The Psychological Paradoxes That Couples Experience

—Chris Saade

Paradox is part of the essence of the nature of reality, including, for many ancient spiritualities, of divine reality. The understanding of paradox is crucial for the unleashing of love. When we work at accepting paradox and integrating paradox, we achieve something that is very special. We achieve becoming at peace—at peace with our sacred humanity and our sacred authentic spirit. It is the understanding of the paradox of life, life with its beauty and great disappointments, that protects us from succumbing to nihilism.

Life itself is a powerful paradox of both peacefulness and passion—joy and grief, wounds and blessings. We grow in love or we come to love life as it is—life in its full paradoxical givens. There is the beautiful story about Jesus who “came to reconcile to himself all things, whether on Earth or in Heaven.” He came to reconcile us with our nature, with who we are. When we are not at peace with the paradoxical nature of our being, we are at war with that nature. We expect that we are going to transcend our paradoxical life, and we cannot, so we become deeply aggrieved or in despair. When we are at war with that nature, we are paralyzed and we are depressed and we are battered and we don’t have the energy to give to loving the world and loving our partner.

In most psychological and spiritual literature, paradox has been exiled and shunned. Instead, the goal is to achieve total peace, total harmony, total oneness, and total contentment. This puts us into an even greater battle with the reality of who we are on this sacred journey.

In Greek and Phoenician thinking, the number two was essential, and the number two meant paradox. It is said that to be able to walk with the gods and goddesses, you had to understand the meaning of the number two. When you walk with the Divine you will be filled with enthusiasm, but you will also be filled with the grief of the Divine. You will be filled with the power and the inspiration of the Divine as well as the sensitivity of the Divine. The idea of paradox was central to the teaching of the Chinese Tao. It is crucial for the flowering of evolutionary love, to grasp the significance and the power of the paradox.

There are six paradoxes that come up a great deal in the psychological life of a couple. The first one is strength and vulnerability. Most couples have a lot of strength, both individually and as a couple. They also have a lot of vulnerabilities. Individually and as a couple, both strength and vulnerability need to be honored. We must not see strength as the part we respect and vulnerability as the part that is weak. Vulnerability is part of the genius of love, and part of the ability to feel love.

The second paradox within relationship is joy and grief. To get together and celebrate joy is a great gift—but so is the sharing of grief. When grief arises in a relationship, we have to be able to see it as sacred, to actually feel it as a moment of heart, a “participation mystique” in divine grief, a communion with the broken heart of the Divine for our world.

In the Louvre Museum there are incredible paintings depicting grief and people stand before them for hours. They see the beauty and the ecstasy in grief. Through art they understand that grief does not have to be shunned. The paintings tell us we are not to run away from grief, but to realize that joy and grief are in a dance, a continuous circle of mutuality.

Another relationship paradox is breakthroughs and breakdowns. A relationship that worships breakthroughs but is desolate about breakdowns is a relationship that sets its course for the unreal and will lose its passion. Passion flourishes in the real. Passion develops in a ground that is smooth as well as one that is tilled and opened up. Passion flourishes through breakdowns and breakthroughs.

This evolutionary journey of love can only be taken through honoring the breakthroughs and breakdowns of the past, the present, and the future. A relationship has to be able to bless both, to honor both its defeats and its successes, and to respect both.

Then there is the paradox of freedom and union, the importance of independence from, and connection with, the other. We need not to be afraid of differentiating from our partner. We need to differentiate and deepen our own sense of authentic individuation. We also need to generously bond and seek those moments we become one with our partner and totally lost in their heart and body. To know that place where we become one and then to be able to go back to moments of total freedom within our own unique spirit. There’s so much to this paradox and we will explore it further in the section on evolutionary sexuality. Unfortunately, psychotherapy tends to underline the importance of differentiation while often forgetting the similar crucial importance of the deep bonding of love.

Another paradox, the one of contentment and struggle, keeps us connected to the world. The ability to be content is important yet it has been made almost an idol. We love to see all the sacred images that depict contentment and acceptance, where everything-is-fine-and-all-is-well-forever-and-ever. If there is a struggle in our psyche or a struggle in our relationship, we see it as a failure of either our psychological work or our spiritual work. This kind of mentality, the refusal of the paradox of contentment and struggle, cuts us off from the world itself. It takes us into an idealized and privatized relationship and that’s not the reality of the world. The world is made of peace and beauty as well as demanding struggle. It’s made of contentment and conflict. We have to realize that as individuals we are a microcosm of the world, and in a relationship we are a microcosm of the world, and the fullness of the truth of the world within us has to be respected.

The last paradox we are considering is confidence and anguish. I know for a fact that so many people who are archetypally able to profoundly sense the difficulty of situations and thus feel anxiety, are shamed by their partners, by their therapists, and by their spiritual teachers. Let us remember that although the power of love does release our highest power, and puts us in communion with the Divine, love also makes us more sensitive and empathetic. Through love we can move mountains and that is a wonderful feeling. But love also opens up our anguish. We are anguished about the possibility of loss. We are anguished about what’s happening in the world, about the threat of destruction, about what is happening to the beauty of human culture and how it is being swallowed by exploitation and oppression. We are anguished about how our democracy is besieged by mega money on one hand, and violent demagoguery on the other hand. Anguish is a form of intelligence—so is grief, so is vulnerability, so is strength, and contentment, and peace. This is the essential nature of reality. To be authentic is to carry many paradoxes, it is to be proud of our unceasing laughter and our tears, our moments of elation and our moments of trembling… So we are learning, whether we’re looking at philosophical paradoxes or spiritual paradoxes or psychological paradoxes, to welcome them all. We stand in the midst of them—proud, strong, and welcoming.

A relationship that welcomes all of these paradoxes is a relationship that can unleash the passionate love of the Divine and serve the world. It does not have to protect itself from the paradoxes of life. Creating an ongoing privatized island of contentment is impossible. I have not known any relationship that could achieve this for more than a very short period of time.

Couples who pursue the impossible set themselves up to fail. They lose the strength of their spirit and they end up turning their backs to the world. It is an illusion to think that we can achieve a permanent sense of peace and contentment without loosing our heart, our passion, our creativity, and our sense of active solidarity. By honoring the paradox, and the partial place of peace and contentment within that paradox, we honor life, we honor ourselves as proud humans, and we honor our human (and paradoxical relationships). Because it’s all one. We are all one. The world is struggling, so am I, so is my relationship, so is my family, so is my body, so is everything. There is dignity in the struggle undertaken with mindfulness and serenity.

We are filled with hope, filled with beauty, filled with enthusiasm, filled with Eros, filled with energy and vitality. We are also blessed with wounds and weaknesses and trembling. We are called to love wholeheartedly, to love the Earth, to love the real, to love the real in ourselves, in others, and in the world. Thus we come to be in communion with what is really true with every tear and every smile, with every show of strength and every moment of trembling vulnerability. It is out of this love for the fullness of life that real transformation happens. It is out of this love that we can truly respect our relationships in their beauty and challenges.