The notion that romantic love will fulfill and complete us is one of the greatest ingrained beliefs we carry in the 21st century.
Everywhere we look we are sent the message that finding “your one true love” will solve all of your problems and remove the emptiness you feel inside.
In movies and TV shows, we see protagonists who go to extreme lengths to fulfill the ideal of finding perfect romantic love. We see how happy and seemingly complete these characters are, and believe that if we could just find the same thing, we would be happy. Then we listen to music and read novels which revolve around romantic love. We empathize with the struggles of the loneliness, disillusionment, lovesickness or depression that accompanies romantic unfulfillment. Even our friends and colleagues share their feelings and stories about being single, being in the wrong relationship, and just wanting to find someone who will “tick all the boxes.”
And our conditioning doesn’t just stop there. In childhood, most of us were taught that we’d fall in love with someone, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after (remind you of a specific Disney movie?). Being divorced or single past the age of thirty, continues to signify that there’s something very “messed up” about a person and their life. Women who remain single are called “spinsters” and thought of as frigid, neurotic, cat ladies. Men who remain single are thought of as nerds, mommy-boys, or somehow lacking in manliness.
All of these fearful beliefs, feelings, and notions surrounding romantic love make it one of the most frantically searched after experiences in life. No one wants to be single. And that is understandable. It is completely normal and healthy to crave for love. It is completely normal and human to yearn for affection, intimacy, and someone to spend your life with. In fact, this is a fundamentally biological, psychological, emotional, and spiritual need.
The problems arise when you start believing that romantic love is the only thing that will fulfill you – as if another person will solve all of your problems. Unfortunately and fortunately for you, this is not the case.
Why Romanticizing Life Creates Suffering
It’s fun and exhilarating to romanticize life. When we think romantically about the world, everything seems so much more soft and rosy. We romanticize the past and future, as well as things such as cars, depression, houses, locations, diamond rings, children, and of course, relationships.
But although romanticizing life gives everything a certain magical edge, it also puts us out of touch with reality. In other words, when we romanticize life, we filter everything through our beliefs and ideals, rather than seeing reality for what truly is.
The more we idealize life and filter the world through “rose-tinted glasses,” the more opportunities we create for deep suffering. When someone or something doesn’t match our ideal, we go into denial or become confused, angry, rageful, bitter, hateful, cynical, grief-stricken or depressed.
Why do you think we suffer so much in relationships? We innocently carry so many romantic and idealistic ideas around that filter our perception of reality. When our partner or potential lover-to-be suddenly isn’t all they cracked up to be, our idealistic mirrors begin to shatter. And it can be intensely disturbing to have our rose-tinted glasses removed. Suddenly, we are left in the dark. Our vision struggles to adjust to the new reality. We feel like a protective blanket has been removed. We feel naked, broken, and vulnerable. So most of us adopt another protective blanket: that of anger, cynicism, and closedness to life.
Why Romantic Love Doesn’t Complete You
Don’t be surprised if you have a very strong emotional reaction to the statement I’ve just made, that “romantic love doesn’t complete you.” This single statement challenges years and years of conditioning. In fact, this statement undermines the central goal that many of us carry since our childhood or teenage years.
The difference between an emotional ideal and reality is that reality can be experienced. So you don’t have to believe me when I say that romantic love doesn’t complete you – you can experience it for yourself.
For those of you who have been in relationships before … how long was it before the ecstasy faded and the problems began to set in? For those of you who have extremely loving and deep relationships with your spouses/partners … do you still struggle with feelings of unhappiness, inadequacy, low self-esteem, anxiety, restlessness or emptiness? Be honest.
As many of you may or may not know, I have been in a relationship with co-writer Mateo Sol for a number of years. While this relationship is healthy, mature, and profoundly nurturing, I discovered something amazing: it does not complete me. I say this with great love and respect for my partner, who also feels the same way. Romantic love does not complete me. Thank god!
Although it can be difficult to initially accept that romantic love does not complete us, this discovery is immensely liberating.
All of a sudden, your wholeness does not depend on finding another person. Your happiness and sense of completion doesn’t rely on the presence of a “perfect other.” Stop and think how insanely stressful the thought that “someone out there” holds the key to your completion is. Isn’t it a terribly depressing thought? This single belief creates so much anxiety, stress, and despair within us. Isn’t it sad that so many of us believe happiness can be found by chasing an ideal?
Once you come to see through this terribly misleading belief, you are left with two options: finding wholeness within yourself or continuing to chase it outside of yourself.
