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More and more people today are convinced of the existence of something other and perhaps higher than our physical needs. We usually call it the spiritual realm. Why is there a rush toward this avenue today? If you have just read the sex chapter, this may seem like a sudden shift. However, physical pleasure alone gets boring after a while and many people want more out of the experience. Ask folks above 40 how interested they still are (if they ever were) in one-night stands.

We don’t need relationships anymore to accomplish many of life’s basic tasks. You can survive on the food and shelter level without one. (Hey, this is new and true in only the wealthiest parts of the world. It is a major shift for women especially.) And to complicate matters further, if we try and live our relationships purely on the needs-gratification level, we soon crash. Even with great awareness of our childhood issues and good communication, we will run sooner or later into issues that seem insurmountable to overcome on the purely needs satisfaction paradigm.

Another issue for us modern fortunates is that of finding deep meaning in life. Many people feel something is missing even though they possess scads of rich and satisfying things. Fortunate people, full of good food, sheltered in elegantly designed homes, snappily dressed, getting into expensive cars to go to well paid/challenging jobs, often feel empty when they stop long enough to feel. Many also feel burdened and useless simply protecting their material things.

I’m not saying that plenty of people who still use relationship for the satisfaction of home and hearth, aren’t satisfied with that pursuit. But for a growing number of people, this isn't enough any more.

Therefore, many today are trying yoga, meditation, charitable works, eco-activism, and other forms of “spiritual” paths to give more depth and meaning to busy, materialistic lives. The point of this chapter is to direct that search for meaning and spiritual depth to the arena of relationship. Satisfying your soul’s desire for nurturing by being a servant of the love force is a clear freeway ride to depth and greater meaning.

Warning: This chapter is going to take you to places you haven't even imagined before.

"...We have finally reached the point where we can ask, from a fresh perspective: What is a couple, aside from the old myths and stereotypes? What is the purpose of two people committing themselves to a life together, beyond just raising children or making a cozy home? What are two people who love each other really meant to do together? Now that the old social mandates have largely disappeared and the romantic dream of living happily ever after hasn't lived up to its promise, couple consciousness at the end of the millennium is finally ready to find a new maturity and a deeper sense of purpose. The time is ripe for couple's consciousness raising."

"As soon as we look beyond both duty and pleasure for a deeper meaning and purpose in relationships today, we start to move in the direction of the sacred, which we could define as coming into deeper connection with our true, essential nature, behind all the masks and facades. ...When two partners join together in awakening and honoring the presence of the sacred in their life together, this can serve as a binding force to provide direction, meaning, and purpose that will continue to unfold over a lifetime."

Our true essential nature, as Welwood speaks of it, is an expression that brings up the question of soul. Soul is a word you have heard mentioned a number of times now. Thomas More brought soul out of the medieval closet with a book that many people have been attracted to: Care of the Soul. Now, Soul Work is a frequently used term. Mr. More and other spiritual writers claim that we are more than a personality trying to improve itself. There is something about us that is beyond the personality level, can witness what the personality is struggling with, is separate from it, and has compassion on that struggle as it observes it taking place. Soul is able to observe personality, if you will.

Relationship is extremely difficult for most people, and even more so for those of us who want a lot out of it. When we don’t feel happy in our relationship, when we seem to be confronting insurmountable differences that make us discouraged about life itself, or when we are reactive and critical and can’t stop ourselves, the concept of soul becomes useful. Here’s how.

If there is more to relationship than attempting to keep it smooth and happy feeling, (this is the needs-gratification approach), then, maybe our apparent failure to keep everything happy all the time has a deeper purpose. The purpose as explained in this chapter will be to keep growing as a loving human being. This in turn feeds off soul’s desire for deeper meaning.

Many people today, even those outside of organized religions, sense we humans have a soul that transcends our body, mind, and personality. Now, I know some of you, at this point, will groan. After all, any mention of soul takes you back to the time when you were a child ushered into church by your parents -- who you thought never lived up to their religious teachings but still forced the family to pretend they were good because they went to church on Sundays.

In order to assist all of you with a background like that, it will be best at this point to separate religion and spirituality. Religion is a community thing. The word comes from the Latin meaning to bind. People bound together in a faith are a religion.

Spirituality is something a single person can attune to. My spirituality is about something larger than myself, whatever I believe in. It may be Nature, Love, ecology of the Earth, the One, a mystical teaching, a yoga practice, or a way of living that pushes me to a more whole state. And, it often includes growing in compassion for the human condition. Soul fits in nicely here.

