Every
relationship ceremony is a call to connect as lovers.
In order to understand its importance in modern relationships,
let’s look at the challenge to present day relationships.
After the Revolution
The Sexual Revolution is over--but who won? Women
seemed to win, because they became liberated from confining
stereotypes like the Madonna-whore syndrome. Men also
appeared to win, because they got to have sex more often
with more women--who were themselves sexually liberated.
And yet today, after nearly 40 years of "liberation,"
relationships are in greater upheaval than ever. What's
the problem? And why is the divorce rate still climbing?
The
real goal of the Sexual Revolution has been to recreate
a balance whereby both men and women are fully empowered
to be themselves--not only sexually, but also emotionally,
psychologically, and financially. In relationships,
despite the lofty language expressing equality, most
men still react as if women's empowerment will somehow
make THEM less. The paradox is that when men actively
work to empower their women’s feminine nature,
they become more fully liberated themselves. Alas, few
men are brave enough to approach relationship with this
lofty goal. Those courageous enough to try, and then
succeed, attain a state where they feel more masculine
than any iron-pumping ever accomplished. They become
someone every woman would die to have as a mate.
The
Hero-Goddess approach to relationships offers couples
a model by which to reach this enviable state both sexes
covet. To understand how, we first have to understand
that the big winner of the Sexual Revolution was feminine
or "Goddess" energy. This feminine energy,
which broke onto our consciousness in the 1960s as "make
love, not war," now dominates the social landscape.
Equality of the sexes is the law of the land (Title
IX). Feminine values, such as pregnancy leave, maternal
and paternal leave, co-parenting, and especially conflict
resolution, have become familiar and accepted features
of Western culture. This resurgence of Goddess energy
has benefited men immeasurably. For starters, they have
been relieved of much of the debilitating stress of
always being in charge, always being the one responsible
for earning money and making decisions.
The
mutual gains that have flowed from the push for financial
and other forms of equality for women, however, have
yet to be fully experienced in the relationship realm.
Most of these gains were made because women adapted
themselves to men's ways. But in relationships the direction
is reversed. To sustain love, men have to adapt to women's
ways. Relationships represent the final major campaign
of the sexual revolution, the theater where male and
female energies most intimately encounter each other's
entrenched attitudes and where male energy is making
its last stand. Men are afraid of giving up their power
while women are afraid to claim theirs.
Although
relationship rules are changing dramatically--as are
the rules of dating--couples have only a dim awareness
of the sweeping significance of these changes. After
all, a few thousand years of patriarchal power and perks
do not easily dissolve. The field is littered with the
casualties of marriage who have failed to adjust to
the new realities. In dating, men who are unable successfully
to enter the Goddess world are increasingly being rejected
as poor marriage prospects. The spate of recent TV dating
shows that offer a throwback to the bachelor-bimbo rules
of engagement represent a desperate longing for a return
to those supposedly simpler times. No such luck. It's
just another indication that both men and women today
are often unaware of the dilemma they are in. That dilemma
I call the "new relationship paradox."
The Paradox
The new relationship paradox states that some aspects
of the old gender roles are more relevant than ever,
but their context is entirely different. After all,
many of these gender roles predate the rise of patriarchy,
and so continue to be valid. On the sexual plane, for
instance, women still seek a strong, confident man to
surrender to physically and emotionally. But their understanding
of what constitutes a strong, confident man has drastically
altered. What's more, as an individual relationship
evolves, a woman's definition of what constitutes a
man also evolves. In the beginning, the woman may have
been happy when her man opened up to talk about himself;
and having him simply listen to her felt like enough.
But over time the roles have shifted, and now she wants
more: she wants him to participate in their conversation
in a way that honors her emotional realities. Men have
been slow to catch on to these subtleties. They often
feel confused that what their partner once responded
to in them now makes her edgy or angry. The same male
humor that used to make his woman laugh, for instance,
now enrages her. Men experience this natural evolution
as a kind of betrayal, however: Just as he learned the
rules, the rules changed. But the truth is as simple
as it is hard to grasp: The qualities needed to win
a woman are generally inadequate for long-term relating.
What
turns on most women is: a man who wholeheartedly surrenders
to her desires while simultaneously taking the initiative--no
simple task, and for most men, entirely counterintuitive.
Like it or not, he needs to be strong and protective
while knowing when to be vulnerable and let her take
the emotional lead. She insists on this not only in
the bedroom, but around the rest of the house as well.
Failing this little tightrope walk causes relationships
to crash.
But
how is a man supposed to figure all this out? And how
is a woman going to get him to understand that he HAS
to figure it out or passion will slip away, replaced
by the nag? The first step is to understand that we
do not struggle alone.
