What is the purpose of a relationship? Meeting with the opposite sex for the purpose of procreating might be one answer, but that is a very limited viewpoint.
Intimate romantic relationships are different for each of us, but all intimate romantic relationships have many similar goals. Procreation may seem like the ultimate purpose of relationships to some. But we are a collective of individuals making up a larger organism: Each of us does not need to procreate to keep the whole organism going.
There are many other purposes for relationships to arise. The “prime directive” of humans may not be survival. Maybe it’s pleasure and enjoyment. Even if the prime directive of humans were to procreate for the sake of us all, individually we are likely to be self-centered and may not care about the group if it does not serve the self.
That is an example of the complexity of free will. Free will allows us to decide if we care about the survival of our species or just about our own selves as individuals.
Sex may drive us to seek a mate, but it very rarely holds a relationship together. We are designed to have relationships of all kinds in our lives. It's instinctive and it’s in our DNA. We are not solitary creatures by design.
I believe that our romantic relationship is the most complex type of relationship that we have, followed by the relationships that we have with our children. The romantic relationship is more complex because of the intensity of the feelings and the nature of the physical connection. When you add sex as a component to any relationship it can intensify the feelings because of the intimacy and the exchange of energies.
The ultimate purpose of a relationship is to become the “caretaker” of the other person. That doesn't mean that you find someone who is broken and then fix them up. It's more so the opposite of that: You find someone who is generally whole who can take care of you as well.
A relationship is a place where we elevate ourselves above our ordinary human drives such as hunting, eating, or defending our primary territory. A relationship is where we cultivate aspects of our character. In solitude we can develop our character as well, but it won't be as effective as it would be if we were doing so in the presence of others. Consider this: You can have the worst character in the world, but if you were completely alone it wouldn't make much difference because you couldn't do anything compassionate for anyone besides yourself.
Ultimately relationships are a direct reflection on the type of relationships that we have with self. If we are caring and loving to ourselves, we will usually be caring and loving to others. If we're broken within ourselves, we'll likely treat others as broken people as well.
We can accelerate the growth of our character faster in a relationship than we can in solitude. We need relationships because both our chemistry and our hearts tell us so.
If a person has been badly hurt in relationships they may do better in solitude with a pet or a passion for art. They may prefer to be alone. In such cases solitude becomes their new instinct, but it's a different type of instinct from that which they were born with and which was dictated to them by their body chemistry.
Particularly in the last thousand years or so, people have tended to see relationships as objects. They see them as objects that can be swapped out with other objects, and these objects must serve them first and foremost.
Relationships have to advance our purposes. Some people marry for title and wealth, some marry to appease their parents, some people marry for fear of being alone, and some people marry for access to sex. Some people marry to get citizenship in a country. All of these superficial reasons to marry are driven by lower consciousness. That doesn't mean the lower consciousness desire won’t elevate a person to higher consciousness, but it's not guaranteed that that will happen.
Yet we have to realize that the choices we make can impact the rest of our lives. If we married somebody for citizenship and didn’t have children, we might feel very lonely later in life. But it's also possible that you might fall into incredibly deep and rich love with the person you married for the purpose of obtaining citizenship.
You should write out your motivation for being in a relationship. Then you should write out a mission statement for your relationship. It's a very positive relationship mission to serve one's partner in a relationship. Hopefully you'll also have enough trust and faith to believe that your partner's mission is to serve you as well.
I hope that you believe, as I do, that a romantic relationship is for having a mutually beneficial sharing experience and a place to experience mutual respect and freely given love. A relationship should be a place to develop deeper understanding into the nature of self, character, and emotional healing.
Most of us start off with relationships with good intentions and later find ourselves mired in problems. When that's the case, people will find fault and blame their partners for almost everything. They rarely find fault with themselves and aren't very open to pursuing their own personal growth.
We tend to pick romantic relationships for ourselves and then we decide where we want to be with them. For example, a man may begin dating a woman casually then decide he wants to live with her, and subsequently decide he wants to marry her.
Some relationships, even in modern times, are arranged by parents and subject to approval by parents. such relationships are works in progress like all others.
A good relationship entails ample communication between both partners about their feelings, their fears, and their resentments. The two partners should work hard to resolve conflict. Conflict resolution is a skill that a person coming into a relationship must have or be willing to learn. If a person is unwilling to learn how to resolve conflict but instead harbors resentment then there will be difficulties in that relationship.
The purpose of a loving relationship is ultimately to come to peace with ourselves and with the world, and resolve all the conflicts within our own mind in the process. Perhaps that sounds like a lofty goal, but that's what we must strive for. When we ourselves are filled with love and share it with another, we can cherish the commitment and closeness and embrace the sublime experience of that love.
But there's much to work through: passions, fears, jealousy, distrust, betrayal, incompatibility, different goals, and different agendas. Such things interrupt the flow of love. They can make our significant others into our adversaries as opposed to our allies.
Where does all this turmoil and conflict come from? I believe that it comes from consciousness being so centered around the self that it becomes too difficult to center our existence around the comfort and fulfillment of the desires of another. Such conflict can make relationship problems seem to be insurmountable.
Relationships are often under pressure because of expectations from society in general and family members in particular. Add to that our distrust towards our authority figures and people that we loved caused by childhood traumas. To that, add the distractions that we have in society ranging from endless activity to attractive people passing by constantly. It seems that the chances of a relationship being successful in this day and age are slim to none.
In this book it's my desire to promote new ways of thinking that facilitate healing and contribute to the success of relationships. Whole books could be written about unraveling stereotypes about choosing successful partners. Whole books could be written on what society values in relationships and how those values affect life in the bedroom and how they affect our ability to be intimate and to relate. multiple books could be written on resolving internal conflicts caused by coming from a less-than-perfect childhood. And many books could be written on how the subconscious mind processes people and the traumatic events that we associate them with in such a way that they negatively affect our present relationships.
The dynamic that I'm speaking of happens when somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious mind I relate to my partner as if she were my mommy or my daddy. My subconscious mind receives those figures and wants love. It wants to resolve all the old conflicts with my caregivers. My subconscious mind does so as a defense mechanism.
That's the case with all of us. We take traumatic events which can disrupt healthy patterns of the mind and we store them. And then within our relationships these feelings associated with past traumatic experiences get triggered by situations. The situations may look totally different than the events of childhood or they may look the same. Some people even go out of their way to recreate their childhood as if they're writing an elaborate play and setting up the scenes one by one. That in effect conjures up old injuries.
Many of us do this. It's an attempt by the subconscious mind to initiate healing. The problem is that the healing mechanism is so unconscious that we never heal with certainty or finality. So, in the subconscious process that I speak of, the healing never really happens.
We go through difficulty and pain in relationships, and sometimes we experience growth when we go through it. And more often than not there will be opportunities to heal. Because we're so unconsciousness, though, we let those opportunities to heal pass us by.
You must become aware in your life of how you are recreating patterns of your childhood. You must write about them, talk about them, and analyze them. You must determine how you can overcome the emotional difficulties associated with your childhood trauma. When you do, you will be able to keep the unresolved emotional difficulties from wreaking havoc in your current personal relationships.