Art of Soulful Romance
by Bill Plotkin

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Soulfully entered, romance — that delightfully alluring, mad dance that transports and destroys us — can be a powerful soul-deepening adventure and one of the finest opportunities for carrying the soul’s gift of love into the world. Through human loving, we become acquainted with spiritual love and the longing for sacred union. And yet romance is also the realm where we unleash our grandest and most delusional projections, where the shadow is sure to emerge in all its dark glory.

Love affairs are propelled by powerful currents — desire, fascination, sensuality, sexual ecstasy, attachment, devotion, communion, union. Affairs of the heart evoke the strongest emotions, from ardent passions to poisonous hatreds and jealousies, and can result in the most stunning betrayals. Through its extreme currents and emotions, romance destabilizes the ego and opens a door to soul.

Romance can be engaged soulfully and consciously, or it can be engaged egocentrically. When approached egocentrically, we unknowingly project aspects of our selves and our parents onto our beloved and thus have a limited understanding of the real person with whom we are partnered. Most of us go through an egocentric phase, sometimes lasting an entire lifetime, in which we fervently believe an intimate engagement with a lover is the thing that will save us, complete us, or make our world right. We believe, in other words, that a romantic relationship will somehow accomplish for us the task of our soulwork.

In Western society, romance is usually entered with the belief — usually unarticulated and often hidden even from ourselves — that we are each half persons. The covert agenda is to find our other half, our one and only soul mate. We innocently trust that once we find him or her, we will become whole by simple virtue of being together.

This longing for wholeness is as strong a pull as any in life. Yet we are terrified of the actual journey to wholeness that romance can set in motion. In egocentric romances, we are more likely to avoid the underworld journey than to embark upon it. We act as if the difficulties and uncertainties of soul encounter will be magically avoided simply by meeting him or her. This is the widespread fantasy of the Magical Other, brilliantly described by Jungian analyst James Hollis.

The Magical Other approach to romance, which is adolescent and egocentric, contrasts with an adult and soulcentric approach that opens the door to romance as a soulcraft art.

The easiest way to tell if we are approaching romance egocentrically is to take a radically honest look at our romantic fantasies. In egocentric romance, we have a particular image of the desired relationship even before we fall in love, before we have so much as met our beloved. We enter the love affair as if playing the Dating Game, with a preexisting image of how the other person looks, sounds, what she wears, what his IQ is, what sort of work she does, what his age, race, and religion are — perhaps even how many children we’ll have and where we’ll live! After we meet and begin a relationship, our primary agenda, whether we admit it or not, is to mold the other to that preexisting fantasy. Truly and deeply getting to know the other is secondary or, in the most egocentric forms of romance, of no interest at all.

Adolescent love affairs begin with a period of ecstasy in which everything is heavenly. All too soon, however, comes the letdown, the mutual perception that the other is not perfect after all. Then we try to shoehorn our lover into our fantasy of how he or she was “supposed” to be. But that flesh-and-blood person is never entirely moldable to that fantasy.

Yet, as egocentric lovers, we feel entitled to our dream. We attempt, in every creative and desperate way imaginable, to make it real. Naturally, it doesn’t work. We become angry, hurt, and disillusioned. Soon enough, we convince ourselves we were terribly mistaken in whom we picked. We reject the other as flawed, not good enough. Sometimes we reject ourselves in those terms. But, alas, we do not reject the project itself, the Magical Other fantasy. We cling firmly to that egocentric dream and steady ourselves to do a better job next time, resolved to cast the right person into the romantic drama living inside our adolescent heart. What Hollis calls the “Eden project” — attempting through romance to return to the wholeness and perfection of the womb or the original garden — lives on intact.

Egocentric romance is so common and compelling in the initiation-deprived Western world because the uninitiated ego approaches romance from the perspective of its own experience, which is one of deficiency and incompleteness. The ego is in fact a “partial person” within the greater whole of the psyche. Before soul initiation, the ego feels a genuine and inconsolable loneliness and longing. It really does need to be completed by something. The problem is that that completion will never take place through a romantic relationship with another. It is only the soul, the divine lover, that fully completes the ego and allows it to feel fittingly partnered.

The uninitiated ego, without knowledge of the soul’s world, has little choice but to project all of its longing onto an outer human beloved. Its loneliness continuously fuels the desire for love affairs. Until it discovers an alternative, it will keep seeking completion in that way — and failing. In contrast, the Wanderer knows that the Other lives inside, or, alternatively, that the Other exists as the divine. Both the candidate for initiation and the initiated adult understand that human romance can deepen the sacred marriage between ego and soul, but it is not a substitute for it.

Egocentric love is what makes the egocentric world go round. It is one of the central fantasies upon which our egocentric culture is built. The adolescent dream of romance is celebrated in myriad ways — in pop music, mainstream cinema, advertising, “true romance” novels, in prince and princess fantasies. This is all good fun as far as it goes. A youthful approach to love is not itself the problem; the problem is the rarity of what comes next developmentally: a more mature way of engaging a lover that has a deeper, more spiritual, sustainable, and, yes, even sexier set of possibilities, an approach to romance that encourages and supports soulful development.

The Magical Other fantasy, so deeply rooted in our Western psyches, does not die easily. Surrendering that fantasy can evoke a grief and experience of cosmic betrayal greater than the loss of any lover. Like many, I used to suffer great anxiety at the outset of romantic relationships. If she was indeed the one and only Magical Other, then my salvation, I imagined, depended upon her wanting to be with me forever. A single misstep by me was potentially fatal to all future happiness, and so I was debilitated by a painful self-consciousness.

However, I no longer sought a lover as a means to personal salvation. Having grieved the loss of the Magical Other fantasy, I began to experience myself as whole already, fully eligible to be in love with the world either alone or partnered. Having experienced the Feminine as an intrinsic presence in the world, I was less prone to project Her exclusively on a lover. This is the rearranging power of ceremony. I became more capable of embracing romance as a dance, an engaging way of being in the world in the present moment, an end in its own right, as well as a doorway to a spiritual union with the beloved of the soul.

Part of our longing for a human lover arises from our accurate recognition, at some level, that we can come to know ourselves more deeply through romantic union. In the mystery of love, as we learn to love another truly, we meet the beloved of our own soul through the eyes of the human Other. Our personal destiny is to incarnate that beloved.

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Article Based on Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., New World Library, $14.95, Trade Paperback, Available September 2003, www.newworldlibrary.com, Toll-free-Ordering: 1-800-972-6657 Ext. 52

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