There Is Only One Relationship
When couples fight they often feel like they're
rehashing the same pattern over and over again. The
reason is that, although no two relationships are the
same on the practical level, on the Spirit level there
is only one universal relationship in which we all participate.
This explains why each fight echoes our previous fights:
the same accusations of "You never" and "You
always," the same stomping away or sulking in silence
and, with slight variations, the same scripted ending.
Our neighbors are doing likewise. We can drive down
any street knowing that in most houses a couple is caught
up in the same drama we are.
The
great American mystic, Ram Dass, called the spiritual
path "The Only Dance There Is." In the past,
people who wanted to pursue that path went off to monasteries
or ashrams or nunneries to meditate and pray--in effect,
to dance alone. The major spiritual advance of our current
era is the dawning awareness that the real spiritual
adventure is to be lived in engagement with other people
in the material world. And the ultimate manifestation
of that path is the love relationship. We can either
be single mystics living alone in the woods, or relationship
mystics engaged in incarnating Love onto the planet.
Relationship
is itself an archetype, an ancient, universal pattern
that we all share, whether we are 20 and embarking on
our first commitment, or 80 and settling into our sunset
years. We may be a CEO, Ph.D., or LPN; a trucker, a
waitress, or a rock star; live in Anchorage, Anaheim,
or Apple Valley. At the core of our relationship the
same drama drives us all: how to keep love alive. That
aspect of relationship involved with being lovers is
governed by the Lover's archetype. Just as mystics describe
the search for an elusive divinity, the deep feeling
of love we call the "Lover's Space" is fickle
and fleeting. It appears one nourishing evening, convincing
us it will stay forever; the next day it vacates, banished
by one cruel word, taunting us with its memory. Yet
the search for this “Lover’s space is what
gives every relationship its meaning.
On
the archetypal level every woman struggles with feeling
disappointed by her man; and every man carries the burden
of knowing he is falling short. This tension underlies
every relationship and fuels the cyclical fighting that
erupts. It forms the context within which every call
to connect through ceremony is made.
"I
do," the world's shortest sentence, starts a lifelong
journey where each of us joins all the other couples
striving to incarnate love onto our particular plot
of earth. If we want relationship, we do not get to
decide whether to trek or not, only the partner with
whom to set out. Saying “I do,” literally
or figuratively, turns our relationship into our primary
spiritual practice, dwarfing all the other religious
expressions we may resonate with. I spent 11 years in
a Roman Catholic monastery, followed a Buddhist teacher
since 1978, studied with a Native American shaman, and
am an ordained Interfaith Minister. Yet none of these
practices has transformed me the way my relationship
has: Trying to keep love alive has forced me to do my
most profound inner work. I am not the same man I was
when I married 16 years ago. In fact, fully diving into
relationship becomes our short path to enlightenment.
In
the past, people who sought spiritual realization went
off by themselves, joined small communities, or took
vows of celibacy—the proverbial 40 days and 40
nights in the desert. But today, isolation from the
world may be the antithesis of a spiritual path. Given
time alone, most people simply masturbate, watch T.V.,
or both, whereas striving to keep love alive sets us
on a genuine spiritual journey. We connect energetically
to all couples, where our individual love story participates
in the Divine love story of the planet. Each pair of
lovers becomes first-time explorers traveling the uncharted
mysterium of love.
Like
all journeys, relationships have dos and don'ts, yet
its proscriptions are encoded not in rules, but in roles.
My wife and I discovered these roles while facing the
conflict in our own marriage. We entered marriage with
the belief that, with our psychological expertise and
spiritual training, we were immune to the struggles
we saw around us. When the inevitable disappointments
arrived, in shock we initiated an intense two-person
process of cross-fertilization. This required balancing
my daytime career of counseling couples with our nighttime
struggle to heal ourselves. During those late-night
‘pillow talks,’ we came face to face with
the archetypal roles that control relationships: the
feminine role of Goddess and the masculine role of Hero--which
together form the Lovers. We realized that when we stepped
into these roles we created falling in love; when we
abandoned them we created disconnection and caused love
to die.
“When
conflicts arise, most couples finger their own or their
mate's character flaws as the culprit. My wife and I
got very clear that it was not our character flaws that
caused the problem--after all, we managed to fall in
love originally with those same flaws intact. Rather,
we had exhausted our ability to maintain our Lover's
roles of Hero and Goddess.
Hero and Goddess: the Ultimate Lovers
The basic polarity that has been driving evolution,
from the cellular level up and from the dawn of time
until now, is the energy of attraction and repulsion.
As positive-negative electrical and magnetic fields,
this energy envelops us, creating storms, weather patterns,
and so much more. In plants and animals, this force
emerges as gender: male and female. The highest expression
of human male-female polarity manifests as lovers, and
the supreme expressions of lovers are the archetypes
of Hero and Goddess.
