responsibility. With the new partner, passion, freedom and a sense of adventure enter our life. With that person, we often leave behind the expectations of family and society and finally allow a long-repressed part of ourselves to come to the fore.
With the old partner we often did things according to our upbringing, but found ourselves in a cul-de-sac of repetitiveness and routine. Unconsciously, we ended up in all sorts of old familiar patterns. Sometimes we even brought up our children the same way our parents brought up us, in spite of deciding to do everything differently! The old partner somehow embodies this former ‘home’ – the place where we weren’t allowed to be ourselves. By divorcing, we now leave this old home and feel liberated. But the tragic thing is that as long as we are not aware of the old patterns and hurts of our former home and have not healed them, we will continue along the same path. In the meantime, however, we feel free at last with the new partner while all our pain remains associated with the ex-partner. We have distributed our inner tensions among two people, and one seems right and the other wrong.
Often the new relationship keeps its magic as long as it stays free from commitments. Take a look at how new relationships change when issues such as children and money emerge. And take a closer look at the influence of old relationships. Both parties can hurt each other for a long, long time afterwards. Destructive, sad, revengeful, guilty or nostalgic thoughts, problems and tensions can give rise to an endless amount of passion and commitment between former partners for years – sometimes for the rest of their lives. I know many separated couples who over the course of time have discovered that no chucking out, no moving away, no divorce can effect a separation in the heart, and that rejection and hatred can be just as binding as love.
You might say, ‘But the solution can’t possibly be to stay together at all costs. You can’t stay with a man who has beaten you up or with a wife who has cheated on you.’ No, that isn’t the solution. I don’t advocate sticking it out until death do you part, or going through the motions for the sake of it when both parties left emotionally ages ago. I get sad when I meet couples who are still living together but are further apart than others who have had the courage to face the consequences and separate. Often people end up chained to each other rather than following a common path together.
There is an old saying: ‘If you want to get rid of your chains, love them.’ To be honest, it took me years to understand what this meant and to apply it to my marriage. Maybe my experience will help you to achieve this more quickly. I am not pleading either for divorce or for staying together at all costs. I passionately believe in vitality, authenticity and truth, and the aim of this book is to inspire you to recapture your own self. I hope it also encourages you to uncover the lies you have been living and to find your own truth behind them. On this journey you will discover the love and life in your own heart and in those of the people around you. This journey to yourself is also the way to revive the power, love and passion in your relationship.
After 30 years of marriage, a well-known German politician embarked on a new relationship, admitting, ‘For a long time I confused politics with life.’ Like many men, for decades he had drawn a sharp dividing line between his emotional life and his work, between his real self and his public persona. Now he seemed to undergo a transformation. He shaved off his beard and turned up radiant with his new wife, wearing stylish glasses and fashionably loose suits. ‘I yearned for life,’ he stated, shrugging off all criticism and jokes.
Many divorces are the result of people being unable to play out their restrictive roles any more. Men in particular find that the armour that they have put on in the course of their career suddenly gets too tight. It seems as if they divorce their wives in order to leave their own history behind. The German politician also looked as if he had had to leave his marriage and family in order to be real for once – to be himself. The new woman was his second attempt to find himself by means of a relationship. For her it was the third time.
If such a search for the self has not developed organically but been triggered by an outside event, if it arises because of another person, then the impact is felt in a radical and explosive way in all areas of life. A transformation that might have taken years of conscious decisions, small steps towards personal development and courageous insights now swirls like a hurricane through a well-organized life.
It is not the new partner that makes the relationship between the two people different from their former experiences, however, but their increased willingness to communicate and their courage to bear the consequences of their love. The attraction of the new partner triggers a passionate process of opening up which singles never have enough strength and courage to do on their own.
A new partner challenges us and reminds us of the ideal that we have lost sight of. We discover something of ourselves in the other person, something that we have wanted for a long time, something we buried early on the long road to adaptation. When at last we experience this part of ourselves in the outside world, something stirs inside us too. But it’s only if we have strayed a long way from our real path that we are finally ready to step out of the small and restricted space of our old relationship – and step beyond our own limitations.