Soul is a metaphor to express something about our self that has a purpose and existence distinct from our personality. To help with this nebulous concept, think of yourself in grammar school. Remember the personality issues and social skills you were struggling with (your hair, your clothes, your cool). Remember the embarrassments you suffered and the successes you celebrated with family and friends, the small, early boy or girl coming along and growing into the adult you know today. But, and here's the trick, that was you back then, and the same you now. Who then is thinking and remembering? Many people would call it your witness self, a first cousin to your soul. Your personality has grown. Has your soul? Do you get the idea of an unchanging aspect of yourself that witnesses changes to your body and personality?

You as a soul have a witness self and a personality. (In the final chapter, you will also learn that you have sub personalities.) The soul is the force behind them both. They are used by the soul.

The personality needs the soul, and the soul needs the personality. But, they also seem separate. We often want to act in certain ways that we can't quite manage. That seems to be soul force giving direction to personality, and the personality attempting to grow in that direction. But it isn't all the way there yet, and stumbles from time to time.

I would like to be so evolved in my spiritual path that when my partner doesn’t feel as sexual as I, it would be easy and gracious for me to simply hug her and let it go. I am not that good yet. My soul is willing, but my personality gets grumpy.

Therefore, if soul has the power to direct our personality to something that we strive for but haven’t yet mastered, it is powerful indeed. We better pay attention to this concept. We need to nourish our soul as well as our personality.

Soul work, consciousness work, awakening, the spiritual path of relating, all express the idea that there is more to relating than satisfying our needs for pleasure, company, sex, children, money, shelter, or even family.

Soul is therefore, the emerging part of us that wants expression and is willing to sacrifice, to be unique, to be stubbornly steadfast, to see a vision that others may not, and to want to be more. Perhaps it's what drives us humans to always want to improve. Soul nudges us. It wants something of us. We have to listen or we lose awareness of ourselves, and start going numb. It beckons us to go forward into unexplored territory.

I believe Love is an entity. I look at love as a force in the universe that is greater than us but also needs us to embody it. Possibly it is the embodiment of God, but I’m sensing that God is greater and more complex than our idea of love. However I was musing about the expression “God-forsaken” the other day in encountering a very poor, drug dealing, alcoholic, and urine stained part of the city. It dawned on me that to call it God-forsaken might mean that it was abandoned by love.

Whatever our beliefs, love is growing and spreading on this planet. I will give you a brief history of this force and you can see for yourself how it has spread. In this context, it is helpful to see love as a force beyond us humans. It is greater than our individual efforts to love, and in fact can be a source of strength in our relationship efforts if we align ourselves with it. We can envision love as a force that carries us along in its mission, sustaining us and giving us hope and courage.

Now let's look at how Love -- a force that is apart from us, but also needs us -- has evolved.

The concept of human love has developed over time. In early-recorded history, what we call romantic did not exist, lust certainly did, beautiful objects of lust did, people became mothers, fathers, and children were brought into the world, but even when the Bible mentions lover and beloved as a symbol of God's love in the Song of Songs, a close look will still reveal it as more lust and longing for the beautiful love object than what we know as romance and relationship. What we would call desire, is spoken of and celebrated in the early stories of women who entranced men with their charm and sexual allure. Both Greek and Hebrew writings give evidence of this.

Back then, family traditions and alliances were more important than love. Dowries carried a lot of weight, and the virtues of the marriage were still measured in fulfilling role assignments. The good wife was a skilled mender of clothes, preparer of food, preserver of resources, nurturer of children, and caregiver to the aging elders. The husband fulfilled his role when he provided and planned for the family's future and wealth. Thus, relationships perpetuated society and the species.

In medieval times, a new force emerged and began to be promoted. It was called courtly love. When troubadours sang of this type of love, they strummed and made verse to the beginning of what we now call romantic love. They promoted the heart giving meaning to physical lust. However, they never intended this to be practiced between husband and wife. Often it was the yearning of a knight for his unobtainable queen that was the subject of the songs. An unavailable lady seemed best suited to inspire this concept of courtly love -- a pure love unsullied by base lust and sex. Love thus moved from base lust to a higher dimension of spirit and emotion.

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is fascinating in portraying emotional love as the realm of fairies and magic. If you think about the mercurial changes the emotions bring to romantic love, it's no surprise that Shakespeare gave us a plot about love that revealed itself with fairy dust and trances.