You Are Already Whole
It can take years, sometimes decades or even lifetimes to discover one of the most simple truths of all: you are already whole.
Most of us have heard quotes and speeches from mystics, spiritual teachers, and enlightened folk talk about this. Yet most of us don’t truly take it to heart. True happiness and wholeness originates from within you.
Anything outside of you that is a source of happiness will eventually perish or be taken away.
All false ideals, beliefs, and thought patterns will eventually be revealed and destroyed.
When everything outside of you is taken away, what remains? When your health, good looks, riches, family, friends, and yes, even romantic partners are taken away, what remains?
Most of us are too scared to answer this question. We are terrified to face our inner emptiness and loneliness face-on. We feel unable to face our soul loss: the profound loss of contact we have with our souls.
But the moment we are ready to face this inner emptiness is the moment we can dive into it through shadow work. The more inwards we travel, the more we discover something amazing: the presence of our Soul begins to emerge. The more blockages in the form of unresolved pain and conditioned beliefs we remove, the clearer our Souls become.
As we begin to connect with our essence, our wholeness, our very Souls, we start letting go of all the beliefs that obscured our inner Light. We refer to this as inner work or doing the work of the Soul.
The notion that you are already Whole may seem hilarious, even an insult considering all the pain you might be struggling with. But the only way for you to find out whether this statement is real or not is to go exploring for yourself: to face your inner emptiness once and for all. Only then can you discover that everything you’ve been suffering is a result of the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs you’ve innocently subscribed to.
Romantic Love is a Divine Catalyst
The deepest desire of our heart is to give love and to feel love.
In saying that, I want you to know that there’s nothing wrong with pursuing love, your soul mate or twin flame. There is absolutely nothing wrong with craving for and seeking out someone to love. This is a normal feeling.
But don’t base your happiness around it.
When you start believing that someone “out there” will complete you and give you everything you’ve ever been searching for … you immediately unlock the door of suffering. You immediately unleash the hellhounds of grief, anger, loneliness, and fear. Please avoid that suffering if you can.
While our partners, lovers, soulmates, and twin flames do not complete us, they do act as divine catalysts. What do I mean by divine catalysts? I mean that our romantic partners help us to grow in ways we never dreamed of. In the case of soulmate and twin flame relationships, such connections help to deepen our spiritual growth significantly. And while these relationships do not complete us, they do help us access the fulfillment that is already buried away deep inside of us.
I will say that again: romantic relationships often help us to access the wholeness that is already within us, but they do not, in and of themselves, complete us. How can anything outside of you that can be taken away, complete you?
Think about that for a while.
Your Heart Wants to Give and Feel Love
The deepest need of every human being is to give and feel love. Romantic love is one of the closest experiences to our true nature, which is why we obsess about it so much.
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When we fall in love, our hearts are open and a sense of freedom fills us. This experience is very similar to what we call liberation, self-realization, moksha, Oneness or spiritual enlightenment. But the key thing to remember here is that romantic love is not the same as unconditional love.
What we are searching for, when all has been said and done, is unconditional love. And relying on another person to give you that will always bring you great grief and suffering. So if you would like to avoid this suffering and experience the everlasting love within your Soul, you can practice these bits of advice:
- Realize that your heart wants to give and feel love.
- Understand and discover for yourself that romantic love cannot complete you.
- See that romantic love helps you to deepen your spiritual growth, but it will not give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of.
- When you are ready, face your inner emptiness. What are you running away from?
- Learn to stop chasing after happiness in the form of other people or ideals.
- Explore inner work as a map that can help you with your inner journey.
I hope these suggestions help.
Remember, even when you do find the love of your life, emptiness, and darkness will eventually return. This feeling of incompletion might arise after one, two, five or ten years, but it will always return.
By choosing to take off the rose-tinted glasses and face reality, you will be taking a courageous step towards the truth that NO ONE needs to, or ever can, complete you. Your Soul is already Whole.
As Frank Zappa said, (romantic) love is for assholes
I recently left a relationship. And what can I say that feelings of lonliness surfaced alot. I was moving between a state of strong posititvity of hope and strong negativity of despair. I think when it comes to relationships such as partners and marrying and all that, I dont even know what to call it any longer because I find that the words wierd but girlfriend and boyfriend.
Tonight I was dreaming of something very strange. I was talking to a woman in my dream who had a husband and a boyfriend, she was cheating but she didnt see it as a problem. Because to her it was filling her need. However I told her, if you are unhappy you should be alone. And I said “Lonliness will set you free”.
