Relationships Bring Out the Best and Worst In Us

By:  Andreas Moritz
Posted: December 7, 2011 — updated 2016
Book excerpt:  Lifting the Veil of Duality

We cannot stay on one part of the polarity for very long without feeling uncomfortable or unfulfilled, even if it is a pleasant situation. Even paradise can become boring if we remain there for too long. In light of this, during a wonderful romantic holiday there may come a point where you feel the urge to go home and do something else. A person who is accustomed to living in luxury and wealth may one day find that being rich is not enough anymore. Having reached one end of duality, we tend to move toward the other. The cycles of change are unstoppable, which is good, because otherwise there would not be any growth or progression in life. This is especially true with regard to learning through human relationships.

If you meet someone who represents all those things that you are looking for in your life (because you think you do not have them yourself), you naturally desire to have him or her near you all the time. Let us assume that your new friend or partner feels the same about you, and finds you attractive because your personality or skills fill a specific need in his/her life. So long as both of you meet those needs, the relationship thrives with happiness and excitement. But perhaps one day your partner begins to discover he is not so satisfied anymore with what he is getting from you, which generates an inner lack of some sort. To overcome this feeling of lack, he starts demanding more attention from you. Yet, if you cannot meet his increased expectations, your partner may become frustrated and angry. As a result, you may feel pressured and even suffocated. In response, you may withdraw from him and pull back your energy to protect yourself.

Eventually, giving whatever you were able to give to your partner before, with love and joy, now becomes more and more contrived and unnatural. You begin to avoid him when he becomes too demanding of you. You do this because it feels as if he is draining your energies. This, however, is an illusion. Your energy level drops not because your partner ‘zaps’ it by demanding that you satisfy his expectations and needs, but because you shut down your heart center. This temporarily ‘disconnects’ your ego awareness from your Higher Self (which can never suffer a shortage of love or energy for any reason). You feel lonely, taken advantage of, disconnected and/or depressed.

Unless you decide to end this relationship, you yourself might now assume the role of the needy one. Since your heart feels empty, you look to your partner to fill it for you. This is often seen as a sign for people that the relationship is working again, and in fact, on one level it is.

The reversed roles now create a new balance. In the dance of relationships, one partner tends to lead and the other is led, until the roles are reversed. The dance of give-and-take and take-and-give keeps challenging the relationship until at least one of you reaches a place of non-judgment. Once you know how to fill your own needs of wanting to be loved, and enjoy the freedom to love without condition, you are no longer disconnecting from your Higher Self and, therefore, remain in your heart center. It is then that your partner also spontaneously stops putting demands on you.

You begin to see right through the neediness of your partner or friend, and what you see is his fear of not being good enough. So instead of pulling back from him and shutting down your heart center, you feel compassion and forgiveness, and you open your heart to him even more. Because you connect more deeply with your own essence, you also notice his true essence and, consequently, you are able to accept him into your life without condition or judgment. You no longer feel suffocated, but instead you have the freedom to love without condition. In the same way, your partner will stop pursuing you in order to derive satisfaction and comfort, for he will find peace within his own heart space.

The old pattern of pulling back and cutting ourselves off from each other merely serves to cause separation in life; it hinders love from flowing freely. Since separation isn’t part of our natural makeup and it causes pain, we keep looking for the ‘ideal’ relationship that is magical, fun and forever lasting. This search ends and true relationships begin when we no longer shut down our heart connection within. Many relationships have been tested in this way during the past decades of global spiritual awakening. More and more people have become very interested in the pursuit of spiritual practices and/or a metaphysical understanding of life, whereas their partners remain entrenched in the old, purely materialistic outlook on life. This has more often than not become a reason for estrangement and problems in the relationship.

Yet, for example, a husband who has chosen to remain in the old energy or way of life is doing this (although unconsciously) in order to be a balance for his wife to hold the opposite energy. This anchoring effect, created by the husband, is very much needed for the wife to be able to explore and experience these new areas safely and without too much hurry. In reality, the husband is against all that ‘spiritual stuff’ out of love and affection, so that his spouse can become more strongly determined to move on in her life. If the wife could see the role her husband is playing for her, allowing her to move into the energies of the new world, she would be able to honor him for that and enjoy a truly fulfilling relationship. If she cannot see it, she might decide to leave him and find an anchor elsewhere.

It seems most of us need to play all the roles when it comes to relationships. In one, we play the needy one, and in another we need to be needed. One commonly hears, in human relationships, the words “I need you” or “I cannot live without you”. Such need-based relationships cannot last, simply because needs are highly changeable. Yet when neediness shifts towards an opening of the heart, the relationship experiences a renaissance based on the mutual outpouring of love. Once you are able to keep your heart open to the one who needs you, be it lover, parent or friend, you will experience a diminishing of your own need-demands, too. Unless we fully love ourselves, we play both of these needy roles. They serve as our guideposts in learning about the duality nature of life. The frequent and sometimes intense oscillations—from wanting our needs fulfilled by others to being needed by others gradually—become balanced and end altogether.

Every relationship of ours is a great blessing for everyone involved because it allows us to experience these dualistic aspects of life in a concrete and tangible way. Like the arms of a cross merging into a central singular point, all opposing values find their common basis in the heart consciousness of the person who experiences them, regardless of whether he is aware of it or not. Once we have learned enough about the opposing parts of life (the dualistic nature of separation), we are ready to see them as unified. This creates a new type of relationship with others and the world, one that accepts everyone and everything just as they are.

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