But married life was another matter. It was a very practical and often brutal affair in those days and for centuries after (still is in many places). Marriage wasn't about love -- it was about working together to stay alive. Children just came. If drunken hitting and animal grunting sex were her only problems, a woman could count her blessings. The prescribed virtues of the day were kindness, patience, and restraint -- to your animals as well as to spouse and children. (Well, not to children yet actually.)

Courtly love gave men and women a chance to experience feelings for each other apart from practical needs. With it, they could feel the stirring of something new. It provided a vision of lovers caring about each other, devoted to each other -- and the bane of a lot of us today -- adoring each other.

This was a huge change from merely trying to be good to each other, as in being patient and kind. A new pull between lovers had started. This was the epiphany of the emotional-sexual connection we call love today.

With the poets singing of courtly love, the Love force plowed new ground that humans have been planting and tending ever since. And then, the biggest miracle happened.

Humans began putting courtly love ideals into marriages. In this way, heart connection spread into the masses at the foundational unit of society. In the West, the romantic notion of love in marriage competed in importance with the traditional roles of mother, provider, mender, farmer, cook, defender, planner, and nurturer of children.

People began choosing mates on the basis of attraction and falling in love rather than following arranged marrieages. Feeling loved by each in an emotional rather that just a grateful manner and maintaining that feeling became an important consideration to marital happiness.

This radical concept is spreading even now from the West to other countries that used to view marriage only as a social duty with prescribed roles and formalities. Even though there are plenty who say this change has not been for the better, it seems unstoppable.

We are the inheritors of this evolution. In our time, each generation has taken love a step further from the formality of roles, and deeper into the connection between the lovers. And, it continues.

From the middle of this century, love has expanded again; this time into becoming a provider of growth, healer of early traumas, and enabler of the lovers coming to wholeness.

An emotional-sexual relationship is the second chance for two people to become whole. The first chance was childhood. However, usually, we need another chance because of the wounding of insufficient parenting. This new growth paradigm is not only a patch-up course for certain unfortunates; it is the current state of evolution of the Love force today.

It wouldn’t have been possible earlier. Can you imagine a medieval man in London coming home after working all day on the cathedral's stone foundation saying, "Honey, I've been thinking all day about how I flew into a rage last night and gave you that black eye. I now see that I didn't know how to say, `no, I don't want to take a walk, I'm tired.’ I never could say no to my mum, and that's why I can't say no to you. So, I act it out by hitting you. I'm sorry, dear." But today, a man could say that. (Especially after the rigors of a little therapeutic probing.)

Romantic love is now a powerful force for growing -- a dynamic vortex that takes lovers in its arms, and leads them to discover the way to wholeness. It seems when people settle into a love relationship, there emerges a force, an urging toward greater wholeness. The lovers project their own insufficiencies onto each other with critical and judgmental comments. This is really a discovery that they want to heal things in themselves, although few people know that without some help. This same urging brought on by love also supplies energy toward finding the path to become whole people again. Many fights and some good resolutions result from this expansion of personalities.

Love grows and spreads. It becomes more revealed, more complex, more conscious. It reveals our wounds so that the wounds can be healed. It uncovers our gifts so they can be expressed. Love is struggling in partnership with us to fulfill a mission we have only a hint of. Where former paradigms of relationship have been structured on ownership (my wife, our children), love now brings us into partnership. Where lust has resulted in a history of abuse, making love now strives to heal the wounded human condition.

We are blessed today to know that early wounding is reawakened after the couple recovers from the intoxication of the early romantic stage. We know that emotions are underground forces controlling most fights. We know we are attracted to our mates because they both mirror how we wish to see ourselves and possess missing parts of ourselves. What was not nurtured in ourselves, we find in those we want to relate to. This, in turn causes the fights that, if used wisely, yield an opportunity for our own re-creation.

This book has presented the current thinking directing us like a road map to successful travels in this healing process of love.

At this point in our history, however, love wants even more. There is still a higher calling than using relationship to heal our personalities. We are bearers of consciousness and have a mission in the universe. We are at the beginning stages of a new leap in the evolutionary process. This is where soul comes in. Love is now asking us to go beyond the struggle with our personalities, our reactivity, our needs for sex, validation, excitement, and feeling loved. It invites us to expand into loving others as service instead of a quid-pro-quo arrangement of need satisfaction or even mutual growth.

