TRUE ROMANCE is not a situation so much as it is a realm of being, a realm unlike any other, permeating the air around us yet oddly invisible. It exudes a mystical power that calls to most of us once we are past a certain age. There is something there we want because we are human, and it clearly answers a basic human need.
True romance answers our need for adventure, for meaning, for magic, and for deep and soulful connection with another. It answers our spiritual as well as our emotional cravings. It is to grown-ups what the entire inventory of a toy store is to children. It makes our eyes grow large and bright the way theirs do when they have seen Santa Claus. In a very real sense, it is Santa Claus!
Yet romantic love is also like a train that cannot be ridden without a ticket. Some people have that ticket and some people do not. Some people have the emotional, psychological, and spiritual propensities for a truly romantic love, while others shy away from its deep and oceanic currents. Many, many people say they want it desperately, yet actually do everything in their power to avoid it.
This book is not about rules for intimacy. It is not about how to have a long-term relationship. It is not a formula. It is merely one woman’s musings on what I have seen beyond the veil of love. It is about what I have come to recognize as the enchantment of a deep romantic encounter, which has less to do with quantity and more to do with quality, less to do with the outer world and more to do with inner domains. To have loved is like having traveled to a very distant and mystical land. This book is little more than impressions I have brought back from my journeys, but with this particular train ride, having been there is a ticket to going there again, and having truly understood someone else’s journey can help convince the conductor that you belong on that train, and deserve a chance to ride it.
Most of the time, we fall in love but can’t remain there. The world then calls the state we were in a delusion or infatuation. But we were not deluded. We were not just infatuated. We merely lacked, or someone else lacked, the emotional skills to hold on to the magic when the morning came. Later we would tell ourselves that that moment of magic had not been real, but that analysis is just a collective lie. We invented the lie as a way to face the disappointment of having been to the moon on a starlit night, and then fallen back down to what can seem like such a barren earth.
That lie is little more than a social conspiracy. It gives its adherents a perverse kind of comfort to think that our basic lack of courage is some form of psychological health. In truth, we can go to the moon and retain its magic for a lifetime. We can breathe in its spirit and never exhale. We can own the powers of romantic enchantment and experience all of life as a glistening adventure. We can enter the temple and receive a new heart, forever aglow with orange heat. Having gone to the moon, and believed in what we saw there, we can return with a ticket that will always take us back.
Forget your old ideas. Forget the lies they told you. Forget them all, and you will begin to remember. There is a realm of romantic enchantment that makes the world we are currently living in seem not so very important, and not even so very real.
That realm is entered two by two. It is not just an emotional vacation spot, but in fact our newest spiritual frontier. In fact, it is where we are supposed to live. And in that place, we do not just live. In that place, we live forever.