This is a crystal clear reflection of my life right now. Lonliness to me is such a mixed feeling. It can feel as if the world is breaking apart. It can come as toxic shame when lonliness is compared to others on social media. It can make me end up lost in thoughts of dreams that isnt lonliness. However. Nothing takes it away from me. Even if I have beautiful and loving friends, or girlfriend, or have joyous activities. Whenever I stop it is right there again.
I would lie if I said that I didnt dream about having a wife and kids and live in laughter and joy. However that dream is not a contradiction to my conditioning. However I have also lived alot of my life with the conditioning that finding your dream partner is the solution to life. Painful lesson to learn that that is not the case.
I dream of this with friends aswell. Sharing Love gives me so much joy it is insane. When I meet people I can share love with, I just want to share love with them. If one day I meet a woman who feels the same way and want to live together and what to create a life together with this joy as the foundation, I think that would be the bees knees.
I truly feel that communion is something that gives great great joy.
It sounds to me like you’re projecting what makes you “whole” onto others and turning them into a spiritual paradigm that validates what makes you whole as a universal spiritual truth.
32 years after meeting and falling in love with my wife, I am more in romantic, intimate, delicious love with her than ever – and she with me. Our feelings and connection have only intensified over the years, not diminished. We have found all sorts of ways to feel, express, enjoy and deepen our romantic love for each other. Whenever we have thought, “this is it, it just can’t get any better than this,” even more love and beauty blooms into our relationship.
You might be thinking, “well, at some point one of you will die, and that darkness will come back in spades.” That has already happened. My wife died in April of 2017 after a 2.5 year battle with cancer at the age of 60. Yes, the grief and despair was overwhelming for about 4 months, until I was able to reconnect with her and we learned how to continue our relationship via methods like astral projection, astral travel, and other techniques.
Today, our love for each other is even deeper and more wondrous in ways I cannot even adequately describe. We call this phase of our eternal romantic love “transdimensional.” The joy in my heart, with her, now, is greater than ever, because I now know for certain our romantic love never ends, and there is apparently no limit to its depth and breadth. We can feel each other now in ways we could never imagine before. It is exquisite; my body here can only take so much at a time, it is overwhelming.
Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic, theologian and prolific astral projector that lived about 300 years ago, said that it is this romantic, true love, spiritual marriage that, when fulfilled, represents the end-purpose of all of creation: the eternal paradise made into inner and external reality by this uniquely intimate and fulfilling true, romantic love. I point this out to demonstrate there are other spiritual paradigms and views, not to assert that his view is “reality” for everyone.
For many years before I met my wife I was on a spiritual path called Sant Mat. I thought much like what you expressed in your article. When I met my wife I realized she was/is everything I had been searching for. I stopped trying to be “spiritual” and just focused on my love for her. Our relationship fully satisfies me, makes me feel complete and whole, joyful, excited and enthusiastic, full of appreciation and wonder. With her, all things are glorious; without her, everything is ash in my mouth.
You and others are free to believe as you wish, and follow any path, spiritual or not, you wish. When you try to tell me what is true for me and my wife and our relationship (by implying the universality of your views,) however, all you can possibly be doing is projecting your own perspective onto others as if you know all there is to know, what is possible and not possible for everyone, what is “reality” and “not reality,” for everyone, everywhere.
Being in a state of forever “falling in love” with your romantic partner, as well as finding and building other deeply satisfying aspects of this true romantic love, is a matter of deliberately managing your psychology. Yes, if you allow it to wane and dissipate because you believe it “must,” it will fade. If you allow your psychology and feelings to happen to you, instead of making deliberate choices and figuring out how to continuously evoke that dreamy, wonderfully intimate romantic state with your partner, it will fade and may be replaced with one might call a “healthy,” mature, lasting love, but my experience demonstrates you can have both in with same person in an ongoing fashion.
A lot of your post seems to me to be about the avoidance of suffering. That seems to me to be a fear-based perspective. It seems to me that you are afraid of the suffering that loving someone so deeply, and so completely, may bring you. Yes, when that person who is the world to you dies, it rips a hole in you and you become acutely aware of every bit of what that person means to you. It is being shoved into the abyss of total despair and agony. I know this because I went through it when my wife died.
I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. I would not go back and avoid it if I could. It revealed to me, in all its terrible beauty, the depth of my love for her and all she means to me. I can tell you with 100% certainty, it is the main reason we came here: to experience that suffering because there is no other way to reveal the full measure of that love and that relationship than to have that person die and think, “she’s gone. It’s over.” It’s utterly devastating.