I am proposing that the highest purpose, the one that transcends our bodily needs, is to become servants of the Love force. Having as our ultimate value that of being the bearers of conscious love.

This will open us to a new frontier that stretches out before us like a vast horizon. We will not know what will be asked of us. Going beyond our personality development -- but not bypassing it -- into a world of service to Love will be a voyage into the unknown.

How do the concepts of soul and the evolution of love affect our daily relationships? Some might say: “Be more forgiving and loving?” Or, “Be more enlightened and less ego driven?” It actually is a lot more complicated and personal than that. Let’s see how Daphne Rose Kingma, in her book, The Future of Love, describes relationship as a spiritual journey. She sees relationship as a quest...

"...To know each other as spirits as well as personalities, to embrace our lives as the exquisite spiritual journeys they are, and to deliver us from the tedious, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfying ordeals that our relationships become when we live them only at the personality level."

This is heady stuff. What does she mean to go beyond personality? Why would we want to? And, what does she mean by the tedious and ultimately frustrating ordeal of all that? She means the following:

So, dear reader, is it becoming clearer how living as a servant of love differs from living a relationship on the needs-gratification level, even the gratification of healing oneself? The difference is the servant of love is serving something higher than personality, his and his partner’s. It’s a more complex world as you’ll see more clearly in the following chapter.

"A journey we started as personalities we are now being asked to finish as souls. This will mean many things:

Second, most likely, having more than one significant relationship in a lifetime.

Fourth, loving more, in different ways, with perhaps a less personal and certainly a less self-involved focus; and

I see in her summary a call to not be boxed in by the traditional norms, but to risk more for love itself which might mean kindness, lack of judgment, and being good to people who you are supposed to forget if you live by societies social norms (like your daughter’s ex).

Okay, okay, I know this is vague stuff. Here’s what the above list has meant to me. The first one is obvious: no one relationship can give us everything. However knowing this, and knowing it are two different things. In the first chapter, I quoted John Gottman’s studies of happy and stable couples in which you learned that the happy ones didn’t allow unsolvable problems and differences between them to ruin their relationships.

This concept gives balance to the serious question that many face which is to know when to take what you have and make it work, and when to leave a relationship. This leads to the second idea here. Namely, we may end up in more than one significant relationship in our lives

I have been divorced. Most of my friends have also. The idea of serial monogamy has certainly been embraced in our society. It also has wrecked havoc in people’s lives. Which leads us to the next idea that advises us to stay loving even though the relationship form has changed.

It’s a challenge to get out of a marriage and still love each other in a respectful and helpful way. How much better divorces would be for children if adults would force themselves to live this paradigm instead of running from the marriage with a good-riddance and blaming attitude.

Divorce also affects other family members with this same challenge. A mother, whose son has just divorced her daughter-in-law might wish to continue that rich friendship established over the time of the marriage.

“Learning to love in a less personal and self-involved way,” makes me work at being present and loving to those people who come into my life. We can ignore people, talk behind their back, humor them, shy away from them, be rude to them, or…try and be loving. It isn’t about being nice, phony, or sweet. It’s about being respectful and present. Many people confuse nice with love.

Being nice is very often a way to run from true presence and love. For instance, I may be truly present to you by not smiling at your joke that seems lame or inappropriate. In that way, I am not kissing you off like I would be if I smiled and secretly thought you were a jerk. Loving another doesn’t have anything to do with making people feel good simply to avoid difficult stuff.

This leads us to Kingma’s last idea about living according to spiritual principles. To me, this means being conscious about how I treat others and myself. I evaluate my actions with values higher than simple personal satisfaction, boredom, irritation, and personal prejudices. That annoying cousin who comes over to talk with me at Thanksgiving now receives my attention and presence (maybe not my laughing at his jokes though). I explain the difficult concept of presence in the next Chapter which concentrates on how to live this new paradigm.

From the viewpoint of soul, a relationship is not just for us. It isn't there for our satisfaction, physical or emotional. We are in service of something higher, bigger, and more pervasive than we as single personalities could ever be.

This has been hard when I run into those difficult times that hurt because I feel left out, abandoned, not loved sexually, or any of the other common complaints we all have. In those times I feel asked by this new paradigm to not ignore my feelings, but also to not be confined to them. I am learning to ask how to love her and myself. It seems counter-intuitive to be this “spiritual.” The desire to feel sorry for myself is strongly imprinted.

