Why have so many of us borne so much pain and disappointment in relationships? 

Why is it so hard to find someone who matches our values and visions?  Why do partnerships that begin with passion, deteriorate to become stale, boring or bitter?  Why do we fight with people we once cared about deeply?  Why is the divorce rate so high?  Why do so many people go from relationship to relationship, marriage to marriage, and still feel so empty and alone?

It is because our relationships are conditional, without our realizing this.  We single out a person to be the source of our happiness.  We believe we are alone, our life is meaningless.  Then we bestow a person with the power to save us from our sense of lack and to make us happy.  We believe that they will ‘complete us’.

The belief that someone can complete you, implies that you are incomplete.  This incorrect self-image is the root cause of all emotional pain because it is untrue.  You are not incomplete and nobody can complete you.  You are unassailably, undeniably whole.

The fatal flaw in the belief that somebody can complete you, is that if they have the power to complete you by doing what makes you happy, they have the power to render you once again incomplete by withdrawing the behaviour that validates you.

• Not receiving a phone call can leave you feeling deeply anxious and insecure.
• If you are ‘in love’ with their looks, when their looks change you fall ‘out of love’.
• If their declaration that you make their life worth living makes you feel secure, the day s/he chooses to go fishing with his buddies/lunching with the girls, rather than being with you, leaves you feeling worthless.

Conditional love is like a drug, the more you indulge it, the more you need it.  When it goes away, you plunge into withdrawal.  Then, as the pattern goes, you seek and find another person to fill the role of saviour.  But this is not the answer to your emptiness.

You cannot isolate something outside yourself as the source of your happiness.  Only you have that power.  The special someone you have been looking for is you. 

Conditional relationships are fuelled by resentment.  When you hand over the power of your happiness to someone, you resent them for being able to pull your strings.  Why would you like, let alone love, someone who can make you miserable?  So behind the ‘niceness’, anger simmers and erupts when you are rubbed the wrong way.

Simultaneously you resent yourself for ‘selling out’.  To indulge in conditional love, you must see yourself as deficient, empty and incapable of fulfilling your own happiness.  You demean yourself by needing someone else to validate you.  This is why conditional relationships turn so quickly to resentment and even hate.  Scratch the surface with an unkind word, missed anniversary, and the ‘love’ you professed, quickly evaporates.  Why do you have the biggest blow-ups with the person you supposedly love the most?  Because the love you profess is conditional love.  Because your subconscious intention is to get something from that person, something you believe you cannot give yourself.  As long as they deliver the goods, you ‘love’ them.  But the moment there is a slip, watch out – all hell breaks loose.

In order to have a healthy, functional relationship, you must not see yourself as lacking, you must not bestow your partner with the power to ‘save’ you.  You regard both of you as whole, together to discover and enjoy the gifts you both bring to each other and the world.  You recognise that your source of happiness resides inside you and you can choose to feel good, regardless of your partner’s behaviour.

One way you can cultivate a non-conditional relationship is to release your insistence on the form you believe your partner’s behaviour should take, and support them on the path of their choice, rather than the one you expect.

Tools for Transformation

Conditional love relationships are the ego’s favourite weapon to keep you from peace.  You believe they will bring you to ‘heaven’, but instead they take you to ‘hell’.   Recognise when this is happening and start making new choices.

Recognize how much conditional love is costing you

These relationships bring you enormous emotional pain.  If your relationship is bringing you more sorrow than joy, and the losses outweigh the gains, you must not continue as you have been.  be honest with yourself regarding what is and what isn’t working for you and then have authentic communication with your partner.

Shift your vision

Anger towards a partner is a sign that you are focusing on limiting aspects in order to justify your feelings.  To start healing your relationship, find and focus on aspects of your partner that you like and stop focusing on faults.  You cannot control the behaviour of others and you cannot dictate the choices they make, but you have total control over which aspects of them you are choosing to focus on.

Establish your awareness in the now

Relationship arguments drag the past into the present, as artillery to justify your position.  It’s always about what they did rather than what they are now.  If you weren’t always referring to ‘what you did’, you would give yourself the opportunity to enjoy the moment, with your partner at your side, rather than on the opposite side of a battlefield.

Seek to join rather than separate

We believe that our way is right and we want our partner to do things ‘our way’.  When this doesn’t happen there is resistance, frustration and conflict.  Learn to accept each other’s differences and to stop seeing them as ‘wrong’.  Neither partner should try and impose their way onto the other.

Invite Higher Power into your relationship

If you are experiencing relationship difficulties, it is because you have placed your ego in charge of a domain it is not capable of managing.  The ego, which thrives on conflict, does not have the skills to create and maintain a healthy relationship.  You cannot get yourself out of a relationship mess with the same mind-set that got you into it.  It is time to start using the part of your mind that is connected with divine wisdom.  It is stronger and wiser than any difficulty the ego can conjure up.  You must consciously start trusting in this wisdom and open up to it.

The moment you become irritable because your partner doesn’t take out the garbage, your flight is delayed or your neighbour goes to a church you disapprove of – conditions have become your captor.

Do not try to stifle or extinguish your or your partner’s unique joys, passions and self-expression.  They are all a part of the path that leads to your divine destiny.  You have a place in the world that will bring healing to you and others when you claim and act on it.

Conditional relationships, challenging as they can be, provide the most fertile ground for transformation.  When you turn a conditional relationship into a truly loving one, you have done the work of a lifetime.  The joy and healing you experience from transforming a conditional relationship to a truly loving one, goes far, far beyond the petty rewards the ego seeks to extract.  All relationships are potentially true love stories.  When you recognise the gifts that they bring, you will thank everyone who has walked by your side, for a moment or a lifetime, and all your relationships will bless you forever.

From A Course in Miracles – excerpts from Alan Cohen

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