I cannot express my deep gratitude for that experience and what it demonstrated to us, what it revealed, how it motivated us, and provided for all that has come since for us. It opened up a whole new world for our relationship, for our love. An eternal world where we can love each other, have fun together, adventure together, and play together forever in a way that only romantic true love partners can.
Only you know what makes you whole and I cannot, would not argue against that. However, you don’t get to say what makes others whole. That’s for each individual to find.
I’ve found mine; I’m glad you have found yours.
This is an amazing, wonderous and truly beautiful experience.
Some may well find a form of what humans call “unconditional love” for a time here on earth. i cannot argue with anyones experience. Its a series of the hard lessons of the universe that have taught me that the answer lay within, that no other person can create satisfaction or even love within you. One might take the very well thought out title a step further, and say “romantic love will not satisfy you, and and you shall be empty and pine for what is not available on earth, peace = acceptance of self and self love”. The thing is, im not bitter at any individual or system or even the universe. It’s clear to me at least that the love i seek, is only in another world, another universe perhaps, a parallel universe, or another life, or what some call the next life.
“It’s clear to me at least that the love i seek, is only in another world, another universe perhaps, a parallel universe, or another life, or what some call the next life.” –– or perhaps it is here in this world, just deep inside on a Soul level. That is my experience in any case. ❤
Luna, you are so correct about this. How could I bring happiness to a relationship if I am not happy myself? At that point all I could bring is co-dependency. I don’t want to bring that into a relationship with a future mate. My desire is to make the change within myself that makes me attractive to another so we both can have happiness together. I’m not fearful of this change at all. I am more that willing to let an unhealthy idea be released. But like I’ve said recently to a friend, if you let go of something bad you have to replace it with something good. I need that goodness filled inside me so I have it to give to someone else. <> Bring it on!
Well! That’s the nice post.
I can relate to this article a lot.
If I’m honest here, the only thing that got me through my teenage years was the hope that I would one day find my soulmate. I wasn’t the type of girl to have many crushes, but when I did, I crushed HARD. Feeling abandoned by my dad, I thought a guy could fill that huge gaping hole in my life. I ended up giving my power away many times, losing my sense of self in the process. Needless to say, I didn’t have the most successful start to my love life.
It took a health crisis after high school to wake me up. Although fantasies of being whisked away and saved by a man still plagued me, another desire came through…for life itself. I always thought that finding my soulmate and getting married would be my happy ending, but I realized the dangers of allowing that to be the only measure of my happiness and how well I lived. I guess it took the darkest moments of my life to lead me to start appreciating the smaller things…such as a beautiful sunny day or a cardinal in a tree. The immense loneliness I’ve felt has led me down the path of self acceptance, and I realize that I don’t exactly need someone to make me feel worthy and whole. There are a lot of reasons to live, and I now see how silly it is for us to believe that romantic relationships and marriage are the only ticket to an enriching life.
Although I still hope to share my life with somebody one day, I’ve now realized that I want a romantic relationship to be the “icing on the cake” for a life that already feels amazing and a sense of self that already feels healthy and complete.
“Icing on the cake” was a good way to put it. Cakes don’t really need icing (in my opinion), because they’re cake–a great, already “whole” dessert. You on the other hand can choose to put on as much icing as you like :)
Interesting, for all my life , I always thought there was a purpose , or something was missing in my life. My perception of love seemed complete, till I met someone special , who lit a fire in my heart and soul beyond description of words .I found love , true love, unconditional love , the perfect storm . My soul was complete, I became a useless romantic, not by choice , but by desire. This person made me feel complete, in every sense .her just being , her aura made me feel fulfilled. Alas she ran out of the blue, wether a twin flame or one of God’s props, to open me up spiritually, mission accomplished. I’m back to where I was previously , not looking for love ,or someone to fill my life just because. I’ve experience a love that words cannot describe , satisfied,,,,i think I’m the one
“i think I’m the one” – I love this more than words can express.
Perhaps it wasn’t the person that made you feel complete, but the actually love you experienced that completed you?
Yes , it was the love that completed me, Mr heart , my soul, God whispered, “she’s the one !” It was like I came home! Then she , out of the blue abandoned me ,,,zero contact ,,,next 24 months I have gone through what you call, dark night of the soul, I call it ,ground hog day in hell, In the end , im spiritually awakened, have faith in trust in God,,,,, he holds my hand on the bad days :) twin flame? Possible? Best moments of my life , would never trade it away to be blessed to experienced, true unconditional love ! There is a heaven , because I experienced it with her !
I have never been in love, neither have I ever wanted to be. I have always been alone and a loner. Romantic love does not interest me, never has, never will.