On the other hand, I also feel stronger and deeper as a person when I consider that I am aligning myself with something much bigger than I am. When I am successful at this, the “problem” seems to resolve itself, often in mysterious ways. I feel lighter and indeed more loved.

This is the challenge and purpose of this chapter. To go beyond our personal needs with the purpose of serving something higher. This empowers our attempts at becoming loving beings with a force greater than ourselves. The benefit to our yearning personalities is that we feel more immersed in love. It feels good to us in other words.

I want to be very clear that I do not mean ignoring or skipping over our personal needs or feelings. We are grounded in whatever stage of evolving and being conscious we are at. If we skip over, we are no longer present. As the next chapter will explain in practical terms, living this new paradigm means being present to ourselves in a more complete way than we ever have. Pretending we are more loving, less reactive, more generous, or less self-involved has no place in this paradigm. That’s why the expression, “Hey man, get out of your ego,” seems so ridiculous. It’s a process, not a decision.

I’ve been tempted to write a book entitled Marriage is Impossible and It’s Not Your Fault. It’s a Design Problem. What with two people being so different from one another, often one having a lot more sexual energy, both influenced from childhood wounding that makes them afraid of intimacy, defensive, full of anger, full of attitude, full of control needs, or just the wear and tear of a hectic, expensive life style; it’s no wonder serious relationships are so darn near impossible to do well.

However, I have found that calling myself a servant of the love force gives me a connection to something greater than my needs. It also turns out to feel more truthful and in alignment with how the universe works. And, since I like to describe unhappiness as knocking our heads against the wall of how the universe works, I think this is the correct direction.

Being a servant of love gives us energy to rise above, to slow down, to make room for the other’s process and our own growth. When we don’t get what we want, we will have more things to think about than plotting how to get them.

We suddenly find ourselves in a process that is unfolding. When we feel stuck, something is about to happen. But we don’t know what it will be. And we don’t have control over it. There are always larger lessons that push us into painful places, out of which we cannot see. We have to wait and see. We can fight like hell to get out of the pain, or we can be present in the feelings and connection and watch something happen that is greater than we could have brought about by resisting or managing each other. Our relationship feels much larger this way and we get the help of doing something bigger than simply trying to keep the relationship happy and smooth.

However, all of this wonderful philosophy is much harder to live than to say. The next chapter is devoted to learning about living this new paradigm. I hope with the motivation of this chapter, you will be able to embrace the practical techniques and goals of the next chapter and elevate your relationship efforts to a new plane.

Love wants to fly. Its essence is caring, mutual taking care of, accepting our differences, and being there for the other and ourself. New relationship forms will mutate to embrace whatever we need to continue evolving more expansively. Love generated through romantic unions won't have to be pinched off if circumstances change. Parents won’t have to take your side in the divorce and lose their twelve-year relationship with the mother of their grandchildren.

New ways of continuing to care will radiate out not only to lovers or partners but also to ex-lovers, ex-partners, children, friends, family, and community.

Taking part in this march of great caring is a tall order, yet every day we can make small decisions of openness to ourselves and to the others in our lives. Watching how we shut out or judge others different from us can be a daily reminder of this path.

Love is on a constant journey of expansion. What a paradox that it not only leads us but also needs us. We make love present in the world.

Granted, this has been a packed chapter and the broad strokes I’ve used don’t always do justice to the concepts. Fortunately, a number of books are available to help you understand these ideas more clearly and bring them usefully into your lives.

The Future of Love by Daphne Rose Kingma is a visionary treatise on future forms of relationships that are more inclusive, less possessive, and more in tune with the evolution of love. Also, her book, The Men We Never Knew is an excellent understanding of how men work.

Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is an excellent and readable study of Buddhist thought and practice, especially the development of compassion. The compassion exercises have been warmly received when I have used them in workshops with couples to enhance compassion for self and others.

Chogyam Trungpa's Shambala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior is another Eastern look at love and spirituality in a passionate and clear form. This is a clear presentation of such practices as non-attachment, and being true to self while being connected to others.

Ondrea and/or Stephen Levine's books A Year to Live, and Embracing the Beloved are passionate treatises on Soul work. This couple has taken the high road of flowing with soul force and also good at explaining their vision. Their focus on meditation will hearten those with a solid meditation practice.

Less theoretical and more practical books are listed at the end of the next chapter.

Remember the five-to-one ratio of happy relationships.

Five positive interactions to each negative one.