At
first blush, Hero and Goddess may sound like grandiose
terms, or worse, an attempt to return to outmoded stereotypes.
But they are in fact ancient, universal patterns that
are already encoded in our DNA. You don’t have
to be endowed with great strength, courage, beauty,
or wisdom to access the Hero and Goddess within. Think
of them as roles. When two persons want to create love,
they learn to step into these roles. Most couples refine
these roles enough to get to the altar—but then
they stop! Thinking they have crossed the finish line
they relax, not realizing that they are merely at the
starting gate; their journey has just begun in earnest.
As magical as most new lovers find these roles, they
are just scratching the surface of the deep and nourishing
game they are evoking.
The
Hero initiates. Drawing from his primary slogan, he
says: “I will step beyond my own preoccupations
and concerns and do whatever it takes to reach you.”
Meanwhile, the Goddess guides, using her primary slogan:
“There is more.” She means that the further
we travel into love the more passion we can celebrate
and the more connected we can feel. If a relationship
were a car, he would be the engine, and she, the steering
wheel. Without the engine, we can still entertain ourselves,
push the buttons, listen to the radio, but we won’t
go anywhere. And without someone steering, even if we
start on the journey, we will shortly run into a ditch.
Remember
the myth of “Snow White?” That was no ordinary
prince. He wasn’t just hanging out on a street
corner passing time when he came across Snow White.
No, he was on a mission—a vision quest--searching
for love. He had the Hero’s heart. Once he spotted
the woman of his dreams and proclaimed “I’m
going to do whatever it takes to reach you, even though
you’re dead, his kiss was so powerful it awakened
that goddess vision lying dormant waiting to be activated.
This is the story of every new love. Her surrender to
him creates the falling in love that initiates their
adventure.
From
this point on the journey is as much about despair as
it is about love. Despair, not anger or hate, is love’s
opposite. Whenever she feels her inner vision neglected,
trampled on, not nourished, she confronts despair. Every
woman holds that Goddess essence wisdom deep inside
her. Knowing what the two of them can become with her
guidance and his courage is the source of her power.
As
Joseph Campbell points out, after all the other Hero
journeys are played out, the ultimate journey is towards
the Goddess, the representative of wisdom. On the Spirit
level every relationship is a journey into the feminine.
For a man, this means letting go of his conquering mentality
by placing those qualities under the guidance of his
female partner, as the representative of their shared
vision.
As
the holder of the relationship vision, she sets their
course while he navigates them there. The image is of
two people paddling a canoe: she steers and he provides
the power. She says, "Let's head towards that island"
and he honors her (which is not the same as agreeing
blindly). All ancient stories have lovers traveling
in the same direction: towards sunset--and sunset is
followed by night, where the ebb and flow of the moon
hold sway. Night time begs us to set aside surface preoccupations
so we can nourish ourselves on the depths below. It
is no accident that most relationship encounters happen
at night. This is Goddess territory, where every man
encounters the deeper meaning of the reality that his
Goddess truly is a woman of the night.
Creating a Sacred Bedroom Space
Every ceremony is a call to connect. Just as every
man’s challenge is to empower the feminine in his
woman, every woman’s challenge is to guide them
to connect. She puts out the call that says, “Its
time to drop our preoccupations and come together. Join
me; let’s step out of practical concerns and touch
souls.” This is why a ski trip together may be
an exhilarating bonding experience, but it’s not
ceremony.
Ceremony
takes place in a sacred space. In relationship the most
sacred of spaces is usually the bedroom—a couple’s
church. Instead of just adding a few candles and soft
music, I recommend a more far-reaching ceremony: turning
the whole bedroom into a permanent sacred space. This
is the challenge to every woman as guide: to make of
the bedroom a place that feels nourishing to her most
feminine, sensual aspects; where her heart says “I’m
home.” This means creating a theme, redecorating,
starting from the bottom up to design the most intimate
room in the house. Don’t throw out utility, rather,
fit the traces of daily activity, like hampers, dressers
and televisions into the intimate scheme. A room where
practical or economic needs dominate will look quite
different from a room designed for the needs of lovers.
Both
persons making the intention to collaborate on externalizing
their shared vision of intimacy is what lifts this activity
from project to ceremony: one stretching over months
involving lengthy discussion accompanied by trial and
error. Using as a guide “what feels good to her”
couples can produce bold, daring possibilities never
before imagined. The room becomes a physical metaphor
for the whole relationship, breaking old barriers and
opening new doors.
Now
the house has a “Lovers center,” like the
church centered old New England villages, to balance
the other centers of kitchen and playroom—a special
place where lovers come together. When we nourish this
center all other aspects of our relationship also thrive.