When asked in an interview what valuable insights he had gained in 30 years in politics, the German politician replied, ‘Never jeopardize your convictions, your character and your private happiness by what you do.’
New love can ignite the hurricane of change, but it can also have other triggers. Often people experience it after a serious crisis or a near-fatal illness. Such dramatic events either drive the victims into complete paralysis or back to their real path, their old self and their strength. Time and again you read of people who in terrible circumstances find their courage, their passion and their fighting spirit.
People who have overcome a strong addiction can also develop a strength that nobody would have suspected. As addicts they search for physical, emotional or mental satisfaction, but only find an even stronger addiction. During the withdrawal process they have the opportunity of analyzing every aspect of their situation and uncovering every layer of paralysis, weakness, greed and lovelessness. Once they succeed, they can finally discover their true strength, sometimes even their true inner divinity, and bring it back into their life. The place inside them that was formerly eaten up by the addiction can now overflow with strength, passion and creativity.
Any of us can experience this. We can do it with our current partner, but if we do, we ourselves will have to raise the storm that will whip up the waves that will carry us on. We will need great courage to speak our own truth and to live it at the risk of hurting our partner and everybody else around us. We will have to leave our comfort zone. We will have to be prepared to be neither loved nor understood. And we will have to be prepared to stay with our partner because every minute we will also have to be prepared to leave.
Nietzsche called marriage a ‘dialogue’. In order to keep this dialogue going, in his view, the partners would have to enter into a continuous ‘radical conversation’. They would have to be prepared to share their innermost thoughts and feelings – to confront their fears and respect their differences.
I don’t maintain that this is an easy way. I’m not claiming that it is easier to stay together than to separate. But I think it is more fulfilling. And I’m paying this homage to good old marriage for pragmatic rather than moral reasons. My life has convinced me that there is no bigger task than overcoming our own nature, time and again, in order to know it more fully. And to truly encounter our own nature we need to truly encounter another person. And that will ultimately show us that we need nothing from them.
What I mean by this is that whenever we believe that we need something, we are indirectly stating that we are weak and incomplete. Every time we discover that we don’t need something any more, our self-esteem and our ability to love grow and, paradoxically enough, bring fulfilment. That means that everything we can let go of during the course of our life – beginning with the mother’s breast – makes us richer and freer and more secure. Growth means letting go of our neediness little by little and not constantly needing something new.
In terms of relationships, we always seem to be looking for something that we are missing: the ideal partner, a lot of attention and love. But though we are apparently looking for our better half, we are really looking to heal ourselves.
If we stay in a relationship, and truly understand what that is about, we will give ourselves the best chance to grow and to heal. After all, the best therapist in the world can’t tap into our repressed feelings as quickly and precisely as our partner. They manage to activate our shadow side every day! And even though we may hate them for it, we should be aware that they are helping us to find the demons in ourselves and to shake them off.
In such situations, if we can find the courage for a radical change of perspective, we can admit that our partner is not the cause but the trigger of our problems. Then, if we can manage to stay true to ourselves while perceiving and healing all those unwanted and unpleasant aspects of ourselves, we are doing our job. And when we deal with ourselves in such an unsparing and intensive way, we experience more and more breakthroughs with our partner, a deepening love and more freedom and strength. And when we are healing our relationship in such a way, our children are automatically healing too. And when our children are healing, society as a whole is healing.
Peter Russell says that relationships are the yoga of Western society. He uses the word ‘yoga’ in its original sense, meaning work, particularly spiritual work. Russell’s point is that we must use our relationships as a kind of meditative yoga in order to develop ourselves and our society.
Over the years I have met many people whose marriage was on the rocks. Many have since separated. I am convinced that most of them would have stood a good chance of staying together if both partners had thought more about the meaning and function of intimate relationships, their phases and laws, and if they had practised the yoga of marriage continuously, relentlessly and with trust. This can turn marriage into an adventure. It can magically transform your perception. If you do it regularly you will discover that truth, growth, openness, courage and giving are much more exciting than taking.